Thomas Hardy's Poetry (Archive Episode)

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Speaker 10 And now, to mark the end of his 27 memorable years presenting in our time, we have Melvin Bragg to introduce the next in our series of his most cherished episodes.

Speaker 2 What's made my time presenting in our time so stimulating is that one week I'd be getting to grips with something I know little about, the innermost workings of the atomic nucleus, for example, and another could be something very close to my heart.

Speaker 2 Thomas Hardy's poetry is one of those. We recorded this just as we were returning to normal after COVID, and so everyone could be back in the studio.

Speaker 2 It was glorious to resume face-to-face conversations with our three deeply read guests who cared deeply about Hardy.

Speaker 2 Hello, in the 1890s, Thomas Hardy stopped writing novels and returned to his first love, poetry, and he stayed writing poems for 38 years, the rest of his life.

Speaker 2 In different styles and meters, he explores genres from nature, the darkling thrush, to war, drummer hodge, and to epics, the dynasts.

Speaker 2 And among his best known are what he called his poems 1912 to 13, responding to his grief at the death of his first wife, Emma, who was neither his first love nor his last, who was the muse who'd made his writing possible.

Speaker 2 With me to discuss Thomas Hardy's poetry are Tim Armstrong, Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University University of London, Jane Thomas, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hill and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, and Mark Ford, poet and professor of English and American literature, University College London.

Speaker 2 Mark Ford, what do we need to know about Hardy's early life that's relevant to his poetry?

Speaker 1 His enthusiasm for poetry did develop while he was a teenager.

Speaker 1 He was born in 1840 in Higher Bockhampton, which is about three miles from Dorchester, quite near Stinsford, which becomes becomes the Melstock of Wessex.

Speaker 1 His father was in the church choir, I think it's an important point, that he played the violin in the church choir.

Speaker 1 So Hardy's interest in music is one of the things that really is really important when we come to sort of discuss his poetry, that his fascination with the process of making music, particularly for the church, was something that was drilled into him from a very kind of early age.

Speaker 1 His mother, Jemima, was probably the dominant influence in driving him to become the ambitious young person and then the very, very successful writer.

Speaker 1 Although she came from a pretty poor background, her own mother was actually on poor relief, but she was very concerned with education and Hardy went to excellent schools.

Speaker 2 Local schools.

Speaker 1 Yeah, local schools up until the age of 16. Well, fairly local.
From the age of 12 to 16, he went to one in Dorchester. And after that, he was apprenticed to an architect.

Speaker 1 And it was while he was working as an apprentice architect that he became obsessed with Latin Greek, and that would develop into a love of English poetry.

Speaker 2 He would get up at four o'clock in the morning before he went to work to learn some of the Latin poets. Is that right?

Speaker 1 That's right, and he taught himself Greek as well. He was an autodidact from the age of 16 onwards.
He did study Latin at school from the age of 12, but he was an autodidact after that.

Speaker 1 And the architect's office that he worked in in Dorchester was a fairly kind of cultured place, and they would kind of swap translations of Latin and so on.

Speaker 2 But he moved to London to continue his work as an architect clerk. He still kept writing poetry there.

Speaker 1 Well, that's when he really, really got obsessed with poetry. It's almost like an addiction the way he talks about it.

Speaker 1 His concern with reading and writing poetry was the thing that dominated his life in London, though he did also go to kind of music halls and the theatre and saw lots of Shakespeare and he went to the National Gallery.

Speaker 1 But he tells us he would stay up until after midnight every night in his room in Westbourne Park Villas, reading and writing poetry.

Speaker 1 And he would send this poetry out in the hope of making a name for himself, but he tells us it was all rejected. We actually haven't got any rejection slips, so he can't verify that.

Speaker 1 But he came to the conclusion that the editors of poetry magazines didn't know good verse from bad,

Speaker 1 and they certainly didn't embrace his work.

Speaker 2 There's one of his very earliest poems called She to Him. It's one of four poems, but I think this one is particularly powerful for a young man.

Speaker 2 When you shall see me in the toils of time,

Speaker 2 my lauded beauties carried off from me, my eyes no longer stars as in their prime, my name forgot a maiden fair and free.

Speaker 2 When in your being heart concedes to mind, And judgment, though you scarce its process know, Recalls the excellent I once enshrined, And you are irked that they have withered so

Speaker 2 Remembering mine the losses, not the blame, That sportsman time but rears his brood to kill, knowing me in my soul the very same

Speaker 2 One who would die to spare you a touch of ill.

Speaker 2 Will you not grant to old affection's claim the hand of friendship down life's sunless hill? I think that's fantastic.

Speaker 2 I just wanted an indication of what he was writing at the time he was rejected.

Speaker 1 He was writing a lot of sonnets in the voice of this woman, who was probably based on a woman he was seeing at the time called Eliza Nicholls.

Speaker 1 And there are four of these sonnets, the She to Him sonnets, that derive a lot from kind of Shakespearean and from John Donne. There's a kind of Elizabethan tinge to them.

Speaker 1 And they're rather complex poems that they illustrate Philip Larkin's contention that every Hardy poem has a spinal cord of thought running through it.

Speaker 1 They're quite cerebral poems, but they're also quite complex and quite emotionally charged.

Speaker 2 Well, I think they're very emotionally charged.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's just this woman is saying, everything's gone, but it's you mustn't blame me and remember the time when I would lay down, I would do anything that you wanted in your life.

Speaker 2 It's an extraordinary poem. I mean, I just

Speaker 2 amazed that they missed it at the time, but now we've got it here, so that's all right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and there was a vogue for sonnets in the Victorian period, so it and I think they reflect the influence of George Meredith as well, particularly the modern love sequence.

Speaker 2 Jane Thomas,

Speaker 2 we may come back to earlier poems later, I hope. He stopped the poems and he started to write novels.
Now why was that?

Speaker 11 Because he knew he would make more money. Writing poetry was not the best way to make money.

Speaker 11 Between

Speaker 11 1871 and 1878 he was writing roughly a novel a year which is phenomenal when you think about it. But around about the 1880s he lost his way.
The novels he produced, Aleoda C.

Speaker 11 and Hand of Ethelberta, were not well received. He also had a physical breakdown and was extremely ill for quite a long time.

Speaker 11 In 1883 he moved to Dorchester thinking that if he could sort of immerse himself in the place and the people that he knew well it might add something to his writing and in 1884 he moved into Maxgate and of course that was the year that the Mayor of Casterbridge was published and that initiated that great tragic phase where we get the Woodlanders, Tessa the Derbervilles, Dude the Obscure and the Well-Beloved.

Speaker 11 He'd always claimed that he'd aimed at making his novels as close to poetry as possible, but he felt hampered by the constraints of realism.

Speaker 11 And I think if you read The Well-Beloved, you can see that working there. He's moving against realism and towards something more poetic.

Speaker 2 Can you tell us about Emma, his first wife, and what she meant to him at first? She opened the door.

Speaker 11 She opened the door indeed. Marx already mentioned that his mother was a great influence in helping him to concentrate on being a writer rather than an architect, and so did Emma.

Speaker 11 They both were responsible for encouraging him. He met Emma on the 7th of March in 1870 in St.

Speaker 11 Juliet where he'd been sent by Crickmay, the architects of Weymouth, to draw up plans for the rebuilding of the church. And he was completely entranced by her.
It only took four days.

Speaker 11 He was entranced by her unreserved manner out of doors, her skills as a horsewoman.

Speaker 11 He returned in August 1870 and by the end of his visit they considered themselves betrothed.

Speaker 11 Now at that point Hardy had had two rejected novels and he had to choose between being an architect, which would mean they could marry sooner rather than later, or being a writer and their courtship might be postponed for quite a long time if that was the case.

Speaker 11 It was Emma who persuaded him to concentrate on being a writer and many years later, many years after her death in fact, Hardy said that she had in fact done a fine thing to put her own desires to one side.

Speaker 11 It was four years before they could marry in 1874

Speaker 11 And Emma really encouraged him.

Speaker 11 She helped him to revise and edit his novels and you can see her influence in The Heroine of Desperate Remedies, of course in the heroine of Pair of Blue Eyes, which tells the story of their romantic courtship.

Speaker 11 I think Hardy was very clear that if Emma hadn't encouraged him at that point, we would have lost one of the greatest writers in the English language.

Speaker 2 Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 Tim Armstrong, for the purposes of this programme, we're concentrating much more on poetry.

Speaker 2 So, extraordinarily, after the great success he had with his novels, particularly with Tesso the Derbervilles, he quit novels

Speaker 2 and this strange reception for Jude the Obscure. And for the next 38 years, Menbrat went back to and wrote poetry, wrote over 900 poems.
Can you discuss that switch?

Speaker 2 Initially, he portrayed it as a flight from the public sphere into something much more personal.

Speaker 2 After the Bishop of Wakefield threw Jude the Obscure into the fire, and there was a great deal of negative commentary, even from some of his friends. So you're saying that

Speaker 2 the reception of Jude the Obscure was one of the big things that made him stop writing novels?

Speaker 2 Yes, though in fact he had been planning to publish a volume of poetry for some time and had also planned to put together The Dynas, his huge verse epic from around 1890.

Speaker 2 But he was at first tentative, so he published Wessex's poems with a series of quirky drawings which really are quite personal.

Speaker 2 He wrote a very defensive preface to it and he included a lot of those early love lyrics. About a third of the poems were written in the 1860s, as well as some more recent poems.

Speaker 2 But after that, his career as a poet begins to take on a momentum. So he publishes another volume quite quickly.
Three years later, he publishes The Dinos.

Speaker 2 He begins to write poems for public occasions, like the death of Queen Victoria.

Speaker 2 And by the time you get to the general preface that he wrote in 1911, he said that he wants to express, quote, most of the cardinal situations that occur in social and public life in his dramatic and narrative poems, and in lyric a round of emotional experiences of some completeness.

Speaker 2 The first collected poems is published in 1919, and by then he's established. And he had an extraordinary late career.

Speaker 2 He published in the last 14 years of his life, up to his death at 87, around 650 poems and five volumes. And it's hard to think of a comparator, really, in terms of that late productivity.

Speaker 2 He was a man, we're told, that he fell in love very easily.

Speaker 2 He began to become interested in women other than his wife in the period around 1890 and had a number of liaisons with women in that period.

Speaker 2 And that included people like Florence Henneker, who remained a friend for the rest of his life.

Speaker 2 He also began to have a relationship with Florence Dugdale around 1905, the person who became the second Mrs. Hardy.

Speaker 2 That was part of the tension between him and Emma, who was clearly aware of what was happening to some extent. I think we can move back to Mark.

Speaker 2 Maybe we could discuss a poem called Neutral Tones and say where that came or what it meant.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Hardy wrote a lot of poems in the 1860s when he was living in London as a young man.

Speaker 1 And the one poem of his that really stands out from this period is called called neutral tones and it seems to be the commemoration of the end of a relationship possibly with eliza nicholls who was a lady's maid who lived quite close to him in westbourne park villas she lived in orset terrace and this poem is a terrifically bleak and despairing one and it's astonishing to think of somebody who's only sort of 27 writing a poem that has so jettisoned all the major belief systems that were so present in the victorian age it actually uses the same um metrical scheme as in Memoriam, but it has none of that belief in God.

Speaker 1 I think Hardy's loss of belief during his period in London in the mid-1860s is really crucial to understanding how his poetry expressed a scepticism which was really modern and different from that to be found in any other Victorian poet.

Speaker 1 And that may be one reason why his work wasn't accepted.

Speaker 1 But this poem describes two lovers who are breaking up beside an ash tree which is near a pond and the leaves from the ash tree have fallen and are grey and the sun is described as chidden of God.

Speaker 1 And all they can think about is how they are completely bored of each other. There's absolutely no reciprocity.

Speaker 1 He compares them to riddles of long ago. There's no mystery, no magic.

Speaker 1 And what is odd is that Hardy associated poetry so much with romance that for him to be a poet was to be involved in romance in some ways.

Speaker 1 And yet these early poems, particularly Neutral Tones, express an utter scepticism towards romance itself.

Speaker 1 And all he learns from this experience of breaking up is that love rings with wrong, that things are always about to go wrong.

Speaker 1 And that's the kind of crucial initiation, I suppose, into the world of the Hardian, that things don't work out as you hoped they would.

Speaker 2 There's a sense that romance in him is connected with loss and death.

Speaker 1 It is. That's obviously...

Speaker 2 Death prompts great love.

Speaker 1 Yes, I mean some go as far as to think of Hardy as almost like a necrophiliac, someone who was only able to kind of love women after they had died.

Speaker 1 And certainly the poems that he wrote about women nearly all came after those women had died. And that was somehow

Speaker 1 they resurfaced in his memory in all their vivacity and liveliness and potential. And he recreated them out of this sense of loss and despair and grieving.

Speaker 2 Jane, how do you react?

Speaker 11 How does the great poet of desire and loss and what greater object of desire than a dead beloved? And this is particularly the case with Emma.

Speaker 11 I don't know whether you want me to talk a little bit about that. The context of those poems.
Emma and Hardy's happiest time was in the first eight years of their married life, 1870 to 1878,

Speaker 11 at which point they moved to London. And as Hardy says, that's when their troubles began.
Because at this point, I think Emma felt she'd lost him.

Speaker 11 She'd lost him to fame, she'd lost him to the literary. The family as a novelist, yeah.

Speaker 11 The famous novelist, yeah, she'd lost him to the society women who were keen for him to attend their literary salons and she felt very um left behind after hardy's illness which i've mentioned in 1880 they moved to max gate and emma became i think maxgate is the house that the house hardy designed

Speaker 11 and his father and brother built for him yeah emma became increasingly lonely isolated and consequently a little bit eccentric tim's already mentioned hardy's infatuation with other women which she didn't really keep very secret but poems about them so hardy was quite embarrassed embarrassed by Emma and I think it's clear to say he was rather cruel to her as well.

Speaker 11 Like he debarred her when he received his Order of Merit. And eventually

Speaker 11 she moved up into two small attic rooms that Hardy had enlarged at her request. Hardy moved in Florence Dugdale.

Speaker 11 Emma confided to Florence.

Speaker 2 She was eight years younger than him.

Speaker 11 Yes, ostensibly, quite cleverly, if you like, as Emma's companion. Emma confided to Florence that she thought Thomas was resembling Crippin,

Speaker 11 who'd been on trial at that point for the murder of his wife. They were very estranged, and Hardy did not.

Speaker 2 But she was quite complicated. Her father had been in an asylum, and we used to basically pick up the family.

Speaker 11 I think a lot of that is speculation.

Speaker 2 But it was certainly an alcoholic. Is that not speculation?

Speaker 11 Well, there was alcoholism in the family.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 11 Excuse me for saying this, but I think a lot of the stories of Emma has been written by male critics who very much take Hardy's side.

Speaker 2 You don't need any excuses for that.

Speaker 11 I'm sure. But writers and academics can be very selfish people, and I think their wives and their companions can often feel left out of their lives as a result.

Speaker 11 So there are all sorts of reasons why this marriage foundered, but it certainly did.

Speaker 11 However, Emma became increasingly ill of the heart failure that eventually killed her, and Hardy doesn't seem to have noticed this because they led these separate lives.

Speaker 11 But on the 27th of November 1912, Emma's maid, Dolly Gale, came down to Hardy in a state of distress, very concerned about her mistress.

Speaker 11 Hardy apparently told her to straighten her collar before making his way in his own time up to Emma's attic, where he found her indeed dying. And she died in his arms of heart failure.

Speaker 11 And the shock was so great to Hardy that it resulted in this magnificent outpouring of loss and grief, regret and guilt.

Speaker 11 I mean, even on her wreath, he wrote for her lonely husband with the old affection. And he talks about how he said a loss like that made the old brain vocal.

Speaker 11 And in her papers after she died, he found two significant little bits of writing. One was called What I Think of My Husband, which he read and promptly burnt.

Speaker 11 And the other was Some Recollections, which tells the story of their early quarrelship.

Speaker 2 What I thought of my husband.

Speaker 11 Why did he? Well, we don't know because none of it survives, but you can imagine, can't you,

Speaker 11 that she was writing really an outpouring of her own sense of abandonment, of rejection, of Hardy's cruelty. But I think those combined, plus the pilgrimage that he made to St.

Speaker 11 Juliet that he'd never made in her lifetime, but he went with Henry, his older brother, on a pilgrimage. And all of this stimulates that imaginative recreation of their early romance.

Speaker 2 And those extraordinary poems. Can we turn to you, Tim? Can you unpick those poems, the collection 1912,

Speaker 2 those few years where you got more than a score of poems around Emma, which

Speaker 2 some of the best loved poems in the language?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 Hardy takes the traditional elegy and turns it into a sequence, which really goes through many different stages of grief and reaction, beginning with some hostility in a way and cruelness, and eventually moves the scene from Dorchester to Cornwall, where he re-finds Emma.

Speaker 2 If you look for example at the second poem, Your Last Drive, it ends with the line, you are past love, praise, indifference, blame.

Speaker 2 And indifference, if that's the middle term, there's a kind of another term, hate, which is sort of lingering at the end of the poem.

Speaker 2 So he recognises his own culpability in their relationship, but he nevertheless, as Jane says, seeks to re-find her.

Speaker 2 And the key poem there is After a Journey, which is the 13th poem in the sequence of the 21, where he finally does move to Cornwall, where he finds the young Emma again.

Speaker 2 He says, Through the years, through the dead scenes, I have tracked you. What have you found to say of our past? Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you.
And that's a rough word.

Speaker 2 She is, in effect, a ghost, though. She is.
In fact, in revising the poem, he pushes her even further away.

Speaker 2 So, in the early printings of the poem, he says at the beginning, here too I come to interview a ghost. And then he changes it to the final version, here too I come to view a voiceless ghost.

Speaker 2 So he shifts the poem from interviewing her, talking the idea of interchange, to looking at her, finding an image for her. What do you make of this great sequence of poems?

Speaker 2 I mean, he's treated her, as we've been told in no uncertain terms, very, very badly indeed. He's taken on a young woman who is supposed to be her secretary.

Speaker 2 He's flirting with society ladies all over the place. And he brings this great outpouring of largely positive regret.
How do you account for that?

Speaker 2 Hardy always said that he had a faculty for burying emotion inside him and then reinterring it. And that's really what he does.

Speaker 2 And he's also very interested in the idea that you can come back to your early experience and refind it and see the truth of it.

Speaker 2 So he gradually comes to see across the sequence, in a sense, the meaning of his life, the meaning of his early romance, the meaning of

Speaker 2 everything that's happened since. And he becomes obsessed with that idea of recovering the image of Emma and the landscape in which they had their romance.
Thank you very much.

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Speaker 2 Mark, these poems take us into Cornwall, as has been said, as much as Dorset. Can we just talk about the role of landscape here? Can you tell us a bit about the Cornish connection?

Speaker 1 Yes, he made this journey, as Jane has pointed out, to Cornwall in 1870, and it was for him like a journey to a mythical kingdom, the way he represents it after, to Lyoness.

Speaker 1 And she actually lived quite near Tintagl. So the fact that

Speaker 1 she was Isolde and he was Tristan was one of the sort of myths which he plays when he reconfigures her.

Speaker 1 And this mythical journey to Cornwall was one in which he escaped his family and he found this very unpredictable woman who had this pony called Fanny.

Speaker 1 and she used to ride up and down the shore on this pony and it took him out of his entire kind of cautiousness and he fell in love with the fact that he didn't know what she was going to do next and that is all kind of mapped onto the Cornish landscape and the unpredictable Cornish weather oh the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea as he opens beanie cliff and so the cornish landscape is one in which Emma is figured as the genius lockey to use the kind of Latin phrase the idea that she is the spirit of the place she actually didn't like Cornwall very much she was from Devon and she spent only seven years in Cornwall and she was rather harsh in some recollections about the Cornish people.

Speaker 1 And Plymouth was always her favourite city, and she believed that she was a Devonian.

Speaker 1 But Hardy, in his imagination, has

Speaker 1 this image of her on her horse on the Cornish coast, and that has become one of the most powerful images in English poetry, I think.

Speaker 1 And it incarnates for him freedom, excitement, exhilaration, romance, all the things which had previously been lacking in his life.

Speaker 2 He does have the generosity to say that she unlocked something in him which enabled him to write a lot better.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes, he was very, very generous in his depictions of her, as well as those 21 poems in poems 1912, 13. There are over a hundred other poems about Emma.

Speaker 1 I mean, he literally could not stop writing poems about Emma, and they are tributes. So, the terrible thing is that none of these poems were published before she died.

Speaker 1 He only published one poem called Ditty, which is a little tribute to her before she died.

Speaker 1 After she died, the floodgates opened, and he recreates with this astonishing ability to remember events from 40 years before as Tim Tim quoted that bit from his autobiography about being able to disinter emotion as fresh as when first experienced and what is so startling about these poems not just the 1912-13 but the other Emma poems is how he can recreate tiny incidents like the fact that she left the greenhouse unwarmed one night and all the plants died and that becomes the Donnet of a poem or once he sees her standing in a quarry with green slates, and that becomes the donnet for a poem.

Speaker 1 So these little incidents from that magical week that he spent with her are all transformed into this moment.

Speaker 2 The magical first week.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the magical first week of March 7th to March 11th, or just five days really.

Speaker 1 And then he's left regretting that he never was able to say to her in life the things that he was able to say to her in these poems which he wrote after she died.

Speaker 2 Would you like to take that up, Jane?

Speaker 11 I think we have to make a big leap of faith and try and detach the poems from the biography, because when we do that, we see how the poems can really generously open up that limited plurality of meaning, which means that they can speak to us now without knowing the biography.

Speaker 11 We don't know how much of that is true. We're looking at the art to recreate the life, and art, as we know, is fiction, it's fabrication.
You mentioned, I think, Ditty.

Speaker 11 In that poem, the narrator says, here is she seems written everywhere to me.

Speaker 11 So he's already talking about the spirit of place, that this idea of Emma is embroidered on the landscape a bit like a sampler.

Speaker 11 You could see that poem as the beginning of this creation of the genius lockey, the creation of the landscapes of the mind.

Speaker 2 Does the poem The Voice have any bearing on this?

Speaker 11 The poem The Voice has a lot of bearing on this.

Speaker 2 Could you tell us something about it?

Speaker 11 Yes, it's, I think, one of the greatest elegies, again, in the English language.

Speaker 2 Can you read a little of it?

Speaker 11 I used to know it by heart.

Speaker 11 I'll try. And I'm glad you asked me to read it because what's interesting about that is the narrator is totally engendered.

Speaker 11 And once you engender the narrator, that voice then becomes a poignant expression for anybody who's ever lost anybody dear to them. It's a great poem for our time, I think, our times now.

Speaker 11 Could be a mother, could be a sister, could be a lover, could be anybody.

Speaker 11 Woman much missed, how you call to me, called to me, saying that now you were not as you were when you had changed from the one who was all to me, but as at first when our day was fair.

Speaker 11 Can it be that I hear? Let me see you then, standing as when I drew near to the town where you would wait for me, yes, as I knew you then, even to the original air blue gown.

Speaker 11 Or is it only the wind in its wistlessness

Speaker 11 coming across the wet mead to me here, you being ever dissolved to one wistlessness, heard no more again, far or near.

Speaker 11 Thus I, faltering forward, leaves around me falling, wind oozing thin through the thorn from Norwood, and the woman calling. You see, I can't read that without

Speaker 11 you get that catch in that last stanza, and we have to think about the artistry of how Hardy writes these poems. He is a poet.
He says poetry is emotion put into measure.

Speaker 11 The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. And when you see that poem moving from those lovely lyrical dactylics, you know,

Speaker 11 strong, weak, weak, all the way through, it lures you in. And at the end, you get that break, thus I gap, faltering forward.

Speaker 11 And it's a wonderful poem about the on passe of grief, about how one moves forward after grief, one falters forward after grief.

Speaker 11 And you do get that sense of the narrator of the poem, let's leave Hardy out of of it, the narrator of the poem stuck in that trying to recapture, trying to see the person who's been lost, but knowing that they never will.

Speaker 11 Whose voice is it we hear? Is it the woman's voice? Is it the narrator's voice who's actually narrating the poem for us? Or is it just the wind?

Speaker 11 That's that wonderful thorny aeolian harp image of the wind oozing thin through the thorn from Norwood.

Speaker 11 It's it's ah and I think he gets that from Sappho actually that idea of the broken tongue that wrestling of language into communication, so that you can communicate with people across the centuries about that sense of loss that he's describing there.

Speaker 11 It's one of my favourite poems.

Speaker 2 That's wonderful. Tim, just to take that on or up anyway, how can you distinguish what he thinks or what he is or whether the poem is something apart from him that takes on its own life?

Speaker 2 Now, that might sound like a muddle to some people, but not to people who write, and I'm sure not to you. So, could you explain it?

Speaker 2 It's a very difficult question because Hardy himself insisted that his poems were personas, projections.

Speaker 2 Walter Delamer put it very nicely when he wrote in an early review that the effect of even the most objective of his poems is that of a tale being told, of an experience being described, of a memory or secret being related by a man whose face we can see, whose voice we can hear, whose ghostly presence is extraordinarily close to us.

Speaker 2 So, it's not just a dramatic monologue, it's something that sucks us in with a kind of presence with the idea of the secret of the self and the feeling person

Speaker 2 somehow behind it, but abstracted and often decontextualized. He writes a number of poems like for example The Wound or The Something That Saved Him which in which we get an emotion.

Speaker 2 In the wound he says he sees a sunset and he says it's like that wound of mine, but then he doesn't ever tell us what the wound was. He doesn't tell us what the something that saved him was.

Speaker 2 So we get emotion that's curiously abstracted in that kind of poem. Mark, can we talk about...
Hardy was keen on philosophy.

Speaker 1 Yes, a lot of his poems present the death of God in a sort of in a nutshell.

Speaker 1 There's one called God's Funeral, and that sort of sums up pretty much the main philosophic message that he wanted to communicate to his readers was that the old faiths no longer held.

Speaker 1 And that's what makes Hardy kind of modern. And

Speaker 1 he read very widely from Darwin through to Einstein

Speaker 1 in terms of he kept up with modern thought and he did incorporate modern ideas. He read kind of Bergson as well.

Speaker 1 And he did incorporate modern ideas into his poems so that he does look forward to 20th century ideas in which the great problem is how do we live in a world in which nobody believes in God anymore.

Speaker 1 And Hardy took that sort of, that was his major philosophical breakthrough, that God didn't exist. And yet he was very, very churchy, to use his own phrase, and he loved churches.

Speaker 1 I think there were like 70 poems set in graveyards in Hardy's Oeuvre. So he really was obsessed with the hole left by the loss of God.

Speaker 1 And his own poetry both insists on that time and again, but also finds ways of not exactly making up for it, but what he puts instead was the notion of loving kindness.

Speaker 2 Was he going against the grain of his audience of the time when he was saying that so emphatically?

Speaker 1 Yes, I mean the mid-Victorian period was the period in which belief in God was extremely strong, and the whole Gothic architecture movement in which Hardy committed to himself initially was a kind of idealistic religious movement.

Speaker 1 One of the reasons Hardy couldn't go on being a Gothic architect was because of the loss of belief in what Gothic churches were for, which is to communicate with God.

Speaker 1 But I would sort of slightly at this point like to mention how important Gothic was to him as well, as a way of exploring philosophy.

Speaker 1 That the Gothic was this vast notion that the artwork could have lots of different facets to it and be all over the place.

Speaker 1 And Hardy's enormous 900-page collected poems is like a vast Gothic cathedral with niches here and niches there of all kinds of gargoyles. funny poems, ballad poems, sonnets.

Speaker 1 There's dozens and dozens of sonnets by Hardy. He could turn his hand to anything like a good Gothic architect.

Speaker 1 And that creation of poetry was for him, in my belief, a kind of substitute for the loss of belief in God.

Speaker 2 Jane, he wanted to pay attention to the world as it was, and the world as it was then. It was a great deal to do with war.
But can you talk about his war poetry?

Speaker 2 Because I don't think it's very often mentioned.

Speaker 11 No,

Speaker 11 he's not often collected because he wasn't a combatant, so I think people felt that he didn't really experience war.

Speaker 11 But of course, Dorchester was a garrison town and he knew a lot of the people who actually went and died on the fields in South Africa in the two Boer Wars but also in World War I.

Speaker 11 You know, he rubbed shoulders with people who had lost brothers and sons and husbands.

Speaker 11 So he, you know,

Speaker 11 he writes about the people left behind, the people who are dealing with loss.

Speaker 2 The people below history.

Speaker 11 Yes, the people who are not part of history. Gadi said, what are my books but one plea against man's inhumanity to man, woman and the lower animals? And for him, war was an abomination.

Speaker 11 He just couldn't understand. He has a poem called The Sick Battle God.

Speaker 2 It's interesting to compare his drummer with Rupert Brooke, isn't it?

Speaker 11 Oh, indeed, yes.

Speaker 2 How would you do that?

Speaker 11 Well, Hardy is anti-nationalism, he's anti-patriotism, he's anti-empire. We're all part of the great web.

Speaker 11 If you read Transformations, he believes that

Speaker 11 we're all connected, men, women, animals, we're all connected there. And Rupert Brooke's soldier, there is a portion of a foreign field that is forever England.

Speaker 11 Hardy's Drama Hodge, portion of that unknown field, will Hodge forever be. There, you get the difference, I think.

Speaker 11 Drama Hodge is another wonderful, understated, magnificently touching poem.

Speaker 11 It's artfully put next to a poem called A Christmas Ghost Story, where a mouldering soldier says, What's happened to the cause that Christ died for? You know, we're still killing one another.

Speaker 11 And then you get Drama Hodge,

Speaker 11 the way way that human beings can feel unhoused unhomed by by dreadful things like war how can you how can you comprehend the idea of war and drama hodge is unhomed by being um on the south african plain the the stars are foreign the constellations are foreign he doesn't understand them he doesn't recognize patterns and you'll know that hardy's heroes like gabriel oak recognize star patterns they can tell the time of the day they can they can tell the time of the year from the star patterns.

Speaker 11 Hodge doesn't recognise this foreign landscape. And

Speaker 11 yes, he's thrown in, they throw in drummer Hodge

Speaker 11 uncoffined, just as found. As a boy, he is.
As a boy.

Speaker 11 And of course he's Hodge, so he stands for the amalgamation of the rural peasantry that the Victorian middle class like to dump all together as Hodge. Hardy specifies him.
He's a specific person.

Speaker 11 He's also a drummer, so he's not carrying arms, which makes it more poignant. He's leading them into battle.

Speaker 2 And if you read his account of the Napoleonic Wars and the dynasty, I think that the most touching passages there are often to do with those who are thrown out of history, with the English army dying at Walsheren, or the retreating French soldiers dying on the return from Moscow.

Speaker 2 The people whom he calls in another poem, the hurt, misrepresented names who come at each year's brink and cry to history to do them justice or go past them dumb. In this body of work,

Speaker 2 Tim, is there much experimentation?

Speaker 2 There is quite a lot about Hardy that

Speaker 2 could be called experimental.

Speaker 2 One thing is his use of words, his lexicon, which, as all the reviewers noted, included what one reviewer called seeing all the words in the dictionary on one plane.

Speaker 2 So he mixes old and new words, coinages like wistlessness, dialect, jagged syntactic edges. He's also quite surreal sometimes in his imagery.

Speaker 2 One of my favourite images is that of the moon described like a drifting dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave. And he's also, I think, quite exploratory in his topics.

Speaker 2 So he writes a poem on abortion. He writes a poem on what it's like to burn a photo of someone you loved.
He writes about Dorset dialect being

Speaker 2 rather like German in the middle of the war. He writes about Jesus being fathered by a centurion.
So he writes all these poems which are quite transgressive in a way in their subject matter.

Speaker 2 Mark, can you talk a little about the way he compared himself to the great writers?

Speaker 1 He hero-worshipped Shelley and Keats also was someone.

Speaker 2 What Hardy did with Shelley being a baronet?

Speaker 1 Well, Shelley had a pretty lively life and Hardy rather envied his kind of sexual irresponsibility, very different from Hardy's own.

Speaker 2 I don't think we can't escape the fact that Hardy really liked the idea of social mobility being him.

Speaker 1 Hardy's is one of the most astonishing feats of

Speaker 1 upward mobility in the history of the 19th or 20th century that he goes from being the son of a mason to hobnobbing with the aristocracy and dining with the prime minister and being buried in Westminster Abbey or most of him his heart was left in Stinsford and his poetry he always thought of as a higher form of achievement than his novel writing why was he so sure that that was the case that poetry granted immortality because

Speaker 1 in 1861 he got Paul Graves Golden Anthology and that was made by a friend of Tennyson's Paulgrave and he thought this was the book that he wanted to write a poem that would go in a book as good as Palgrave.

Speaker 1 He said that was one of his last, one of his last thoughts was in a notebook, was, I just wanted all my life to have a write a poem that could get into an anthology as good as Palgrave's.

Speaker 1 Well, in the end, he wrote a lot. And he found, he struck a chord with lots of young modern poets as well.

Speaker 1 Tim has mentioned Walter de la Maire, enormous admirer, so was Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas. Robert Frost in America takes a lot of his concept of the speaking voice.

Speaker 2 It takes a lot from him, doesn't he?

Speaker 1 From Hardy, yes, indeed. And then he had a huge influence on subsequent generations of poets.
But the ones I think he aims really high.

Speaker 1 Shakespeare, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning were the poets with whom he felt he could kind of get into the ring.

Speaker 1 At the core of him, there is this an ambition to be a great poet, which runs throughout his life, goes underground while he's a novelist, but it is the central vision of his own destiny that he will be a great poet.

Speaker 11 Well, he had a great influence on the modernist poets and one doesn't always think about that really. I mean Elliot couldn't stand him but Pound was a was a massive fan.

Speaker 11 Auden thought that that he would never have got through from the Tennysonian idea of the Victorianism through to the through to Eliot of the modernism if it hadn't been for Hardy.

Speaker 11 Hardy carried him through or said he was half in love with Hardy. And Pound said no man can read Hardy's poems collected but that his own life, forgotten moments of it, will come back to him.

Speaker 11 A flash here,

Speaker 11 an hour there. Have you a better test of poetry?

Speaker 2 Can we just, as we come towards the end of the programme, go towards one of the things that people reach to him for, his observations of nature.

Speaker 2 What about the darkling thrush?

Speaker 11 Hardy was a great poet of occasion, and he liked to write a poem on New Year's Eve. There are lots of poems written.

Speaker 2 So he would set out New Year's Eve with his notebook and his pencil, looking for a subject.

Speaker 11 It says that New Year's Eve always used to inspire him. Of course, the darkening thrush is the end of the decade, the end of the century, the end of the millennium, and therefore very poignant.

Speaker 11 And in the darkening thrush, I think you have that wonderful undecidability that you get in the voice.

Speaker 11 Depending on your state of mind, you can read the end of that poem, Some Blessed Hope Whereof He Knew and I Was Unaware.

Speaker 11 Positively, this is an aged thrush singing his last song on the bleakest day of the year.

Speaker 2 A very aged thrush.

Speaker 11 A very aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and

Speaker 11 small.

Speaker 11 Thank you, just like Hardy at that time. They resembled one another.

Speaker 11 Is this a great outpouring of hope for the new century? Or is it some blessed hope whereof the narrator simply couldn't see it? I was unaware I couldn't see it.

Speaker 11 And that tension, I think, is what drives that poem forward.

Speaker 2 I think what's particularly interesting is a late sequence of poems he wrote in the 20s, in which he simply observes the natural world.

Speaker 2 Almost nothing happens in them, they're not concluded, and that might include watching a cat in the snow in a London garden, it might include watching birds.

Speaker 2 He was fascinated with birds and wrote dozens of bird poems, some of them are about cage birds, but he saw birds as the way that nature renews himself.

Speaker 2 The song is always the same, the song returns, but it's a different bird.

Speaker 1 It's very much a Darwinian vision of nature, though, isn't it? That one bird is replaced by another bird, and each bird begets a further generation of birds.

Speaker 1 So it is a notion that the world is driven by necessity, and nature is not idealised in Hardy at all.

Speaker 1 It's often terrible weather in Hardy poems, for instance, and it's often things are not particularly pastoral or idyllic at all.

Speaker 1 So it's often a scene which is very recognizable, a kind of muddy field would be the kind of archetypal Hardy nature.

Speaker 1 So it's not that he was romanticising nature in the way in which someone like Wordsworth addresses nature as somehow educating him.

Speaker 1 He sees nature in some ways, as in that poem Neutral Tones, which we discussed, something which is inscrutable. It doesn't mean anything necessarily.

Speaker 1 We happen to be in nature, and we don't know why, and that's our situation.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Jane Thomas, Mark Ford, and Tim Armstrong, and to our studio engineer, John Boland.

Speaker 2 Next week, it's the gold standard, which spread from London around the world from the 1870s and, it's claimed, helped trade flourish. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 12 And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Speaker 2 Did anybody want to read a poem? Do you like to read something?

Speaker 11 Shadow on the Stone, can I read that one?

Speaker 2 Sort of orphic, isn't it, really?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Can you say a little about it before you...

Speaker 11 if you want to it's part of the um

Speaker 11 is it part

Speaker 11 no it's not this is what's interesting about poems 1912 to 13 because they are magnificently structured they're not just outpourings of grief and and he adds three poems to them he takes some away, doesn't he?

Speaker 2 And then he pulls out their logic in later poems.

Speaker 2 So the kind of the Orphic quest comes out.

Speaker 11 That's right.

Speaker 11 This is very much about

Speaker 11 Orpheus and Eurydici, you can see it.

Speaker 11 And it could have been in poems of 1912-13, because the biographicalist would say it's about

Speaker 11 being in the garden, expecting to see Emma with her trowel in the garden, and feeling, sensing her presence. But again, if you've lost someone dear to you, it will speak to you.

Speaker 11 This one one will speak to you.

Speaker 11 I went by the druid stone that broods in the garden white and lone, and I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows that at some moments fall thereon, from the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing, and they shaped, in my imagining, to the shade that a well-known head and shoulders threw there when she was gardening.

Speaker 11 I thought her behind my back, yea, her I long had learnt to lack, and I said, I'm sure you're standing behind me, though how do you get into this old track?

Speaker 11 And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf, as a sad response, and to keep down grief I would not turn my head to discover that there was nothing in my belief.

Speaker 11 Yet I wanted to look and see that nobody stood at the back of me, but I thought once more, nay, I'll not unvision a shape which somehow there may be.

Speaker 11 So I went on softly from the glade, and left her behind me, throwing her shade, as she were indeed an apparition, my head unturned, lest my dream should fade now he began that in 1913 he finished it in 1916 so you can see him working at that idea to get the right expression of it

Speaker 1 i read a short one called the self-unseeing which is about returning to the cottage where he was born in higher bockhampton

Speaker 1 here is the ancient floor footworn and hollowed and thin. Here was the former door where the dead feet walked in.
She sat here in her chair, smiling into the fire.

Speaker 1 He who played stood there, bowing it higher and higher. Childlike I danced in a dream, blessings emblazoned that day.
Everything glowed with a gleam, yet we were looking away.

Speaker 1 It's very characteristic, that poem, always in Hardy, he's just missed the experience.

Speaker 1 He's always writing a poem about an experience that he was unable to experience in the moment in which it happened. So this kind of ghostly poetic recreation of the experience

Speaker 1 comes through self-unseeing, unself-consciousness in the moment, and it then translates into

Speaker 1 a really hypnotic little poem.

Speaker 2 We mentioned that Larkin

Speaker 2 was a great follower of Hardy, but the poet who quotes that poem is in Fact Heaney,

Speaker 2 who took Hardy as someone who could inspire his own localism in his poem The Birthplace. And

Speaker 2 he cites afterwards Hardy's poem as an example of the marvellous rooted in the everyday and calls it a bringing of human existence into a fuller life.

Speaker 2 So I think Heaney's an important inheritor of Hardy too.

Speaker 2 But yes, no, the poem I'll read is another short poem in Time of the Breaking of Nations, which takes its origin from Jeremiah.

Speaker 2 As with many of his poems, it's about, in a sense, re-hearing or re-experiencing a psalm or a fragment of the Bible, and it suddenly blossoming into meaning in the way that Mark has suggested.

Speaker 2 So only a man harrowing clods in a slow, silent walk, with an old horse that stumbles and nods, half asleep as they stalk.

Speaker 2 Only thin smoke without flame from the heaps of cooch grass. Yet this will go on with the same, though dynasties pass.

Speaker 2 Yonder, a maid in her white, come whispering by.

Speaker 2 War's annals will cloud into night ere their story die.

Speaker 2 1915.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Was actually inspired by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He was in Cornwall and he saw this horse harrowing the field.

Speaker 1 And then thirty-five years later, the image resurfaces and he he applies it to the First World War.

Speaker 2 Yes, and he's probably also remembering the the volcano-like smoke of cooch grass in his own novel, Desperate Remedies, and other traces.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's the interesting thing also about

Speaker 2 his trip to Cornwall.

Speaker 2 Not only is he remembering, but he's carrying with him, I think, his own romance novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which he had written about Emma, effectively, in those landscapes, though he'd given it a tragic ending within his death.

Speaker 11 He rehearses it all in the well-beloved. Yes.
You know, it's all there in the well-beloved, way before Emma dies.

Speaker 2 But we're mentioning that his own texts are coming back to Haunted. him.
Absolutely.

Speaker 11 Pound again saw the poems as a distillation of all his novels. You know, he said, oh, there's the harvest of having written so many novels.
So Pound saw a connection between the two careers.

Speaker 11 I wanted just to say this, because everybody thinks about Hardy as being a miserable writer and, you know, depressing.

Speaker 11 But it was Larkin who said, deprivation is to me what daffodils are to Wordsworth. And we said that Hardy is the great poet of loss and desire and and yearning.

Speaker 11 I just wanted to quote Florence Hardy talking to Sidney Cockerall in 1920. It's about the mummers that Christmas time had just been, and Hardy had enjoyed the mummers' visit.

Speaker 11 And she said, He is now, this is Hardy, he is now this afternoon writing a poem with great spirit, always a sign of well-being with him. Needless to say, it is an intensely dismal poem.

Speaker 2 It can be very funny. I mean, and we'll end on this note.
The ruined maid is very funny. You ain't been ruined, said she, this

Speaker 2 challenge, this girl who'd left the town and

Speaker 2 been,

Speaker 2 her eyes, her hands were blue from peeling spuds and all the rest. And she ends up in London.

Speaker 2 She's met by a friend who, and she's in fine feathers and she's got a great, lovely dress and all the rest of it. Because she's been ruined.

Speaker 11 Some polish is gained with one's ruin, says she. I mean, he's there for the pragmatist, isn't he?

Speaker 11 I mean, even in something like the man he killed, you know, he says, well, I'm sure the man he killed was just the same.

Speaker 11 He'd just sold up his traps, he'd taken the king's shilling, he was after a better life. And here is the Ruined Maid doing the same and being met with great envy.

Speaker 11 It's, again, I think it's a very risky poem, as you were saying, Mark.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it comes out of his going to the music hall. It's got a music hall poem in some ways.

Speaker 1 The ruined maid was a feature in Victorian music.

Speaker 11 Imagine it on the music hall stage.

Speaker 1 It was actually done by Elsa Lanchester, and she did a music hall kind of routine.

Speaker 1 But if you compare it with his depiction of Tess after Angel finds her in the boarding house

Speaker 1 as a ruined maid, as a courtesan, and you know,

Speaker 1 Angel is completely, and Hardy himself is completely aghast at the tragedy of Tess. But here's the other side of it, turning it into a comic tone.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you all very much indeed. That was terrific.

Speaker 10 In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by me, Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production.

Speaker 5 Can you speak for 60 seconds on the time I went to Sue Perkins' birthday party, starting now?

Speaker 2 I wasn't invited.

Speaker 13 Sue Perkins returns with the one-minute speaking challenge.

Speaker 2 That was the start of my secret journey into the chasm of art.

Speaker 2 What is he talking about?

Speaker 13 With panelists, including Stephen Mangan, Patterson Joseph, and Zoe Lyons.

Speaker 1 I was only once invited to Sue Perkins.

Speaker 2 Oh, aren't you lucky?

Speaker 13 The new series of Just a Minute from BBC Radio 4.

Speaker 10 It's all quite bitter, isn't it?

Speaker 2 Welcome to the game. Oh, yeah, sorry.

Speaker 13 Listen now on BBC Sounds.

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