Six Poets (4 page)

This plunge alone?

Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy,

Our rude realms far above,

Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete

This region of sin that you find you in,

But are not of?

Hardy was the son of a jobbing builder, but many of his relations were farm labourers and some had been born in the workhouse. At Hardy's funeral service in Westminster Abbey, an old tramp had somehow got himself into the reserved seats. A clergyman neighbour of the Hardys got into conversation with him, thinking he'd just come in from the cold, but he found to his surprise that the tramp knew a great deal about Hardy and indeed was probably one of his relatives.

Quite early in his life, Hardy began to cut himself off socially from his lowly background, while artistically he drew on it more and more. He even tried to bump up his social origins, making a great deal of even the vaguest of well-to-do connections (exactly the opposite of what a writer would do today). When he was an old man and a celebrity, he was visited by the Prince of Wales (later the Duke of Windsor), to whom he gave lunch. The gardener, who was as much a social climber as Hardy, but on a lower slope, appropriated the chicken bone that the Prince had gnawed, as a souvenir.

Hardy's poems are sometimes like entries in a writer's (or a film-maker's) notebook. Complete in itself, this poem is also a note for a scene that could become a longer story.

Why does she turn in that shy soft way

Whenever she stirs the fire,

And kiss to the chimney-corner wall,

As if entranced to admire

Its whitewashed bareness more than the sight

Of a rose in richest green?

I have known her long, but this raptured rite

I never before have seen.

– Well, once when her son cast his shadow there,

A friend took a pencil and drew him

Upon that flame-lit wall. And the lines

Had a lifelike semblance to him.

And there long stayed his familiar look;

But one day, ere she knew,

The whitener came to cleanse the nook,

And covered the face from view.

‘Yes,' he said: ‘My brush goes on with a rush,

And the draught is buried under;

When you have to whiten old cots and brighten,

What else can you do, I wonder?'

But she knows he's there. And when she yearns

For him, deep in the labouring night,

She sees him as close at hand, and turns

To him under his sheet of white.

Hardy's verse is often a bit ungainly; it doesn't always run smooth. One of the reasons for this is that he melds ordinary conversation with the verse, and even, as in this next poem, bits of advertising copy. It's this casual style that has made him a greater influence on later poets than, say, Eliot or Yeats, who have had more acclaim. Auden, Betjeman and Larkin – all owe a good deal to Hardy.

‘I stood at the back of the shop, my dear,

But you did not perceive me.

Well, when they deliver what you were shown

I
shall know nothing of it, believe me!'

And he coughed and coughed as she paled and said,

‘O, I didn't see you come in there –

Why couldn't you speak?' – ‘Well, I didn't. I left

That you should not notice I'd been there.

‘You were viewing some lovely things. “
Soon required

For a widow, of latest fashion
”;

And I knew 'twould upset you to meet the man

Who had to be cold and ashen

‘And screwed in a box before they could dress you

“
In the last new note in mourning
”,

As they defined it. So, not to distress you,

I left you to your adorning.'

Now a happier poem, though like so many of Hardy's, it ends with a grave. It's a poem to his cat. Samuel Butler said that the true test of the imagination is the ability to name a cat, but T. S. Eliot said that cats have several names, including the name they're given and the name that they eventually acquire. The name that Hardy's cat eventually acquired was Kiddleywinkempoops Trot.

Pet was never mourned as you,

Purrer of the spotless hue,

Plumy tail, and wistful gaze

While you humoured our queer ways,

Or outshrilled your morning call

Up the stairs and through the hall –

Foot suspended in its fall –

While, expectant, you would stand

Arched, to meet the stroking hand;

Till your way you chose to wend

Yonder, to your tragic end.

Never another pet for me!

Let your place all vacant be;

Better blankness day by day

Than companion torn away.

Better bid his memory fade,

Better blot each mark he made,

Selfishly escape distress

By contrived forgetfulness,

Than preserve his prints to make

Every morn and eve an ache.

From the chair whereon he sat

Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;

Rake his little pathways out

Mid the bushes roundabout;

Smooth away his talons' mark

From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,

Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,

Waiting us who loitered round.

Strange it is this speechless thing,

Subject to our mastering,

Subject for his life and food

To our gift, and time, and mood;

Timid pensioner of us Powers,

His existence ruled by ours,

Should – by crossing at a breath

Into safe and shielded death,

By the merely taking hence

Of his insignificance –

Loom as largened to the sense,

Shape as part, above man's will,

Of the Imperturbable.

As a prisoner, flight debarred,

Exercising in a yard,

Still retain I, troubled, shaken,

Mean estate, by him forsaken;

And this home, which scarcely took

Impress from his little look,

By his faring to the Dim

Grows all eloquent of him.

Housemate, I can think you still

Bounding to the window-sill,

Over which I vaguely see

Your small mound beneath the tree,

Showing in the autumn shade

That you moulder where you played.

2 October 1904

Hardy never said much about writing or the difficulties of it, or the moral difficulties of it. Kafka said that a writer was doing the devil's work, writing a wholly inadequate response to the brutishness of the world, and Hardy increasingly felt this. It's not that it's an immoral activity or an amoral one; it's just that the act of creation is something to which the ordinary standards of human behaviour do not apply.

Hardy never liked to be touched. He always walked in the road to avoid brushing against people, and servants were told never to help him on with his coat and just to drop the shawl around his shoulders and not tuck him in. The pen had been his weapon in his struggle for life – and it had been a struggle.

The next poem is a dialogue with the moon.