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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2021
Hardy's poetry has the careful articulation of the skeleton in a modern surgical laboratory. But also it has all the atmosphere of the skeleton in old ghostly legends: the sudden visitations, the faint shine and quaver, the lank pointings, the leisurely dissolving in gloom, the telltale streaks of gray on the dark earth and sky, the posturing branches, the summoning voices in the wind. All these are in the weft of his verse. A quizzical reader could assemble therefrom quite an array of theatrical apparitions. But at center his work is far from theatric. It moves with a large sincerity and simplicity.
page 1185 note 1 The third line is a too conscious premonition of the melodramatic episode that ensues in this poem, “Honeymoon Time at an Inn.”
page 1188 note 2 The author goes on to fancy that a “germ of consciousness” somehow escaped from that radiant world and “fell wanderingly upon our sphere,” making us aware of our misery. “Maybe now,” he ponders, “normal unawareness” waits rebirth“; the ”exotic germ“ of painful awareness may perhaps be ousted from our nature. But at the same time he cannot help cherishing that rare germ as the seed of a new sympathy winch may possibly grow, and renovate human life. This paradox goes down, of course, to the paradisaic thirst of the primitive human heart, its longing for the sweet of life without the sour. Paradisaic yearnings had a great revival in the nineteenth century. They escaped from the ruins of religious institution. They were freed from the restraints of old moral systems. They were fostered by the humanitarian spirit. They were partly guided, partly repelled, by the reasonings of the scientific-industrial mind. They flourished in opposition to obvious rnaterialism. And William Morris, collecting many of them into his Earthly Paradise in a fin-de-siècle mood, was a natural contemporary of Thomas Hardy.
page 1189 note 3 Hardy was of course unconsciou. of this aspect of his work. Indeed he liked to emphasize the lack of “tendency” in his poetry. “The road to a true philosophy of the he says in his preface to Poems of the Past and the Present, 1901, ”seems to lie in humbly recording diverse reading of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change.“ To be sure, in the preface of The Dynasts, 1903, he is conscious of embodying m this poem ”the Monistic theory of the Universe“ which has such wide prevalence in this twentieth century.” But he seems unaware that such prevalence is due to the intricate growth of the thing In the imaginative literature of the past hundred year. Certainly he is unaware of how this theoretic Monism leads away from “a true philosophy of life” by restricting and prejudicing one's readings of life's phenomena.
page 1191 note 4 “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality”, line 152.