In November of 1912 an ageing writer lost his wife. He was not expecting her to die, but then he had not been taking much notice of her for some time. They had run out of conversation, he was in love with another woman, and for some years now she had withdrawn from him, choosing to sleep alone in a small room in the attic. She spent much of the day up there too, having her breakfast and lunch brought up, and reading and writing in a second attic room. She had just reached her seventy-second birthday. There had been no celebrations. She had seemed unwell, the doctor had seen her, but she had refused to allow him to examine her, and he had given no warning that there might be anything seriously wrong. At about eight in the morning on 27 November her young maid Dolly went to her as usual and found her alarmingly changed since bedtime the night before, when the girl had attended her. Now she was ‘moaning and terribly ill’. She did not complain or ask for the doctor to be sent for, but she did ask Dolly to fetch her husband. Dolly ran down to the master in his study, where he was making an early start on his day’s work. He told her to straighten her collar – she wore a blue dress with a white collar when she was working – then he climbed the narrow stairs to his wife’s room and went up to the bed. He spoke her name: ‘Em, Em – don’t you know me?’ But she was already unconscious, and within minutes she had stopped breathing. Emma Hardy was dead.1
This is the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet. He was a long-established, admired and popular writer, acknowledged as a great novelist and, more recently, as a poet. His historical epic-drama had been greeted with interest and respect, and he had written many fine poems and a few outstanding ones. But it was the death of Emma that proved to be his best inspiration. Filled with sorrow and remorse for their estrangement, he had her body brought down and placed in the coffin at the foot of his bed, where it remained for three days and nights until the funeral.2 The gesture would have been remarkable in a lover who could not bear to be parted from the body of his mistress, but for an elderly husband who had for years been on bad terms with his wife it seems almost monstrously unconventional, until you realize that he was thinking of his situation quite differently. He had become a lover in mourning.
He began at once to revisit their early love in his mind with an intensity that expressed itself in a series of poems. ‘One forgets all the recent years and differences,’he wrote to a friend, ‘and the mind goes back to the early times when each was much to the other – in her case and mine intensely much.’3 The dry old man was ‘in flower’as a poet – these were his own words – although the flower was sad-coloured; and he wrote more poems than he had ever done before in the same space of time.4
They are among the most original elegies ever written, in feeling and in the handling of language and verse forms. They are both conversational and lyrical. They do not spare the truth about the unhappiness suffered by wife and husband, but they move into the past with an expansiveness and panache he had never found before. In them he speaks to her, he gives her a voice, he conjures her up: sometimes she appears as a ghost, sometimes as the elderly woman who liked parties and hats; more often as the girl of long ago, wearing an ‘air-blue gown’, or with her ‘bright hair flapping free’. And he recalls how she seemed to him once a sublime, almost Homeric woman, ‘Fair-eyed and white shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed’.
He talks to her about her past self, ‘With your nut-coloured hair, / And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going’. He remembers how the light of the sunset over the sea, with its ‘dipping blaze / Dyed her face fire-red’. He relives a moment when he walked with her on a rainy road, and they exchanged the words that changed their lives, calling up her image and then letting it go:
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.5
At the same time he knows that she is ‘past love, praise, indifference, blame’. She is shut in her grave, ‘the clodded shell / Of her tiny cell’. She is wrapped in her shroud, with the rain that she hates – or hated – beating down on her.6 She is not there where he expects to see her working in the garden in the evening, and when he returns from his walk the house where she should be is empty of her. He needs to speak to her and see her, although he knows he cannot. The poetry allows him to. It keeps him balanced between the possible and the impossible, as the bereaved need to be, so that he can sorrow, and then rejoice, and then admit that the rejoicing cannot change how things are now.
There were times when he thought of the poems as a way of making amends to Emma, ‘the only amends I can make’, he wrote to another woman he had loved.7 He was seeing her again in the place where he first knew her, and with which he always identified her, the remote coast of north Cornwall, where the untamed landscape and the young woman on horseback with her hair blowing behind her had seemed almost exotic to him in 1870. Away from Cornwall her exoticism faded, and after they were married they never returned there, for which Hardy blamed himself. More than anything, though, he was re-creating his great romance, writing for the first time openly and boldly of ‘The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me’, restoring her to the Cornish cliffs where she had seemed to him to embody the spirit of landscape:
The sequence, which he called ‘Poems of 1912–13’, adding the words Veteris vestigia flammae(‘traces of old flames’), makes up one of the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry.8 It is cast in a different mould from Lycidas, Adonais or In Memoriam, fragmented, less marmoreal, but it still stands beside them. The metrical patterns and shapes of each poem are ambitious, complicated, surprising. The more risks he takes the less he falters, and what he gets away with is astonishing. No two use the same structure. There is a bow to Shakespeare when he reminds Emma’s ghost that night is ending, and ‘Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me, / For the stars close their shutters’.9 But the voice is purely his own.
‘The Voice’was written within weeks of Emma’s death, in December 1912. Its first words go straight to the point: ‘Woman much missed’. You might think he had written down what was in his heart immediately, but the manuscript shows that his first draft suggested something more complicated and even sinister: ‘O woman weird’. We can look over his shoulder and see how second thoughts brought simplicity:
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
The ‘call to me, call to me’is made into a wail of grief by the ‘Woman much missed’before it. The woman is trying to reach him and explain something complicated: that her death means she is no longer as she was in the later years of their marriage, ‘when you had changed’, but as she had been ‘at first, when our day was fair’. Hardy is looking at three different bits of time: the long-ago past, when he and Emma had been true lovers, the recent past, when they were estranged, and ‘now’, when he imagines her to be again as she was in the distant past. (This explains the force of the ‘woman weird’ he began with – she can time-travel inside her grave.)
He goes on to picture her as she used to be, waiting for him to arrive at Launceston Railway Station. Again, he made a change to the second stanza, from a dull ‘Even to the original hat and gown’ to the marvellous ‘original air-blue gown’that lifts and lights the whole poem. It tells us it was summer, and how she stood out luminously in the drab railway station.
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Then, to close the poem, he changes the shape and rhythm, reducing the lines as he finds himself reduced, unable to keep his imagination working, brought to his lowest ebb: ‘Thus I’. No air-blue to lift him now; he is merely an old man who can hardly move forward among a few skeletal autumn trees, and faltering. In this bleakness the woman’s voice is still heard but with no possibility of an answer or an exchange.
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
‘The Phantom Horsewoman’is as odd and bold as any of his poems, rising from one of Hardy’s awkward starts to a conclusion that feels triumphant instead of sorrowful, as though this time the poetry has actually worked magic. It starts with an unnamed ‘I’ who seems to be observing another anonymous person, ‘a man I know’, this one old, half mad and obsessed with something only he can see as he gazes out over the ocean:
Two anonymous men make an impersonal start to the poem, even if both are aspects of Hardy himself. What one is looking at, and seeing continually in his mind, is explained in the last part of the poem, when it changes from the impersonal to the intensely personal. He is seeing
A ghost-girl-rider. And though, toil-tried,
He withers daily,
Time touches her not,
But still she rides gaily
In his rapt thought
On that shagged and shaly
Atlantic spot,
And as when first eyed
Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide.
The ‘ghost-girl-rider’and ‘toil-tried’give a spring to the rhythm, so that the short lines canter away after them like the girl on her horse – and like time that has run away with their happiness, and with her life. Only the poem allows her to pause. This is Hardy’s magic. He makes her draw rein, she sings, she is there again, and now that he has written the poem, she will always be there.
Hardy was a writer who made many of his best effects out of incidents and stories he had collected and put aside, sights stored up, feelings he had kept to himself, anger he had not shown to the world. In these poems about Emma he is rediscovering repressed sorrow and forgotten love. He is like an archaeologist uncovering objects that have not been seen for many decades, bringing them out into the light, examining them, some small pieces, some curious bones and broken bits, and some shining treasures. There is a rising excitement in the writing as of someone making discoveries. He has found the most perfect subject he has ever had, and he has the skills to work on it. ‘There is the harvest of having written twenty novels first,’wrote Ezra Pound in praise of Hardy’s poetry.10
Are the poems true? His second wife, Florence, indignantly rejected the notion: ‘All the poems about her are a fiction, but a fiction in which their author has now come to believe.’11 She was too angry and jealous to accept that there had been another Hardy and another Emma before she knew them, or to understand that poems have their own internal truth to which both fact and dream may contribute. Maybe it does not matter whether they are true or not, although Hardy himself evidently thought they were. A year after Emma’s death, in November 1913, he had a conversation about them with Arthur Benson in Cambridge in which ‘He told me he had enough verses for a book, but he didn’t know whether he ought to include in it some verses he wrote when his wife died “very intimate, of course – but the verses came; it was quite natural; one looked back through the years and saw some pictures.”’12 Benson’s account suggests that Hardy felt the poems showed his past, and that they had come to him almost unbidden: ‘one looked back through the years and saw some pictures.’It may be how he preferred to remember and simplify the work that had gone into them, packing fluid feeling into solid shapes, making patterns with words and rhyme, exploring the tension between idea and form. The manuscripts are effectively fair copies with just a few emendations, and, although there were rough drafts, which he always destroyed, it may be that they were composed almost like music in his head even before he put anything down on paper.
Benson added, ‘I have forgotten to put down by far the most interesting thing Hardy said. He was talking about his wife’s death, and wondering if it was indecent to write poetry, and he said “It’s natural to me to write poetry – I was never intended to be a prose-writer, still less a teller of tales – still, one had got to live.” ’ The question about whether it was proper to publish the poems did not worry him for long. The volume containing them appeared in November 1914, three months after the outbreak of the First World War, which partly explains the small attention given to them. He wrote to a friend in December, ‘My own favourites, that include all those in memory of Emma, have been mentioned little… I am so glad you like “When I set out for Lyonnesse.” It is exactly what happened 44 years ago.’13 In that week a review of the poems appeared in the New Statesman, by Lytton Strachey, who wrote: ‘They are, in fact, modern as no other poems are. The author of Jude the Obscure speaks in them, but with the concentration, the intensity, the subtle disturbing force of poetry… He is incorrect; but then how unreal and artificial a thing is correctness! He fumbles; but it is that very fumbling that brings him so near to ourselves.’14 Hardy would not have liked the accusations of incorrectness and fumbling, but Strachey did see that his poetry is the real thing, able ‘to touch our marrow-bones’.
Hardy went on writing poems about Emma, returning again and again to incidents in their life together, to the end of his own life fifteen years later. Some, by no means all, of the later verses rise to the heights of the ‘Poems of 1912–13’, and at least eighty poems belong to her. Inspiration came to him all the time, from a curl of her hair that she had cut for him once to console him on parting, which had stayed a bright brown; from the memory of a walk when her long skirts gathered ‘Winged thistle-seeds’which
… rose at the brush of your petticoat-seam…
And sailed on the breeze in a nebulous stream
Like a comet’s tail behind you…15
Also from the sight of the keys of the piano she had played when he refused to listen – in the poem ‘Penance’he finds the grimmest of images to stand for his guilt in his own failure in love:
I would not join. I would not stay,
But drew away,
Though the winter fire beamed brightly… Aye!
I do to-day
What I would not then; and the chill old keys,
Like a skull’s brown teeth
Loose in their sheath,
Freeze my touch; yes, freeze.16
He said he was prouder of his poetry than of any of his prose, even of his great novels, because he felt that in all the novels there was an element of compromise. His professional life, which appears from most aspects as a triumphal progress, always seemed to him to be a struggle against publishers determined to censor what he wrote, and the wilful misunderstanding and lofty disapproval of the critics. When he talked to Benson of having to write novels because ‘one had got to live’, he was still showing his sensitivity to criticism, remembering the hard labour of writing against time for serial publication and the many struggles with editors and publishers to be allowed to say what he wanted. He was often despondent even once he had become successful and rich. Only in poetry was there no compromising, and in the ‘Poems of 1912–13’he bared his heart as he had never fully allowed himself to do before. It gives them their immediacy and power, allowing us to eavesdrop on his train of thought and feeling as he moves between an old man’s sorrow and a young man’s bliss.
This book is about how Hardy became a writer, poet and novelist. It starts with his mother, from whom he took a way of thinking and many of his ideas and ambitions. Her story sets the background to his life.