In this collection Hardy's love poems have been arranged to tell the tragic story of his love affair with Emma, his first wife, from its idyllic beginnings, through long years of disillusionment, to the passionate, yet futile, reawakening of Hardy's love for Emma after her death.
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.
Between us now and here - Two thrown together Who are not wont to wear Life's flushest feather - Who see the scenes slide past, The daytimes dimming fast, Let there be truth at last, Even if despair.
So thoroughly and long Have you now known me, So real in faith and strong Have I now shown me, That nothing needs disguise Further in any wise, Or asks or justifies A guarded tongue.
Face unto face, then, say, Eyes mine own meeting, Is your heart far away, Or with mine beating? When false things are brought low, And swift things have grown slow, Feigning like froth shall go, Faith be for aye.