This post was originally published at
The Master’s Artist.
Thomas Hardy is best known
for his novels – The Return of the Native
was at one time required reading in many high school or college English
classes. His fiction has often been described as rather dark and brooding, and
sometimes as depressing, but it was clearly part of the bridge that connected
the Victorians to the Moderns.
Hardy
also wrote poetry, and a considerable amount of it. Some of his best known
poems during his lifetime were about his wife Emma. Now, lots of poets write
poems for their wives, girlfriends or lovers. What distinguishes these love
poems of Hardy’s is that they were written after Emma died in 1912 – and the
two were barely on speaking terms at the time of her death. She died shortly
after her 72nd birthday, which Hardy had ignored. He had not written
love poetry to her before her death. He was already in love with another woman
and would eventually marry her. And yet Emma’s death evoked a remarkable an
outpouring of love.
“No
one could have predicted the effect Emma’s death had on Hardy,” writes Claire
Tomalin in the introduction to Unexpected Elegies, Poem of 1912-13 and Other Poems
About Emma.
“He immediately began to mourn like a lover. He had her body brought down and
placed in a coffin at the foot of his bed, where it remained for three days and
three nights until the funeral. And he began almost at once to write,
revisiting the early love between them in his mind with an intensity that
expressed itself in a series of poems.”
It
was almost as if he fell in love with her after she died.
They
had met in Wessex, Hardy’s “home turf” and the setting for so many of his
novels. She came from a better class than he did, and both families opposed
their marriage. They married anyway. Hardy published a romance novel in 1873,
called A Pair of Blue Eyes, that is little
known today but is partially based on their meeting and love affair. (I posted a review
of it
in 2012.)
Over
the years, Emma helped him enormously in his writing work, but they grew apart.
For the last decade of her life, they lived together under the same roof but rarely
spoke.
And
then she died, and Hardy seemed to fall in love with her again, or perhaps fell
in love with the idea of her again. And the result was some 41 poems published
form 1912 to 1920 (Hardy died in 1924).
The
poems are rather simple and beautiful, the simplicity arising from profound
emotion that speaks for itself. These are not lines dashed off in a fit of
mourning but worked and refined and hammered into something very fine indeed.
As I read Unexpected Elegies, I felt a sense of regret that at least one of
these might have been read to her while she still lived. But then, they
wouldn’t have been the poems they were, and are.
Here
are two from the collection.
She Opened the Door
She
opened the door of the West to me,
With its loud sea-lashings,
And cliff-side clashings
Of
waters rife with revelry.
She
opened the door of Romance to me,
The door from a cell
I had know too well,
Too
long, till then, and was fain to flee.
She
opened the door of a Love to me,
That passed the wry
World-welters by
As
far as the arching blue the lea.
She
opens the door of the Past to me,
Its magic lights,
Its heavenly heights,
When
forward little is to see!
The Walk
You
did not walk with me
Of
late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And
I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not
thinking of you as left behind.
I
walked up there to-day
Just
in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only
that underlying sense
Of
the look of a room on returning thence.
