Six Poets (3 page)

‘And now to God the Father,' he ends,

And his voice thrills up to the topmost tiles:

Each listener chokes as he bows and bends,

And emotion pervades the crowded aisles.

Then the preacher glides to the vestry-door,

And shuts it, and thinks he is seen no more.

The door swings softly ajar meanwhile,

And a pupil of his in the Bible class,

Who adores him as one without gloss or guile,

Sees her idol stand with a satisfied smile

And re-enact at the vestry-glass

Each pulpit gesture in deft dumb-show

That had moved the congregation so.

That's very much a novelist's poem, an incident, no moral drawn, just his vanity, her disillusion, the way things are, the poet simply putting a frame round it. Hardy's poems seldom offer consolation even when that consolation might just amount to some hint of meaning or sense in the universe. Religion certainly had none for Hardy; when he was eighty-nine, he scribbled down a bitter verse called ‘Christmas: 1924'.

‘Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it,

And pay a million priests to bring it.

After two thousand years of mass

We've got as far as poison-gas.

Hardy had given up writing novels in 1896 after the hostile reception of
Jude the Obscure
, a copy of which, it's particularly worth noting today, was burned publicly by a bishop. He had written poetry all his life and now devoted himself exclusively to it. I suspect that it was what Virginia Woolf called the ‘architecting' of novels that no longer appealed to him. Poetry has it over the novel in that it uses fewer words. You can do more with less.

He did, though, write one huge poem –
The Dynasts
, about the Napoleonic wars. Some of it is windy and sprawling, but Hardy was nothing if not down to earth (it's part of his fascination with graves). Here is a section about the night before Waterloo, but not about the common soldiers as Shakespeare might have done it, but the common creatures, disturbed by the preparations for the coming battle.

(
from
The Dynasts)

The eyelids of eve fall together at last,

And the forms so foreign to field and tree

Lie down as though native, and slumber fast!

Sore are the thrills of misgiving we see

In the artless champaign at this harlequinade,

Distracting a vigil where calm should be!

The green seems opprest, and the Plain afraid

Of a Something to come, whereof these are the proofs –

Neither earthquake, nor storm, nor eclipse's shade!

Yea, the coneys are scared by the thud of hoofs,

And their white scuts flash at their vanishing heels,

And swallows abandon the hamlet-roofs.

The mole's tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels,

The lark's eggs are scattered, their owners fled;

And the hedgehog's household the sapper unseals.

The snail draws in at the terrible tread,

But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim;

The worm asks what can be overheard,

And wriggles deep from a scene so grim,

And guesses him safe; for he does not know

What a foul red flood will be soaking him!

Beaten about by the heel and toe

Are butterflies, sick of the day's long rheum,

To die of a worse than the weather-foe.

Trodden and bruised to a miry tomb

Are ears that have greened but will never be gold,

And flowers in the bud that will never bloom.

So the season's intent, ere its fruit unfold,

Is frustrate, and mangled, and made succumb,

Like a youth of promise struck stark and cold! …

Some of that sympathy with the unredeemed lives of small creatures found its way into many of Hardy's poems. Once, when he was a boy in Dorset, he was crossing the field where the sheep were penned and took it into his head to get down on his hands and knees and pretend to crop the grass to see what it was like to be a sheep. When he looked up, the whole flock was gathered round him, gazing at him with astonished faces.

The railway hadn't reached Dorset when Hardy was born in 1840, but when it did, it was, of course, the Great Western, with its terminus at Paddington. It has been said that in London you settle near the station you arrive at, and when Hardy came to London to work as an architect, he lived in Bayswater and was married at St Peter's, Paddington. Several of his poems are set on the railway, including this:

‘There is not much that I can do,

For I've no money that's quite my own!'

Spoke up the pitying child –

A little boy with a violin

At the station before the train came in, –

‘But I can play my fiddle to you,

And a nice one 'tis, and good in tone!'

The man in the handcuffs smiled;

The constable looked, and he smiled, too,

As the fiddle began to twang;

And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang

With grimful glee:

‘This life so free

Is the thing for me!'

And the constable smiled, and said no word,

As if unconscious of what he heard;

And so they went on till the train came in –

The convict, and boy with the violin.

Another of Hardy's poems set on a train is a poetic version of a scene that occurs with much the same details in his last novel,
Jude the Obscure
.

In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy,

And the roof-lamp's oily flame

Played down on his listless form and face,

Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,

Or whence he came.

In the band of his hat the journeying boy

Had a ticket stuck; and a string

Around his neck bore the key of his box,

That twinkled gleams of the lamp's sad beams

Like a living thing.

What past can be yours, O journeying boy

Towards a world unknown,

Who calmly, as if incurious quite

On all at stake, can undertake