The Essential Hardy

by Thomas Hardy

Book by Hardy, Thomas

Genres: Poetry

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Thomas 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.

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph Brodsky, who edited this volume, wrote: "with Hardy, when you say 'poet' you see not a dashing raconteur or a tubercular youth feverishly scribbling in the haze and heat of inspiration but a clear-eyed, increasingly crusty man, bald and of medium height, with a mustache and an aquiline profile, carefully plotting his remorseless, if awkward lines upstairs in his studio, occasionally laughing at the achieved results."

While Hardy's poems are stylistically clunky, rarely "smooth," even off-puttingly old-fashioned (he has been condescendingly called a "pre-modern", modern in his skeptical outlook on life but Victorian in diction), and while his poetry honestly doesn't sound that great in the ear, Hardy's imagery is so killer it carries the attentive reader right on through.

Obsessed with mortality, the poet takes us through the maze of dust, to witness tiny pinches of vanished beauty and life left scattered everywhere and dried up along pathways, as we walk in the surprising and captivating afterlife of the dead Sublime. Behold the skylark that inspired Shelley, a generation before Hardy's birth in 1840, now turned into "a little ball of feather and bone" in some Italian orchard or field: Hardy is out there literally looking for its fallen remains ("maybe it sleeps in the coming hue / Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene"), its fragile bird's body yet to be consecrated "to endless time" in a casket that he asks fairies to bring. Hardy's poem about the Roman graves of Keats and Shelley next to the pyramid of Caius Cestius in the luscious Protestant Cemetery is another stroll into a world that, you sense, is losing its vitality, becoming more and more like the stuffed animals in a museum: we walk in the shadows of dying "shades," half-aware of old great things disappearing, things that may have existed, he speculates, mostly to cast a gloom or a beauty on us long after their own death. (Wordsworth thought the River Derwent flowed into his youth to shape the later poet.) At other times, like the fascinating figure of a contemporary Roman whom Hardy sees trying to bury his white cat amid "The Roman Gravemounds", he is taken with the beauty of things just now going under, oblivious of worlds long-gone but curiously, paradoxically, still alive and permeating their old haunts. Hardy's world is an underworld that is still very much moving before our eyes.

Hugely interesting, often stunning, imagery, though Hardy's pessimism is off-putting in the end and not entirely convincing, even after a long evening with these poems. Although they're obviously writers of a totally different ballpark, I've had the same sense after reading H.L. Mencken's satires and Christopher Hitchens' jabs -- good writers who ultimately leave me wanting something less skeptical and tentative, less ironic and outsider. Like them, Hardy didn't really convince me in the end that his aesthetic is based on a "complete" experience of life -- too much of life is just missing here. Hardy is breathtaking as a melancholy agnostic, but the gloom of his poetry is one-sided. Joy is desperately absent (even his love poetry is dour and death-haunted). But for all that, Hardy is truly a Magellan of the shadows.

The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky's long-winded introduction (a third of the book) is generous and insightful.

[Annette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary:
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was a Russian poet and essayist. He wrote the 63 page introduction. The later 117 pages are selected poems from Thomas Hardy (1840-1928.)
There are 101 poems in the book.
Link to read the biography of Joseph Brodsky.
After Thomas Hardy received negative reviews from his last novels, he concentrated on poetry.
The last two novels Hardy wrote were Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895).

My Thoughts:
Reviewing poetry is not something I do often, and I'm never sure exactly where to start.
What I can do is state what I like and don't like, and post lines from the poems that speak to me.
This seems rather elementary, but I hope it will suffice.

The first poem that I like/love and spoke to me (my mind and emotion.)
The second poem listed is "Neutral Tones." I've read this poem several times and each time something new stands out. For example: "The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing/ Alive enough to have strength to die;" A smile is compared to something dead. This is shocking to me. It's also tragic, and a stunning comparison. A smile is happiness and joy. A smile is inviting and kind. Hardy compares the smile to death. So, what is Hardy really saying? I believe the person smiling is superficial, deceptive, conniving, and cruel.

The second poem of my two favorites.

"Going and Staying"

I
"The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was glowing,
Pink faces, plighting, moonlit May,
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.

II
Seasons of blankness as of snow,
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.

III
Then we looked closelier at Time,
And saw his ghostly arms revolving
To sweep off woeful things with prime,
Things sinister with things sublime
Alike dissolving.

I don't believe this is a poem about nature or weather.
This is a poem about life. May is a month in late spring. It's a month of freshness and fragrance. It's a month filled with growth and promise and hope. Snow means winter, but it can also mean the winter of one's life. Winter can mean of a senior age, or it can mean how a person feels about their life regardless of age. Winter is a dormant season. There is no growth, only a frigid quiet period.
"Ghostly arms revolving" reminds me of the mystery of death.
The words "woeful" and "dissolving" remind me of death.
Hardy may be referring to a physical death at the prime of life, as compared to vibrant "glowing" May, or he may be speaking of the death of a dream. A dream of something that will never become fruit bearing, it has died in winter.