Thomas Hardy

by Thomas Hardy

This is the third volume of a new series of publications by Delphi Classics, the best-selling publisher of classical works. Many poetry collections are often poorly formatted and difficult to read on eReaders. The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature's finest poets, with superior formatting. This volume presents the complete poetical works of Thomas Hardy, with beautiful illustrations and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version: 1)

* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Hardy's life and works
* Concise introductions to the poetry and other works
* Images of how the poetry books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts
* Excellent formatting of the poems
* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry
* Easily locate the poems you want to read
* Features the two biographies written by the poet’s second wife- discover Hardy's literary life
* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres

CONTENTS:

The Poetry Collections
WESSEX POEMS AND OTHER VERSES
POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
TIME’S LAUGHINGSTOCKS AND OTHER VERSES
SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE
MOMENTS OF VISION AND MISCELLANEOUS VERSES
LATE LYRICS AND EARLIER WITH MANY OTHER VERSES
HUMAN SHOWS FAR PHANTASIES SONGS, AND TRIFLES
WINTER WORDS IN VARIOUS MOODS AND METRES

The Poems
LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Biographies
THE EARLY LIFE OF THOMAS HARDY, 1841–1891 by Florence Hardy
THE LATER YEARS OF THOMAS HARDY, 1892–1928 by Florence Hardy

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction

2647 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 31, 1977

About the author

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.

The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Gonzo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomas Hardy stands in the middle ground of many contrary impulses. He was a realist and pessimist, which drove him towards conservatism, yet he was enough of a malcontent to disbelieve in progress. His work adheres to the forms of the past, and the beauty of his prose is improved by this dependence, but his outlook of art proves that such beauty is staring at the precipice of modernism. He was conservative in his pessimism, though misanthropy and disgust of modernity seemed to drive him towards progressivism—though once again, the realist in him would not let any form of Utopia appear anywhere near the vicinity of Wessex. Such misanthropy typically breeds a rancid creature, like Gibbon, Nietzsche, or Henry James, and yet Hardy is not rancid. His best work hovers in an uneasy state between the vivacity and splendor of a Dickens novel and the cold morality of a Greek tragedy, failing to reconcile these forms all the while.

And occupying this middle ground between progress and reaction, endurance and despair, it is hard not to feel Hardy that Hardy is the artist of eternal discomfiture, and that his work suffers for being so. Everything Hardy did suffers in comparison to other work, and this fact particularly sticks out in The Portable Thomas Hardy. We start with shorter tales. Hawthorne’s work strikes me as the best comparison to these short works. Both Hardy and Hawthorne deal with the mystical, deal in great coincidences, deal in the stifling nature of rural life and the even-more-terrifying prospect of this life changing.

“Interlopers at the Knap” is a story of strange meetings and strange coincidence. “The Withered Hand” is a revenge story steeped in the occult. “A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork” is more like a travel document than a story. All these tales suffer in comparison to Hawthorne’s work. “Ethan Brand” and “The Ambitious Strange” better deal with the effects of coincidence and fate. “The Birthmark” better deals with depraved human emotions and the supernatural. Hawthorne’s travel writing is usually more perceptive and intriguing than Hardy’s.

Why are Hawthorne’s stories better? Hawthorne wrote short pieces in response to nuggets of ideas and truth. A story like “The Birthmark” or “The Artist and the Beautiful” blended the themes of sensual pleasure, fidelity, technology, and the supernatural, all while making profound statements on each topic. Hawthorne was a man with a philosophy. Hardy only has tales.

Nonetheless, Hardy is a greater storyteller than Hawthorne, and when we begin to compare novels, we must leave the Salemite behind. When it comes to telling a story, Hardy has few peers. He is more fluent with metaphors and scenes than, say, George Eliot or the Brontes. He is more realistic than Dickens, and it would be hard for anyone to argue, beyond preferences, than Hardy’s prose is less serviceable than any compatriot or peer.

The novel included in this volume, The Mayor of Casterbridge, is one of his best, but also shows most clearly Hardy’s manifest flaws. Everything about the novel is beautifully structured and paced. The shaggy-dog nature of Dickens’s novels is not evident here, and in terms of pure aesthetics, the construction of this novel is about as great as can be imagined. Henchard’s state of mind is brilliantly conveyed through the action of the novel. But these two competing strains--the finely-crafted tale and the psychological portrait--do not create the cohesive tragedy Hardy wants. In the end, Hardy cannot support the structure of his tales.

For all the hullabaloo about Hardy's penchant for tragedy, he seems to misunderstand the form's most important characteristics. For one, tragedies have a hero--the story of a fallen hero is nothing without the hero! Not only must there be a hero, and must this hero fall, but the hero must fall through his own hubris, his own doing, his own tragic flaw. Oedipus’ fate is the most representative of all tragedy because his was so simple. The good king, because of only one impulse—his pride—was given comeuppance by the gods. In a similar way, Othello fell because of his possessiveness, Lear from his foolishness and wantonness, Coriolanus because of his pride. However psychologically complex these Shakespearean heroes were, their downfalls all came about for simple reasons; if it was not the gods which punished them, it was the order of the world. From the time these characters succumbed to hubris, they were doomed.

Nothing about Henchard’s fate is inevitable. One never gets the impression that the gods wish to spite him, or that the gods could even fathom where to start. Henchard does not have one tragic flaw, but many. At times he is envious, avaricious, illogical, and vindictive. From the standpoint of a modern novel this is no fault—we expect such inconsistency from our protagonists, and the fact that Hardy still keeps us in Henchard’s good favor is a credit to the author’s skills at characterization. The problem is that this method fails as tragedy. Henchard is not a good man with one tragic flaw; Henchard is not really a good man, and his flaws themselves are the gods which punish him. Henchard’s fate is sad because we care for Henchard, for whatever his flaws, but we cannot learn anything from him except that we should not be like Henchard.

It is slightly different for Tess Durbeyville and Jude. Unlike Henchard, these characters are good people who meet sad ends due to forces outside their own control. The spiteful gods in their tales are not all psychological, as with Henchard. Rather, as were Dickens's characters, they are weighed by the gods social. The corrupt institutions of marriage and the academy lead to Jude’s downfall. The corrupt silence and hypocrisy of rural life leads to Tess’s. However sympathetic Tess and Jude are as characters, there is seemingly nothing that could have averted their downfalls. For Hardy it is always Society—or even more accurately, the Nature of Things—is cause of human’s downfall.
So perhaps it is “Society” that is the true character in Hardy’s tales—for Hardy’s work to succeed as tragedies, it must be. The order of the world itself--not the gods, but God--is the culprit.

The natural response to this is to show the faults of Society and show how it may be changed so such tragedy might be averted. But Hardy has no desire to do this. He is too much of a pessimist to believe that society can be changed, or at least too craven to follow through on where his pseudo-tragedies should lead him. There is nothing wrong with writing encomiums against society. Dickens, too, wrote novels against Society, attacking debtors’ prisons and utilitarian economics; but he was wise enough to follow Coleridge’s dictum, “What Nature makes thee mourn, she bids thee mend!” Rubbing the reader’s nose in the ineluctable misery of human existence is only bearable—is only meaningful—when we first know the smell of existence’s roses, or have expectation of them. Hardy gives us whiffs of the first in his lovely prose, but no hints of the latter. If Society really is the cause of tragedy, it is not propertly represented in Hardy’s works. In a very basic, fundamental way his works fail as tragedy. Put simply, if Society is beyond amendment, if human nature is beyond redemption, there can be no real tragedy. There is no human flaw in play; reality itself is the flaw. And so there can only be mire and disgust, and revulsion with our lot. This is what we get from Hardy’s works.

Let’s return to Lear. The conclusion of Lear’s tragedy is far more severe than his hubris deserves. Shakespeare suggests in it not only a fault in Lear, but a fault in the order of the universe which would have the innocent Coredelia murdered so soon before she and Lear might forever sing like birds in their captivity. Rancidity rules in Lear’s England, and it is scarcely endurable—no other work of art comes anywhere near matching it.

In comparison, Hardy is merely a malcontent. He hasn’t the power to really lay bare the true injustice of the universe—few of us do! In comparison, Hardy is merely a very talented writer of social novels. Jude’s plight suggests the institution of marriage could use reform. So reform them! Perhaps Hardy would be interested to know the West’s current rates of illegimacy. Tess is a very talented novel about women’s liberation—if only Hardy could see modernity’s ugly freedom.
One is awed by Hardy’s power as a writer, but one quickly forgets his themes—perhaps because we are living in the nightmare world where the sources of his meager tragedies are no longer around to cause us pain. His novels have little to teach us. Nothing about morality, little about institutions—something about character, but when characters cling to no notions of morality, one character is little different from the seven billion which populate the earth alongside him.

Perhaps Hardy can be seen as a further step in the English novel becoming Frenchified. The beautiful nothingness of Flaubert is seen in germ-form in Hardy. The scaffolding of classical tragedy still seems erected around Hardy’s work, but it really supports no edifice. Inside is the chaotic amalgam of modernism, broken free from all consistency with the past, living as “art for art’s sake.”

Hardy’s best work is his poetry. The false scaffolding of his stories and novels is unnecessary here.

When I look forth at dawning, pool,
Field, flock, and lonely tree,
All seem to gaze at me
Like chastened children sitting silently in a school

As Julian Moynahan notes in his introduction, Hardy likely would have found a place in the clergy had not Darwin exploded his conception of the world. Hardy is the artist of Darwin. It is a great irony that Darwin, the prophet of ordered change, should have inspired so many writers and academics into dull stasis. Hardy has read Darwin, but seems not to have …the eon-long animal journey from sludge to Casterbridge has no significance to him, nor, seemingly, does the quality of the two locales! We are merely thinking and feeling amoebae in the sludge of our metropolii.
But see also how phony this low regard is! In fact, this is the height of human egoism—that Nature herself must conform to our own reflections of ourselves lest we fail to appreciate them! Certainly a peculiar result from those who insist on calling humans little different from amoebae and our simian ancestors.

What joys they’ve found I cannot find
Abides a mystery.

The new mode of despair can’t even muster up true despair. For the gods to abandon you, you must first have gods. Pessimism and realism are both assets to those who have ideals. For those without ideals, they become an end unto themselves, an obsession. And so Hardy's pessimism consumes him. For all his talents, Hardy is trapped, like Tess and Henchard and Jude, by what he ineluctably is; in contrast, only Hardy's perspective need change in order to free his characters and readers from the morass he has trapped them in.

This is ultimately what I took away from Hardy. One can imagine him existing in another age, where cynicism allowed him to take his artistic abilities to the heights of Splendor and tell us what he saw there. Instead, Darwinian pessimism abounds. Hardy's faults are deeper than his heights, and we are left to stare out across this span, imagining the landscape that might have been.

[Jon Margetts · Rating 4 out of 5]

In many ways, Hardy is the Wessex Wordsworth. Like the Lake Poet, Hardy has a talent for telling the stories and lives of the common folk around him, be an abbey mason, a trampwoman, or a young boy playing violin to a convict at a railway station. He captures the lyrical nature of their everyday vernacular and, often, transforms the seemingly quotidian into meaningful critiques of Victorian society. In “The Trampwoman’s Tragedy”, a young, coquettish lady walks day and night through brier and bush, resting at warm inns with her loved one. She toys with her loved one: “jeering John” is made out to be the father of her unborn child, and what is should be a harmless tease turns into murder, gallows and emotional and material destitution for the protagonist as she lies dying on a heath. Hardy doesn’t openly attack the constricting institutional prejudice which allows poverty and social ostracization (presumably, the woman and her loved one are out of wedlock) to occur, but merely presents the narrative for us to observe and reflect upon. The lack of explicit, Wordsworth-esque philosophical musing allows for more politically pointed poetry.

Much of the poetry in this short anthology concerns itself with death. Hardy is notorious for his gloomy and pessimistic novels, and upon eschewing that form for poetry in the late 19th century, his gloom doesn’t leave him. Be it in a railway station observing two lovers depart from each other forever, or leaning on a “coppice gate”, reading the “corpse” of the last century into his dark surroundings, much of Hardy’s observations occur within a kind of halfway house between life and death, hope and dismay. Not often enough, I feel, does he strike optimistic messages. Hardy’s inheritance from Wordsworth often manifests itself in self-centred, almost self-pitying resolutions. In the “Darkling Thrush”, for example, he notices the joyful “carolings” of a bird flinging its soul onto a bleak landscape, and only reflects that he knows not the “hope” that bird might know. In “He Resolves to Say No More”, the speaker literally does just that – although admittedly his stubbornness to potentially reveal what lies beyond death is tempered by his reluctance to bear ill will to a mankind already stuffed with concern. In “Death Divided”, Hardy’s egotism returns: he somewhat lays bare the notion that no one in society will know of his connection with his first wife, Emma Gifford, who was just recently deceased upon the time of composition. There is no mourning here, just flat recognition that he’ll be laid to rest elsewhere. He probably couldn’t wait to get away from her.

That poem, written in the last 19th century, makes a distinct contrast to the sequence of poems written from 1912-13 when Hardy revisited Cornwall and actively grieved through composition the passing of Gifford. On one hand, this makes for astonishingly moving lyricism. One of the Hardy’s most painfully moving (and famous) poems is The Voice. In his repetition of “how you call to me, call to me”, there is little within him that can be associated with the staid, reserved Victorian gentleman at the turn of the century. His naked heart opens and looks to hear his first wife’s voice (he remarried shortly after composing the sequence) again and again. She calls to him, and he begs that she calls him further. Or, her voice “haunts” him, the constant calling a disorientating echo as the poet struggles to move on and find closure.

Yet, Hardy problematises his grieving by acting as a ventriloquist for Gifford by using her voice in a couple of poems in this sequence, not to mention as active speech throughout. One feels that it’s a bit too late for that, for it is was within his means to comfort her in her life, and he failed to do so. Hardy also fails to make the explicit link between his neglect (although he doesn’t acknowledge it) and the outcomes she suffered. He feels no remorse for her, but the pang of his loss. His ventriloquism of Gifford, then, only serves to ameliorate his own emotional welfare. But perhaps that is the point – we are meant to observe a poet adorned in pride, unable to digest his grief, and feel frustration for the society which thrust him into this position.

Annoyingly, in this anthology, Hardy’s poetry seems to decay in quality after this famous sequence concerning his dead wife. There are, indeed, moments of optimism. His linking in with death and the rejuvenation of life through the natural environment is as hopeful as he gets. But, otherwise, the reader is left with many poems riffing of the same theme of death, darkness, regret and aging. Ghosts abound throughout his poetry; one can’t help but feel that the ghost of Hardy will leave far longer than him and that, maybe a bit uncharitably, the ghost of Emma will succeed him further through his poignant act of creation.

[Martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been reading one or two of Thomas Hardy’s poems a day for the past few months, and it’s been such a rewarding experience. I’m relatively new to poetry. Having previously read and enjoyed Robert Frost, I thought Hardy would be a natural next step. Like Frost, he uses nature and everyday rural life as a way to explore and reflect deeper themes, such as love, loss, memory, mortality, and the passage of time.

I was also surprised by Hardy’s spiritual outlook on life, which feels surprisingly modern for someone born in the Victorian era. Several poems meditate on the idea that, after death, our bodies return to the earth and our energy lives on through the natural world. It's a comforting thought.

This collection also includes the poems Hardy wrote after the death of his wife, Emma. Full of grief, regret, and remembrance, these are some of his most moving works. In his later poems, Hardy reflects on his own mortality and, in the final piece of this collection, even questions whether he should stop writing altogether, worrying that his melancholy might only spread sadness to others. I couldn’t disagree more. There’s comfort in his honesty: a feeling of being understood and finding connection through shared experience.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want to like Thomas Hardy's poetry a lot more than I actually do, given that his verse is highly regarded by other writers that I admire (Philip Larkin prominent among them). This selection of his nature-focused poetry does have a few highlights ("Shut Out That Moon", "The Haunter", "After a Journey", and "Old Furniture"). But overall, Hardy's words just don't connect with me, and often the poems are notable more as exercises in metrical form and structure than in creative expression.

[Amiee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed a few of the poems, maybe some I didn’t quite get. I may need to look into them so more to grasp their true meaning.

[M. Rought-Brooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

On my Kindle it is extremely difficult to find poems one knows and wants to read. I have his collected poems and often reread many of them. He is a **** poet but the Kindle reduces the pleasure.

[Saad Rehman Shah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The highlight of this book is, obviously, the Mayor or Casterbridge. So my review of the book is mostly the review of that novel. Not only because it's the most impactful of all of it, but also because I have forgot the short stories, skimmed the poems (they bored me), and skipped the non-fiction at the end for the most part.

As for the novel. It's like a fighting match, in which the first blow is so intense, that you keep recovering from it throughout, while keep getting hit be various hits and blows. Every chapter packs more emotion, more psychology, more human nature, more suspense than the one before. The story goes forward with perfect literary beauty, foreshadowing, imagery. The characters are written out so clearly, the person relates to each one of them, each of them appears to be the hero. In fact, there is no hero. There are just people. It is a study of human characters and relationships as much as it is a novel. No wonder it is celebrated as a classic.