The Flirt's Tragedy > Likes and Comments

The Flirt's Tragedy
(17--)

Here alone by the logs in my chamber,
Deserted, decrepit—
Spent flames limning ghosts on the wainscot
Of friends I once knew—

My drama and hers begins weirdly
Its dumb re-enactment,
Each scene, sigh, and circumstance passing
In spectral review.

—Wealth was mine beyond wish when I met her—
The pride of the lowland—
Embowered in Tintinhull Valley
By laurel and yew;

And love lit my soul, notwithstanding
My features' ill favour,
Too obvious beside her perfections
Of line and of hue.

But it pleased her to play on my passion,
And whet me to pleadings
That won from her mirthful negations
And scornings undue.

Then I fled her disdains and derisions
To cities of pleasure,
And made me the crony of idlers
In every purlieu.

Of those who lent ear to my story,
A needy Adonis
Gave hint how to grizzle her garden
From roses to rue,

Could his price but be paid for so purging
My scorner of scornings:
Thus tempted, the lust to avenge me
Germed inly and grew.

I clothed him in sumptuous apparel,
Consigned to him coursers,
Meet equipage, liveried attendants
In full retinue.

So dowered, with letters of credit
He wayfared to England,
And spied out the manor she goddessed,
And handy thereto,

Set to hire him a tenantless mansion
As coign-stone of vantage
For testing what gross adulation
Of beauty could do.

He laboured through mornings and evens.
On new moons and sabbaths,
By wiles to enmesh her attention
In park, path, and pew;

And having afar played upon her,
Advanced his lines nearer,
And boldly outleaping conventions,
Bent briskly to woo.

His gay godlike face, his rare seeming
Anon worked to win her,
And later, at noontides and night-tides
They held rendezvous.

His tarriance full spent, he departed
And met me in Venice,
And lines from her told that my jilter
Was stooping to sue.

Not long could be further concealment,
She pled to him humbly:
“By our love and our sin, O protect me;
I fly unto you!”

A mighty remorse overgat me,
I heard her low anguish,
And there in the gloom of the calle
My steel ran him through.

A swift push engulphed his hot carrion
Within the canal there—
That still street of waters dividing
The city in two.

—I wandered awhile all unable
To smother my torment,
My brain racked by yells as from Tophet
Of Satan's whole crew.

A month of unrest brought me hovering
At home in her precincts,
To whose hiding-hole local story
Afforded a clue.

Exposed, and expelled by her people,
Afar off in London
I found her alone, in a sombre
And soul-stifling mew.

Still burning to make reparation
I pleaded to wive her,
And father her child, and thus faintly
My mischief undo.

She yielded, and spells of calm weather
Succeeded the tempest;
And one sprung of him stood as scion
Of my bone and thew. . . .

But Time unveils sorrows and secrets,
And so it befell now:
By inches the curtain was twitched at,
And slowly undrew.

As we lay, she and I, in the night-time,
We heard the boy moaning:
“O misery mine! My false father
Has murdered my true!”

She gasped: yea, she heard; understood it.
Next day the child fled us;
And nevermore sighted was even
A print of his shoe.

Thenceforward she shunned me, and languished;
Till one day the park-pool
Embraced her fair form, and extinguished
Her eyes' living blue.

—So; ask not what blast may account for
This aspect of pallor,
These bones that just prison within them
Life's poor residue;

But pass by, and leave unregarded
A Cain to his suffering,
For vengeance too dark on the woman
Whose lover he slew.

A week has flown by, so it's time for discussing a new Hardy poem. This is another of his story-poems, again set ostensibly in the 18th century. Last week, my initial comment was probably spoiler-ish, so here I'll refrain from essentially summarizing the entire plot, and let those who haven't previously read the poem discover it for themselves. I'll just mention that one thing we see here is the influence of the folk ballad tradition on Hardy; the stories the folk songsters in that tradition chose to tell were memorable, but usually so for grim reasons. Romance gone wrong, murder, suicide (or all three) might be regular occurrences in these compositions....

As always with Hardy, the poem shows a great degree of technical mastery in its rhyme scheme. It's also a poem that illustrates the influence on him of his Romantic poet predecessors; this is a work that unabashedly seeks to invoke strong emotions from us as readers.

Another new one for me! Thanks Werner; it's now linked to our list.

This is an exciting ballad of love, jealousy, murder, revelation, and rejection. All the stanzas have the same rhyme at the end, rhyming with "knew" in the first stanza. I can imagine this poem being adapted by a folk singer.

I like the Biblical element in the last stanza with the comparison to Cain. In Genesis, God rejected Cain's sacrificial offering and accepted the offering from Abel. Cain was angry and jealous so he murdered Abel. God punished Cain by making him wander the world. In the poem the woman accepts one man and rejects the other, and the rejected man kills his rival. When the woman finds out the truth, she sends him packing. (Werner, you're our expert on the Bible, but I'm giving a short version of the Cain and Abel story for anyone who has different religious traditions.)

Thanks for sharing another of Hardy's ballads.

Connie wrote: "(Werner, you're our expert on the Bible, but I'm giving a short version of the Cain and Abel story for anyone who has different religious traditions.)"

Connie, you're very kind to call me an "expert," though I'm sure there are others in the group who are every bit as knowledgeable! You gave an excellent summary of the biblical story, and also helpfully pointed out the deeper parallelism between Cain and the poem's narrator, beyond the surface one that both are murderers. Thanks! (Another parallel, besides those you mentioned, is that they both have to live with the consciousness of their guilt.)

Even though the adult Hardy wasn't a Christian, another feature of his literary style that's reflected here is frequent use of biblical allusions, in both his poetry and his prose. He was raised at a time when most households had a Bible and made it a staple of their reading; so he was familiar with it, and could safely assume that the great majority of his readers were as well.

Wow! This is so different from what I have come to expect from Hardy. I liked it a lot and look forward to hearing more about the tale.

As I read it, I thought the unnamed woman gained respectability from the suitor who swoops in to save her honor but then the child that the husband accepts as his own accuses him of murdering "his true" father. And the woman whose reputation he has saved shuns him and eventually kills herself.

There is a whole story in these simple lines and it is incredibly sad with such tragic consequences. And that last line, it just screams the final twist in the tale.

Wow, what a poem, Werner! I did not see the twist coming of the narrator killing the man he sent to flirt with the woman he loved. I think I might have gasped at "my steel ran him through".

And then I went back to the beginning and started again. So this Adonis is the one who put the deceit idea into the narrator's head. What a con man the Adonis must have been. He got the narrator to dress him elegantly, write him letters of authenticity and pay for him to live in a mansion, all so that he could woo a beautiful woman. I'm sure he didn't bargain on being killed though.

And then our narrator gets to marry the woman he loved. I didn't see the second plot twist coming of the son finding out who killed his real father. That part reminded me of Hamlet - who always suspected Claudius killed his father. I suppose our narrator got off easy, in that the son didn't kill him, but just left.

I loved all the drama!