Hardy: Poems

by Thomas Hardy

Distringuished as both a great novelist and a great poet. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) had a writing career which spanned more than sixty years, concentrating first on prose and then, after publishing his last novel in 1895, on verse. A master of the short lyric and the vivid narrative, Hardy is pre-eminently the poet of remembrance and tender regret for lost happiness; but he is also an ironist whose exquisite descriptions of rural life are the setting for bitingly sharp observations of human frailty.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Victorian, British Literature, 19th Century

249 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

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

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always loved Thomas Hardy's poetry and thought I would end the year by reading this small collection. No one deals in poetry with problems of memory and time better than Hardy, at least that I have ever read. In fact the world becomes a texture of memory and slides back and forth between past and present in ways that occasionally produce joy but more commonly regret and pain. The question, as always, is what endures and what does not? But, as is the case with most great poetry, one really should just read and leave much analysis aside. Hardy's impact on me endures . . . and will, I think, until I exist only as someone else's memory, for better or for worse.

[Justin Pickett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad, not great. There were a handful of poems in here that I thought were excellent (see excerpts below), but most were just okay. Interestingly, many of the poems were about how places and things (e.g., a picnic spot, planted pine trees, a gentleman’s suit, old furniture) remain after people move on or pass away:

“Where is, alas, the gentleman
Who wore this suit?
And where are his ladies? Tell none can:
Gossip is mute.
Some of them may forget him quite
Who smudged his sleeve,
Some think of a wild whirling night
With him, and grieve.” (p. 117)

Several poems were darkly humorous (e.g., a woman sews up her drunk husband in bed sheets to avoid having sex with him, another woman dances after her husband’s death). The poems below are my favorites from the collection, listed in order of preference, along with excerpts or, for the short poems, the full text:

Christmas: 1924

“‘Peace upon earth!’ was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-gas.” (p. 239)

The Photograph (Excerpt)

“She was a woman long hid amid packs of years,
She might have been living or dead; she was lost to my sight,
And the deed that had nigh drawn tears
Was done in a casual clearance of life’s arrears;
But I felt as if I had put her to death that night!” (p. 108)

The Self-Unseeing (Excerpt)

“She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
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!” (p. 38)

Epitaph on a Pessimist

“I’m Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd,
I’ve lived without a dame
From youth-time on; and would to God
My dad had done the same.” (p. 245)

At The Altar-Rail (Excerpt)

“It’s sweet of you, dear, to prepare me a nest,
But a swift, short gay life suits me best.
What I really am you have never gleaned;
I had eaten the apple ere you were weaned.” (p. 97).

[Elena Sala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very early in his life, Thomas Hardy had a driving ambition to join the company of famous poets. His dream had been that he would be able to make a living as a poet. The need to work and his love of learning and classical literature was the main tension of his young years. He needed his architectural work to earn a living when he was young and soon discovered that if he was to make a vocation out of literature, he would need to turn to something more commercial, like the novel. At present, he is mostly known as a novelist. He was a very successful novelist, however, after his novel writing years, from 1870 to 1896, he dedicated himself entirely to poetry.

He writes about the power of the Dorset landscape, the tragedy of love, loss, even some war poems with a unique poetic language that explores English like a philologist while boldly transforming poetic traditions.

[Jessie Pietens · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's always hard to give a star-rating to a poetry collection, because some poems will resonate with you while others wont. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this poetry collection with some of my favourites being: 'Bereft', 'Neutral tones', 'Night time in mid-fall', 'seen by the waits', 'The old gown', 'He never expected much', 'Christmas: 1924', 'A Spellbound palace' and of course 'The Voice'. Hardy has such a way of describing feelings and nature so plainly, yet so beautiful. I will probably never get tired of it.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is a bit uneven, but the best poems are genuinely excellent. I’m probably unusual in that I’ve never read Hardy’s well-known novels; rather, these poems are my first engagement with his work. (I plan to correct that gap in my reading soon.)

Hardy’s best poems are really strong and a few (e.g. ‘The Darkling Thrush’) rank among my favorite of all. Most of the better ones contained in this volume revolve around loss, memory, and sense of place — many were written as reflections on the death of his wife. He uses frequent motifs of birds, storms, and ghosts, but does so in ways that are (or were) new, unusual, and illustrative rather than self-indulgent.

Overall, Hardy was an excellent poet whom I would not hesitate to recommend, even if I didn’t especially love many of the poems included here.

I’ll end by quoting the entirety of a heartbreaking and poignant short poem that really affected me to give an example of his style:


Logs on the Hearth: A Memory Of A Sister

The fire advances along the log
Of the tree we felled,
Which bloomed and bore striped apples by the peck
Till its last hour of bearing knelled.

The fork that first my hand would reach
And then my foot
In climbings upward inch by inch, lies now
Sawn, sapless, darkening with soot.

Where the bark chars is where, one year,
It was pruned, and bled -
Then overgrew the wound. But now, at last,
Its growings all have stagnated.

My fellow-climber rises dim
From her chilly grave -
Just as she was, her foot near mine on the bending limb,
Laughing, her young brown hand awave.

[Angie Rhodes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Hardy is known for his novels, Far from The Madding Crowd, for example, but he also wrote beautiful haunting poetry. If you love poetry, you will his work, descriptive writing at it's best.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourites:

Transformations,
Old Furniture,
Night Time in Mid-Fall,
At Day Close in November,
A Cathedral Façade at Midnight,
Shut Out that Moon,
Imaginings,
At Tea,
A Sheep Fair,
In a waiting-room,
The Clock Winder,
To Louisa in the Lane,
The Marble Tablet,
Your Last Drive,
Christmas: 1924

[Greg Hovanesian · Rating 4 out of 5]

If this collection only contained poems from 'Satires of Circumstance' it would be 5 stars, because those particular poems are some of the best I've read in my life.

For the entire collection, however, 4 stars.

[Elisabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hardy was such a skilled writer! There are sincere poems, poems that are humorous, and those that manage to be both. And definitely some that will stick with me (like Christmas: 1924 - it's so short but really packs such a punch).

[Joejoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Satires section got laughs out of me. The entire collection reminded me of his novel work and I loved seeing the same sensibilities presented in poem form.

[Marda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just didn't connect with Hardy's poetry. There were only a couple that I really liked in this collection.

[Davis Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's easy to see Hardy's poetry as second-rate Browning, and I wouldn't necessarily dispute that. But I would also argue that it's accomplished and excellent in its own right, though certainly not flashy or innovative. Very few poets convey such a striking sense of solitude and melancholy stoicism—a perfect counterpart to his novels. Which, if you dislike, try these, as he very much reins in his penchant for purple verbosity. I do, however, much prefer the lyrics in this collection ("Neutral Tones" makes my Hall of Fame of 20 poems to memorize for a desert island) to the "short stories", which really are second-rate Browning.

[Monster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bought it because of Harold Bloom's praise and choice of poems in The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost. This is a great book that I imagine I'll continue reading forever because it divides poems according to the books they were in whenever possible, and has his remaining poetry arranged in chapters by theme. I'd like to buy the individual books if I can but I might have to settle for his collected poetry, which has to be at least as big as this, so I'll always be glad to have a convenient, representative greatest hits.

You can probably count on one hand the poems in this book that aren't about mirrors, birds, graves and funerals, or the experience of memories, but who gives a shit? Everything means the same thing to Hardy: suffering. But that cow's got like, 64 tits to milk, if you're gonna write a poem about a memory or a bird. His poems all have set rhyme schemes but I'm pretty sure he makes up a new rhyme scheme for every poem. He has fairly lofty tone and phrasing, which contrast nicely with his frequent use of colloquial language.

There is a lot of wry humor and dramatic irony. The sheer number of plots that Hardy manages to think up and then fully but concisely articulate makes it easy to believe he could write amazing novels too. I'm excited to see what they are like (My guess is "madcap screwball comedy"). I'm starting with The Mayor of Casterbridge because that's the one that a different group in my 10th grade English class read (While I GOOFED OFF and only skimmed Jane Eyre (I'll never forgive myself)).

[Kaylee Gwyn (literarypengwyns) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gosh, I want to like poetry so badly and it just is so hard for me to want to read and enjoy. Some of the more obvious rhythms are easy to like and the ones that have true artistry behind them, are really lost on me. Hardy’s books capture my imagination and paint a vivid picture of Wessex and social convention of Victorian and turn of the century cultures, but his poetry (which he is well known for) were as enjoyable for me. I did enjoy the sections on love and death and the section titled “Satires of Circumstance”.

[James Violand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. Hardy considered himself a poet before a novelist, which I found hard to believe considering I'm a big proponent of his novels. Never-the-less, his poetry shows the depth of character that created so much great literature.

[Perry Emerson]

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