Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses

Thomas Hardy

Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses

APOLOGY

About half the verses that follow were written quite lately. The rest are older, having been held over in MS. when past volumes were published, on considering that these would contain a sufficient number of pages to offer readers at one time, more especially during the distractions of the war. The unusually far back poems to be found here are, however, but some that were overlooked in gathering previous collections. A freshness in them, now unattainable, seemed to make up for their inexperience and to justify their inclusion. A few are dated; the dates of others are not discoverable.

The launching of a volume of this kind in neo-Georgian days by one who began writing in mid-Victorian, and has published nothing to speak of for some years, may seem to call for a few words of excuse or explanation. Whether or no, readers may feel assured that a new book is submitted to them with great hesitation at so belated a date. Insistent practical reasons, however, among which were requests from some illustrious men of letters who are in sympathy with my productions, the accident that several of the poems have already seen the light, and that dozens of them have been lying about for years, compelled the course adopted, in spite of the natural disinclination of a writer whose works have been so frequently regarded askance by a pragmatic section here and there, to draw attention to them once more.

I do not know that it is necessary to say much on the contents of the book, even in deference to suggestions that will be mentioned presently. I believe that those readers who care for my poems at all – readers to whom no passport is required – will care for this new instalment of them, perhaps the last, as much as for any that have preceded them. Moreover, in the eyes of a less friendly class the pieces, though a very mixed collection indeed, contain, so far as I am able to see, little or nothing in technic or teaching that can be considered a Star-Chamber matter, or so much as agitating to a ladies’ school; even though, to use Wordsworth’s observation in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, such readers may suppose “that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association: that he not only thus apprises the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded.”

It is true, nevertheless, that some grave, positive, stark, delineations are interspersed among those of the passive, lighter, and traditional sort presumably nearer to stereotyped tastes. For – while I am quite aware that a thinker is not expected, and, indeed, is scarcely allowed, now more than heretofore, to state all that crosses his mind concerning existence in this universe, in his attempts to explain or excuse the presence of evil and the incongruity of penalizing the irresponsible – it must be obvious to open intelligences that, without denying the beauty and faithful service of certain venerable cults, such disallowance of “obstinate questionings” and “blank misgivings” tends to a paralysed intellectual stalemate. Heine observed nearly a hundred years ago that the soul has her eternal rights; that she will not be darkened by statutes, nor lullabied by the music of bells. And what is to-day, in allusions to the present author’s pages, alleged to be “pessimism” is, in truth, only such “questionings” in the exploration of reality, and is the first step towards the soul’s betterment, and the body’s also.

If I may be forgiven for quoting my own old words, let me repeat what I printed in this relation more than twenty years ago, and wrote much earlier, in a poem entitled “In Tenebris”:

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst:

that is to say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation possible: briefly, evolutionary meliorism. But it is called pessimism nevertheless; under which word, expressed with condemnatory emphasis, it is regarded by many as some pernicious new thing (though so old as to underlie the Christian idea, and even to permeate the Greek drama); and the subject is charitably left to decent silence, as if further comment were needless.

Happily there are some who feel such Levitical passing-by to be, alas, by no means a permanent dismissal of the matter; that comment on where the world stands is very much the reverse of needless in these disordered years of our prematurely afflicted century: that amendment and not madness lies that way. And looking down the future these few hold fast to the same: that whether the human and kindred animal races survive till the exhaustion or destruction of the globe, or whether these races perish and are succeeded by others before that conclusion comes, pain to all upon it, tongued or dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum by lovingkindness, operating through scientific knowledge, and actuated by the modicum of free will conjecturally possessed by organic life when the mighty necessitating forces – unconscious or other – that have “the balancings of the clouds,” happen to be in equilibrium, which may or may not be often.

To conclude this question I may add that the argument of the so-called optimists is neatly summarized in a stern pronouncement against me by my friend Mr. Frederic Harrison in a late essay of his, in the words: “This view of life is not mine.” The solemn declaration does not seem to me to be so annihilating to the said “view” (really a series of fugitive impressions which I have never tried to co-ordinate) as is complacently assumed. Surely it embodies a too human fallacy quite familiar in logic. Next, a knowing reviewer, apparently a Roman Catholic young man, speaks, with some rather gross instances of the suggestio falsi in his article, of “Mr. Hardy refusing consolation,” the “dark gravity of his ideas,” and so on. When a Positivist and a Catholic agree there must be something wonderful in it, which should make a poet sit up. But.. O that ’twere possible!

I would not have alluded in this place or anywhere else to such casual personal criticisms – for casual and unreflecting they must be – but for the satisfaction of two or three friends in whose opinion a short answer was deemed desirable, on account of the continual repetition of these criticisms, or more precisely, quizzings. After all, the serious and truly literary inquiry in this connection is: Should a shaper of such stuff as dreams are made on disregard considerations of what is customary and expected, and apply himself to the real function of poetry, the application of ideas to life (in Matthew Arnold’s familiar phrase)? This bears more particularly on what has been called the “philosophy” of these poems – usually reproved as “queer.” Whoever the author may be that undertakes such application of ideas in this “philosophic” direction – where it is specially required – glacial judgments must inevitably fall upon him amid opinion whose arbiters largely decry individuality, to whom ideas are oddities to smile at, who are moved by a yearning the reverse of that of the Athenian inquirers on Mars Hill; and stiffen their features not only at sound of a new thing, but at a restatement of old things in new terms. Hence should anything of this sort in the following adumbrations seem “queer” – should any of them seem to good Panglossians to embody strange and disrespectful conceptions of this best of all possible worlds, I apologize; but cannot help it.

Such divergences, which, though piquant for the nonce, it would be affectation to say are not saddening and discouraging likewise, may, to be sure, arise sometimes from superficial aspect only, writer and reader seeing the same thing at different angles. But in palpable cases of divergence they arise, as already said, whenever a serious effort is made towards that which the authority I have cited – who would now be called old-fashioned, possibly even parochial – affirmed to be what no good critic could deny as the poet’s province, the application of ideas to life. One might shrewdly guess, by the by, that in such recommendation the famous writer may have overlooked the cold-shouldering results upon an enthusiastic disciple that would be pretty certain to follow his putting the high aim in practice, and have forgotten the disconcerting experience of Gil Blas with the Archbishop.

To add a few more words to what has already taken up too many, there is a contingency liable to miscellanies of verse that I have never seen mentioned, so far as I can remember; I mean the chance little shocks that may be caused over a book of various character like the present and its predecessors by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant, effusions; poems perhaps years apart in the making, yet facing each other. An odd result of this has been that dramatic anecdotes of a satirical and humorous intention (such, e. g., as “Royal Sponsors”) following verse in graver voice, have been read as misfires because they raise the smile that they were intended to raise, the journalist, deaf to the sudden change of key, being unconscious that he is laughing with the author and not at him. I admit that I did not foresee such contingencies as I ought to have done, and that people might not perceive when the tone altered. But the difficulties of arranging the themes in a graduated kinship of moods would have been so great that irrelation was almost unavoidable with efforts so diverse. I must trust for right note-catching to those finely-touched spirits who can divine without half a whisper, whose intuitiveness is proof against all the accidents of inconsequence. In respect of the less alert, however, should any one’s train of thought be thrown out of gear by a consecutive piping of vocal reeds in jarring tonics, without a semiquaver’s rest between, and be led thereby to miss the writer’s aim and meaning in one out of two contiguous compositions, I shall deeply regret it.

Having at last, I think, finished with the personal points that I was recommended to notice, I will forsake the immediate object of this Preface; and, leaving Late Lyrics to whatever fate it deserves, digress for a few moments to more general considerations. The thoughts of any man of letters concerned to keep poetry alive cannot but run uncomfortably on the precarious prospects of English verse at the present day. Verily the hazards and casualties surrounding the birth and setting forth of almost every modern creation in numbers are ominously like those of one of Shelley’s paper-boats on a windy lake. And a forward conjecture scarcely permits the hope of a better time, unless men’s tendencies should change. So indeed of all art, literature, and “high thinking” nowadays. Whether owing to the barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, “a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” (to quote Wordsworth again), or from any other cause, we seem threatened with a new Dark Age.

I formerly thought, like so many roughly handled writers, that so far as literature was concerned a partial cause might be impotent or mischievous criticism; the satirizing of individuality, the lack of whole-seeing in contemporary estimates of poetry and kindred work, the knowingness affected by junior reviewers, the overgrowth of meticulousness in their peerings for an opinion, as if it were a cultivated habit in them to scrutinize the tool-marks and be blind to the building, to hearken for the key-creaks and be deaf to the diapason, to judge the landscape by a nocturnal exploration with a flash-lantern. In other words, to carry on the old game of sampling the poem or drama by quoting the worst line or worst passage only, in ignorance or not of Coleridge’s proof that a versification of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry; of reading meanings into a book that its author never dreamt of writing there. I might go on interminably.

But I do not now think any such temporary obstructions to be the cause of the hazard, for these negligences and ignorances, though they may have stifled a few true poets in the run of generations, disperse like stricken leaves before the wind of next week, and are no more heard of again in the region of letters than their writers themselves. No: we may be convinced that something of the deeper sort mentioned must be the cause.

In any event poetry, pure literature in general, religion – I include religion because poetry and religion touch each other, or rather modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the same thing – these, I say, the visible signs of mental and emotional life, must like all other things keep moving, becoming; even though at present, when belief in witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and “the truth that shall make you free,” men’s minds appear, as above noted, to be moving backwards rather than on. I speak, of course, somewhat sweepingly, and should except many isolated minds; also the minds of men in certain worthy but small bodies of various denominations, and perhaps in the homely quarter where advance might have been the very least expected a few years back – the English Church – if one reads it rightly as showing evidence of “removing those things that are shaken,” in accordance with the wise Epistolary recommendation to the Hebrews. For since the historic and once august hierarchy of Rome some generation ago lost its chance of being the religion of the future by doing otherwise, and throwing over the little band of neo-Catholics who were making a struggle for continuity by applying the principle of evolution to their own faith, joining hands with modern science, and outflanking the hesitating English instinct towards liturgical reform (a flank march which I at the time quite expected to witness, with the gathering of many millions of waiting agnostics into its fold); since then, one may ask, what other purely English establishment than the Church, of sufficient dignity and footing, and with such strength of old association, such architectural spell, is left in this country to keep the shreds of morality together?

It may be a forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish, and complete rationality, which must come, unless also the world is to perish, by means of the interfusing effect of poetry – “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression of science,” as it was defined by an English poet who was quite orthodox in his ideas. But if it be true, as Comte argued, that advance is never in a straight line, but in a looped orbit, we may, in the aforesaid ominous moving backward, be doing it pour mieux sauter, drawing back for a spring. I repeat that I forlornly hope so, notwithstanding the supercilious regard of hope by Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and other philosophers down to Einstein who have my respect. But one dares not prophesy. Physical, chronological, and other contingencies keep me in these days from critical studies and literary circles

Where once we held debate, a band

Of youthful friends, on mind and art

(if one may quote Tennyson in this century of free verse). Hence I cannot know how things are going so well as I used to know them, and the aforesaid limitations must quite prevent my knowing hence-forward.

I have to thank the editors and owners of The Times, Fortnightly, Mercury, and other periodicals in which a few of the poems have appeared for kindly assenting to their being reclaimed for collected publication.

T. H February 1922.

WEATHERS

IThis is the weather the cuckoo likes,And so do I;When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,And nestlings fly:And the little brown nightingale bills his best,And they sit outside at “The Travellers’ Rest,”And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,And citizens dream of the south and west,And so do I.IIThis is the weather the shepherd shuns,And so do I;When beeches drip in browns and duns,And thresh, and ply;And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,And meadow rivulets overflow,And drops on gate-bars hang in a row,And rooks in families homeward go,And so do I.

THE MAID OF KEINTON MANDEVILLE

(A TRIBUTE TO SIR H. BISHOP)

I hear that maiden stillOf Keinton MandevilleSinging, in flights that playedAs wind-wafts through us all,Till they made our mood a thrallTo their aery rise and fall,   “Should he upbraid.”Rose-necked, in sky-gray gown,From a stage in Stower TownDid she sing, and singing smileAs she blent that dexterous voiceWith the ditty of her choice,And banished our annoys   Thereawhile.One with such song had powerTo wing the heaviest hourOf him who housed with her.Who did I never knewWhen her spoused estate ondrew,And her warble flung its woo   In his ear.Ah, she’s a beldame now,Time-trenched on cheek and brow,Whom I once heard as a maidFrom Keinton MandevilleOf matchless scope and skillSing, with smile and swell and trill,   “Should he upbraid!”1915 or 1916.

SUMMER SCHEMES

When friendly summer calls again,      Calls againHer little fifers to these hills,We’ll go – we two – to that arched faneOf leafage where they prime their billsBefore they start to flood the plainWith quavers, minims, shakes, and trills.   “ – We’ll go,” I sing; but who shall say   What may not chance before that day!And we shall see the waters spring,      Waters springFrom chinks the scrubby copses crown;And we shall trace their oncreepingTo where the cascade tumbles downAnd sends the bobbing growths aswing,And ferns not quite but almost drown.   “ – We shall,” I say; but who may sing   Of what another moon will bring!

EPEISODIA

IPast the hills that peepWhere the leaze is smiling,On and on beguilingCrisply-cropping sheep;Under boughs of brushwoodLinking tree and treeIn a shade of lushwood,   There caressed we!IIHemmed by city wallsThat outshut the sunlight,In a foggy dun light,Where the footstep fallsWith a pit-pat wearisomeIn its cadencyOn the flagstones drearisome   There pressed we!IIIWhere in wild-winged crowdsBlown birds show their whitenessUp against the lightnessOf the clammy clouds;By the random riverPushing to the sea,Under bents that quiver   There rest we.

FAINTHEART IN A RAILWAY TRAIN

At nine in the morning there passed a church,At ten there passed me by the sea,At twelve a town of smoke and smirch,At two a forest of oak and birch,   And then, on a platform, she:A radiant stranger, who saw not me.I queried, “Get out to her do I dare?”But I kept my seat in my search for a plea,And the wheels moved on. O could it but be   That I had alighted there!

AT MOONRISE AND ONWARDS

      I thought you a fire   On Heron-Plantation Hill,Dealing out mischief the most dire   To the chattels of men of hire      There in their vill.      But by and by   You turned a yellow-green,Like a large glow-worm in the sky;   And then I could descry      Your mood and mien.      How well I know   Your furtive feminine shape!As if reluctantly you show   You nude of cloud, and but by favour throw      Aside its drape.      – How many a year   Have you kept pace with me,Wan Woman of the waste up there,   Behind a hedge, or the bare      Bough of a tree!      No novelty are you,   O Lady of all my time,Veering unbid into my view   Whether I near Death’s mew,      Or Life’s top cyme!

THE GARDEN SEAT

Its former green is blue and thin,And its once firm legs sink in and in;Soon it will break down unaware,Soon it will break down unaware.At night when reddest flowers are blackThose who once sat thereon come back;Quite a row of them sitting there,Quite a row of them sitting there.With them the seat does not break down,Nor winter freeze them, nor floods drown,For they are as light as upper air,They are as light as upper air!

BARTHÉLÉMON AT VAUXHALL

François Hippolite Barthélémon, first-fiddler at Vauxhall Gardens, composed what was probably the most popular morning hymn-tune ever written. It was formerly sung, full-voiced, every Sunday in most churches, to Bishop Ken’s words, but is now seldom heard.

He said: “Awake my soul, and with the sun,”.And paused upon the bridge, his eyes due east,Where was emerging like a full-robed priestThe irradiate globe that vouched the dark as done.It lit his face – the weary face of oneWho in the adjacent gardens charged his string,Nightly, with many a tuneful tender thing,Till stars were weak, and dancing hours outrun.And then were threads of matin music spunIn trial tones as he pursued his way:“This is a morn,” he murmured, “well begun:This strain to Ken will count when I am clay!”And count it did; till, caught by echoing lyres,It spread to galleried naves and mighty quires.

“I SOMETIMES THINK”

(FOR F. E. H.)

I sometimes think as here I sit   Of things I have done,Which seemed in doing not unfit   To face the sun:Yet never a soul has paused a whit   On such – not one.There was that eager strenuous press   To sow good seed;There was that saving from distress   In the nick of need;There were those words in the wilderness:   Who cared to heed?Yet can this be full true, or no?   For one did care,And, spiriting into my house, to, fro,   Like wind on the stair,Cares still, heeds all, and will, even though   I may despair.

JEZREEL

ON ITS SEIZURE BY THE ENGLISH UNDER ALLENBY, SEPTEMBER 1918

Did they catch as it were in a Vision at shut of the day —When their cavalry smote through the ancient Esdraelon Plain,And they crossed where the Tishbite stood forth in his enemy’s way —His gaunt mournful Shade as he bade the King haste off amain?On war-men at this end of time – even on Englishmen’s eyes —Who slay with their arms of new might in that long-ago place,Flashed he who drove furiously?.. Ah, did the phantom ariseOf that queen, of that proud Tyrian woman who painted her face?Faintly marked they the words “Throw her down!” rise from Night eerily,Spectre-spots of the blood of her body on some rotten wall?And the thin note of pity that came: “A King’s daughter is she,”As they passed where she trodden was once by the chargers’ footfall?Could such be the hauntings of men of to-day, at the ceaseOf pursuit, at the dusk-hour, ere slumber their senses could seal?Enghosted seers, kings – one on horseback who asked “Is it peace?”.Yea, strange things and spectral may men have beheld in Jezreel! September 24, 1918.

A JOG-TROT PAIR

   Who were the twain that trod this track      So many times together         Hither and back,In spells of certain and uncertain weather?   Commonplace in conduct they      Who wandered to and fro here         Day by day:Two that few dwellers troubled themselves to know here.   The very gravel-path was prim      That daily they would follow:         Borders trim:Never a wayward sprout, or hump, or hollow.   Trite usages in tamest style      Had tended to their plighting.         “It’s just worth while,Perhaps,” they had said.  “And saves much sad good-nighting.”   And petty seemed the happenings      That ministered to their joyance:         Simple things,Onerous to satiate souls, increased their buoyance.   Who could those common people be,      Of days the plainest, barest?         They were we;Yes; happier than the cleverest, smartest, rarest.

“THE CURTAINS NOW ARE DRAWN”

(SONG)

I   The curtains now are drawn,   And the spindrift strikes the glass,   Blown up the jagged pass   By the surly salt sou’-west,   And the sneering glare is gone   Behind the yonder crest,      While she sings to me:“O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,And death may come, but loving is divine.”II   I stand here in the rain,   With its smite upon her stone,   And the grasses that have grown   Over women, children, men,   And their texts that “Life is vain”;   But I hear the notes as when      Once she sang to me:“O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,And death may come, but loving is divine.”1913.

“ACCORDING TO THE MIGHTY WORKING”

IWhen moiling seems at cease   In the vague void of night-time,   And heaven’s wide roomage stormless   Between the dusk and light-time,   And fear at last is formless,We call the allurement Peace.IIPeace, this hid riot, Change,   This revel of quick-cued mumming,   This never truly being,   This evermore becoming,   This spinner’s wheel onfleeingOutside perception’s range.1917.