The Columbia History of British Poetry (137 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 543
own scientific Darwinian philosophy; referring to his "obstinate questionings" and "blank misgivings" (phrases borrowed from Wordsworth's
Immortality Ode
), he defends as philosophical the pessimism for which he had been criticized: ''the visible signs of mental and emotional life, must like all other things keep moving, becoming; even though at present, when belief in the witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and 'the truth that shall make you free', men's minds appear . . . to be moving backwards rather than on." This seems to be a sweepingalthough in light of the German aggression of the First World War allusiverebuke to the Modernist zeitgeist of Nietzschean pessimism and disbelief and of fascination with the darker forces of the Freudian unconscious. Donald Davie associates it with Hardy's dismay as a "scientific humanist" at the ignorance of Modernists substituting their own mythologies for philosophy or religious belief. Hardy's explicit Darwinian response to the issue of the loss of faith made him seem "Victorian" and old-fashioned, easy to dismiss by the advocates of "make it new" on their own terms, but his work would be returned to fashion in view of a century's appalling work by reactionary "witches."
Molly Holden's poem "T. H." looks at Hardy's intermixture of peasant simplicity and keen irony, comparing him to a sly dog fox:
I see now how much alike these Wessex creatures,
fox and man, in their wariness were; for the latter also,
despite his downcast eyes, saw everything he needed
about his fellow-men and the world, marking it all
upon the full-mapped country of his mind and memory.
In form, Hardy remains a poet of Romantic pastoral modes, of the ballad and lyric in the tradition of Wordsworth, of the elegy in the tradition of Coleridge, and of the music of dialect in the tradition of Burns; but in philosophy his Darwinian sense of chance and fate mitigates the Romantics' confidence in the design of nature as an expression of the Creator. The skepticism of his more scientific-minded antecedents, Blake, Coleridge, and Keats, has been honed through the dismay at an indifferent universe expressed by a believing Tennyson and an unbelieving Arnold into Hardy's "pessimism" in the face of an arbitrary and often tragic world. After all, Hardy chose to abandon fiction and to publish poems for the first time in 1898the very moment of awakening awareness of the imperial "heart of darkness" when the Victorian sense of confidence in civilization was being chal-
 
Page 544
lenged by violence in the Sudan and South Africa; he continued to write poetry through the horrible conflict of the European colonial powers in the First World War. In that sense, Hardy's 1898 volume,
Wessex Poems
, could be said to mark the beginning of the modern period in poetry. Yet Hardy's poems often focus on and conveyeven celebrate in a Romantic's waya sense of attachment to local place (the title of his first volume evoked the fictional name of the world of Dorset and southwest England of his novels). His poems express the desire to hold on to this sense of place amid fear of the displacing and trying destiny identified by personifications like "Crass Causality" or "Immanent Will" or "Sinister Spirit" that disrupt and destroy human lives. As a result, the landscape of Hardy's poetry is not that of Wordsworth's spring and summer lyrics but that of the winter cruelty of Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" and Keats's "Drear Nighted December'' and "Upon Visiting the Tomb of Burns," a wasteland of "the God-cursed sun, and a tree, / And a pond edged with greyish leaves" ("Neutral Tones"), where even April hints of being a cruel month"Say, on the noon when the half-sunny hours told that April was nigh, / And I upgathered and cast forth the snow from the crocus-border" ("In Tenebris" III). In such a place, the personal concern of the poet is to survive in a season of death"Birds faint in dread: / I shall not lose old strength / In the lone frost's black length" ("In Tenebris" I).
The irony that defines Hardy's poetry is that of Blake's innocence and experience; many poems are tales or personal anecdotes "showing contrary states of the human soul." This tragic human condition is expressed in the story of "Drummer Hodge," whose fate is to die in the Boer War and be buried "uncoffined" in Africa, in a place so alien to his native land that he could not even understand the place-names:
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew
    Fresh from his Wessex home
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
    The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
    Strange stars amid the gloam.
The poet's persona in most of Hardy's poems is still innocent enough to be in awe of the evidence of a terrible cosmic indifference and silence to human needs, even though he must accept this fateit is a persona
 
Page 545
created out of the elegiac voices of a Romantic who has lost faith in the renewing possibilities of nature (Coleridge in "Dejection: An Ode") and of a Victorian who is desperately reaching for love (Matthew Arnold in his "Marguerite" poems). These voices can be heard in the complaint of the octave of "Hap''"If but some vengeful god would call to me / From up the sky" before causing loss and sufferingor the confusion of hearing the joyful voice of "The Darkling Thrush" in the midwinter of New Year's 1900, that marks for Hardy the turn of the century:
So little cause for carolings
   Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
   Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
   His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
   And I was unaware.
This is also the voice of sheer horror expressed in "The Convergence of the Twain" at the oblivious nature that buries the
Titanic
and the "vain-gloriousness" of the civilization the ship represents:
   Over the mirrors meant
    To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawlsgrotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
In "Channel Firing," the sounds of war threaten the very idea of civilization, and Hardy relates his fear for his own world to that of other high moments of English civilization that have passed into legend:
Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
In such a dangerous and evolving universe, Hardy finds philosophical consolation when the hills of home provide the momentary solace of a Wordsworthian landscape. He walks "Wessex Heights," for instance, to escape the "ghosts" of his haunting memories of personal loss:
So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,

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