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from Part III - Darwinian Dialogues: Four Modern Poets
Next this strange message Darwin brings, (Though saying his say In a quiet way);
We all are one with creeping things And apes and men Blood-brethren,
And likewise reptile forms with stings.
(‘Drinking Song’, ll. 46–52)In Thomas Hardy's ‘Drinking Song’ the speaker decodes Charles Darwin's ‘strange message’ with a uniquely complex blend of philosophical gravitas and darkly mischievous wit. What triggers this speaker's sardonic dismay is the possibility of a lineage reified in ‘blood’: a mysterious bond between ‘apes and men’ that survives ‘dull defacing Time’ (‘In the Night She Came’, l. 11). The phantasmagoric, visionary and uncanny components of Hardy's poetry, anchored in a radical repackaging of Darwin's scientific bequest, owes a signal though not widely canvassed debt to a late-Victorian anthropologist with a keen interest in questions of biological inheritance and ancestral memory, as well as in the ‘potential diffusion’ of consciousness and the ‘permeability’ of individual selfhood (Vrettos, 2007):
Among evidence aiding us to trace the course which the civilization of the world has actually followed, is that great class of facts to denote which I have found it convenient to introduce the term ‘survivals’. These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has evolved.
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