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Satires of Circumstances: Lyrics and Reveries with Miscellaneous Pieces
1915. Hardy, English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, whose powerfully delineated characters, portrayed in his native Dorset, struggled helplessly against their passions and external circumstances. At the age of 55 Hardy returned to writing poetry, a form he had previously abandoned. Satires of Circumstances is a collection of Hardy's short poems, both lyric and visionary.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1914
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About the author
Thomas Hardy
2,361 books6,797 followersThomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.
The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 17, 2012
A book everyone should have on their bedside table.
September 4, 2023
Hardy’s greatest collection of poems, perhaps because it is also his oddest. We tend to think of Hardy as costume-drama fodder, agrarian, frozen in time. In fact, Hardy saw, long before TS Eliot, that English poetry needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century.
Hardy’s scenes are resolutely unglamorous. Sentimentality is outlawed. ‘In the Cemetery’ depicts a group of mothers arguing over the location of their children’s unmarked graves. We learn that a drain has recently been laid across the site: all the bodies have recently been disinterred and dumped in a common pit. The narrator decides not to tell them, concluding:
As well cry over a new-laid drain
As anything else, to ease your pain.
Hardy is no respecter of the grand and good. ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ imagines the ‘moon-eyed fishes’ picking over the once-cherished furnishings from the Titanic. The institution of marriage takes a particular belting. After a bridegroom overhears some pub gossip about his bride, he promptly commits suicide by drowning:
They searched, and at the deepest place
Found him with crabs on his face.
Many though not all of the poems deal with the death of Hardy’s wife Emma. Their relationship, one needs no biography to infer, was not a happy one. Hardy records his feelings with fidelity and without a censoring glance over his shoulder. How could she had been so careless to die without warning him first?
Never to bid goodbye
Or lip me the softest call.
The sheer sweetness of their first meeting (her ‘air-blue gown’) becomes a torment, bayoneting him at stray moments, often leading to grand declarations of the kind familiar to the bereaved, the unbalanced, and the drunken. The supremacy of their love was worth an eternity:
It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before?
Oddness also applies to diction and theme. Only Seamus Heaney press-ganged a burlier squad of syllables into service (fulth, darkled, chasmal, brabbled). Hardy was an atheist yet the collection is crammed with ghosts, addressed directly as if they were still living. (Douglas Dunn and Ted Hughes essentially aped Hardy in their own elegies to their late wives.) But another word for ‘odd’ might well be ‘human’ and Satires of Circumstance brims with it, fortified by its own stout-black humour. Even the Christian god is allowed his own lament:
Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you
The unhappy need of creating me -
A form like your own - for praying to?
Hardy’s scenes are resolutely unglamorous. Sentimentality is outlawed. ‘In the Cemetery’ depicts a group of mothers arguing over the location of their children’s unmarked graves. We learn that a drain has recently been laid across the site: all the bodies have recently been disinterred and dumped in a common pit. The narrator decides not to tell them, concluding:
As well cry over a new-laid drain
As anything else, to ease your pain.
Hardy is no respecter of the grand and good. ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ imagines the ‘moon-eyed fishes’ picking over the once-cherished furnishings from the Titanic. The institution of marriage takes a particular belting. After a bridegroom overhears some pub gossip about his bride, he promptly commits suicide by drowning:
They searched, and at the deepest place
Found him with crabs on his face.
Many though not all of the poems deal with the death of Hardy’s wife Emma. Their relationship, one needs no biography to infer, was not a happy one. Hardy records his feelings with fidelity and without a censoring glance over his shoulder. How could she had been so careless to die without warning him first?
Never to bid goodbye
Or lip me the softest call.
The sheer sweetness of their first meeting (her ‘air-blue gown’) becomes a torment, bayoneting him at stray moments, often leading to grand declarations of the kind familiar to the bereaved, the unbalanced, and the drunken. The supremacy of their love was worth an eternity:
It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before?
Oddness also applies to diction and theme. Only Seamus Heaney press-ganged a burlier squad of syllables into service (fulth, darkled, chasmal, brabbled). Hardy was an atheist yet the collection is crammed with ghosts, addressed directly as if they were still living. (Douglas Dunn and Ted Hughes essentially aped Hardy in their own elegies to their late wives.) But another word for ‘odd’ might well be ‘human’ and Satires of Circumstance brims with it, fortified by its own stout-black humour. Even the Christian god is allowed his own lament:
Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you
The unhappy need of creating me -
A form like your own - for praying to?
October 31, 2021
There were one hundred and six poems in this volume which was published in 1914. One collection of fifteen poems was particularly given the title “Satires of Circumstance” which then became the title of the whole collection of more than a hundred poems.
The concerns raised in those fifteen poems were light and inconsequential as proportionate to the reality around Hardy when World War I was just about to commence. This volume contains also the “Poems of 1912-13” which Hardy wrote to memorialize his early adore of Emma Gifford whom he had afterward married.
In writing these poems he overlooked the desolation which he had suffered during his married life, and recorded only the gentleness of feeling with which he had regarded Emma during his courtship of her and during the first few years of their married life.
In these poems Hardy made amends to Emma for having neglected her and having treated her scruffily, as he thought.
These poems comprise possibly the most indisputable love-elegy in the English language. In these poems, and in the narrative behind them, lies a satire of situation more philosophical and across-the-board than any of the other poems in this volume.
After going through these poems, Hardy’s second wife began to think that Hardy had perhaps found his greatest happiness with Emma, and that now he longed for eternal rest with her in the grave.
The concerns raised in those fifteen poems were light and inconsequential as proportionate to the reality around Hardy when World War I was just about to commence. This volume contains also the “Poems of 1912-13” which Hardy wrote to memorialize his early adore of Emma Gifford whom he had afterward married.
In writing these poems he overlooked the desolation which he had suffered during his married life, and recorded only the gentleness of feeling with which he had regarded Emma during his courtship of her and during the first few years of their married life.
In these poems Hardy made amends to Emma for having neglected her and having treated her scruffily, as he thought.
These poems comprise possibly the most indisputable love-elegy in the English language. In these poems, and in the narrative behind them, lies a satire of situation more philosophical and across-the-board than any of the other poems in this volume.
After going through these poems, Hardy’s second wife began to think that Hardy had perhaps found his greatest happiness with Emma, and that now he longed for eternal rest with her in the grave.
December 31, 2024
It took me almost 2 years, but I finally finished this collection by Hardy. His novels are among my favorite books, all of which I read during my high school and undergraduate years. They truly were the books that made me want to write fiction. One of my new year's reading resolutions is to revisit those books and see how I feel about them as an old lady.
I was never moved much by his poetry, though. I initially started reading this late collection because I read the chapter in the Paul Fussell book on WWI in which he uses some of the poems in the collection to set the scene and elaborate on the European mindset and the relationship between irony and war. While it is true that these poems drip with irony, what struck me most about them is his morbid fascination with burial and haunting. They were all written before the war began, but it's hard not to think of the mass casualties and the haunting voices of all the war dead as you read them. I also find the dialogues fascinating, especially the female voices. Many of these poems were written in response to the death of his wive, and it's clear that his fascination with the female psyche is formed by a highly problematic marriage.
I was never moved much by his poetry, though. I initially started reading this late collection because I read the chapter in the Paul Fussell book on WWI in which he uses some of the poems in the collection to set the scene and elaborate on the European mindset and the relationship between irony and war. While it is true that these poems drip with irony, what struck me most about them is his morbid fascination with burial and haunting. They were all written before the war began, but it's hard not to think of the mass casualties and the haunting voices of all the war dead as you read them. I also find the dialogues fascinating, especially the female voices. Many of these poems were written in response to the death of his wive, and it's clear that his fascination with the female psyche is formed by a highly problematic marriage.
August 27, 2025
He enters, and mute on the edge of a chair
Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there,
A type of decayed gentility;
And by some small signs he well can guess
That she comes to him almost breakfastless.
"I have called — I hope I do not err —
I am looking for a purchaser
Of some score volumes of the works
Of eminent divines I own, —
Left by my father — though it irks
My patience to offer them." And she smiles
As if necessity were unknown;
"But the truth of it is that oftenwhiles
I have wished, as I am fond of art,
To make my rooms a little smart,
And these old books are so in the way."
And lightly still she laughs to him,
As if to sell were a mere gay whim,
And that, to be frank, Life were indeed
To her not vinegar and gall,
But fresh and honey-like; and Need
No household skeleton at all.
Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there,
A type of decayed gentility;
And by some small signs he well can guess
That she comes to him almost breakfastless.
"I have called — I hope I do not err —
I am looking for a purchaser
Of some score volumes of the works
Of eminent divines I own, —
Left by my father — though it irks
My patience to offer them." And she smiles
As if necessity were unknown;
"But the truth of it is that oftenwhiles
I have wished, as I am fond of art,
To make my rooms a little smart,
And these old books are so in the way."
And lightly still she laughs to him,
As if to sell were a mere gay whim,
And that, to be frank, Life were indeed
To her not vinegar and gall,
But fresh and honey-like; and Need
No household skeleton at all.
April 27, 2024
This is a brilliant collection. Hardy presents over a hundred poems and they’re all different: not just in content and them but in style. There are so many different poetic forms in this book that it is astonishing. That he can do this and produce work that is also genuinely affecting is astonishing. I loved the titular Satires Of Circumstance, The Convergence Of The Twain and Ah, Are You Digging On My Grave?
July 4, 2023
Ça va dans toutes les directions et je ne peux pas dire que j'ai été emporté par beaucoup de ces textes. Peut-être que c'est plus intéressant quand on a tout lu de Hardy, ce qui n'est pas mon cas.
April 13, 2017
Definitely rate the poetry over his prose.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews