I prefer my mare

‘Well: the poems were lying about, & I did not quite know what to do with them,’ Thomas Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse shortly after the publication of his first collection, Wessex Poems (1898). ‘It is difficult,’ he went on, ‘to let people who think I have made a fresh start know that to indulge in rhymes was my original weakness, & the prose only an afterthought.’ Fifteen novels is some afterthought, but he had been saying for some time that it was ‘better to fail in poetry than to succeed in prose’. He would succeed in both, and it’s hard to think of another writer who rose to fame as a novelist only to become famous a second time for his poetry. Couching it in these terms, though, downplays Hardy’s gravitation towards original weakness, unfresh starts, failure. Thinking about poetry on New Year’s Day 1879, he made a note rather than a resolution: ‘A perception of the failure of things to be what they are meant to be, lends them, in place of the intended interest, a new and greater interest of an unintended kind.’

The opening line of Wessex Poems includes a coinage, ‘chancefulness’, which raises a question about how much of the unintended a poet might actually wish for. The question remained unsettled; Hardy later noted that the secret of a living style lies in ‘not having too much style – being, in fact, a little careless, or rather seeming to be, here and there’. T.S. Eliot felt that Hardy was indifferent to ‘the prescripts of good writing’ and composed ‘always very carelessly’. ‘At times,’ Eliot added, ‘his style touches sublimity without ever having passed through the stage of being good.’ It’s true that Hardy’s style is uneven: he will rhyme ‘door’ with ‘theretofore’, or write a line like ‘But that I fain would wot of shuns my sense.’ But he will also take his chances with rhyme, rhythm and syntax to arrive at this, on the sinking of the Titanic:

       Over the mirrors meant
       To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

Another writer would have opted for a slimy sea-worm. ‘Slimed’ might refer to the mirror, but it also seizes on a passivity – on something having been done to the creature – which is even more disturbing. The Hardyesque frequently has this mixture of the vivid and the vertiginous. The pile-up of adjectives at the end of the stanza is both precise and a straining after precision, and the awkwardness of the rhyme, its descent into unmusicality, gives a sense that things are not fully under Hardy’s control. There’s no discernible metrical rule, yet the reader registers (belatedly) the force of that dreadful stress on ‘meant’. Call it the failure of the mirror to be what it was meant to be – a failure linked to the mirror of language itself, and to the little interruptions to linguistic transparency caused by Hardy’s archaisms, which conceive of words as being subject to adaptation, accidence, decay. The verb to glass once meant not just ‘to reflect’ but also ‘to put into a glass vessel for the purpose of storing or keeping, to bottle’. Whatever the word is doing here, it doesn’t feel as if things are in safekeeping.

Reviewing the volume in which ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ was published in 1914, Lytton Strachey claimed to hear something fumbling and ‘incorrect’ – ‘but then,’ he added, ‘how unreal and artificial a thing is correctness!’ Hardy wasn’t another Eminent Victorian, but someone ‘who finds it difficult, as modern men and women do, to put into words exactly what is in his mind’. Modern people have also found it difficult to place him, and to decide how modern he really is. Auden acknowledged Hardy as his first master, adding that he couldn’t imagine who else would have carried him from the provincial Tennysonian England of 1907 to The Waste Land. But when Larkin claimed in the mid-1960s that Hardy’s was ‘many times over the best body of poetic work this century so far has to show’, he wasn’t praising him for any Eliotic or iconoclastic talents, which is part of the reason for Donald Davie’s complaint a few years later that Hardy represented ‘a crucial selling short of the poetic vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets who meant most to him were Pound and Hardy. This might seem an unlikely double-act, yet more than half a century earlier Pound had suggested that Hardy be included in an anthology of Imagist poetry, and had written to Hardy himself to ask for feedback on his work. ‘Now there is a clarity,’ Pound said later of Hardy’s achievement. ‘No man can read his poems collected but that his own life, and forgotten moments of it, will come back to him, a flash here and an hour there. Have you a better test of true poetry?’

Returning to Hardy via these new selections of his work, edited by Ralph Pite and David Bromwich, I was surprised by how much I had forgotten – or misremembered. Whereas Bromwich takes his text from later editions, Pite opts for the first editions of individual volumes and provides a sampling of Hardy’s revisions in the endnotes, partly to show the stylistic variety that was sometimes smoothed away, and partly to ‘reveal his development’. Hardy himself wasn’t clear on which versions he preferred: in later years he took pains to specify that a certain text should be used in quoting from his work, but kept changing his mind about which one it should be. And besides, he isn’t really a poet who ‘developed’. But even when the plot of a poem confirms (yet again) that this is the worst of all possible worlds, the language is open to a world in which anything might happen. In one line the moon is ‘mute and cold’ as the clouds hurry past, in the next it’s ‘Like a drifting dolphin’s eye seen through a lapping wave’. Elsewhere a lyric begins with the usual paraphernalia – stormy night, talk of ‘the blind profound’ and so on – and then we get this:

The streams are muddy and swollen; eels migrate
       To a new abode;
   Even cross, ’tis said, the turnpike-road;
(Men’s feet have felt their crawl, home-coming late)

Note ‘men’s feet’ (not ‘the men’), and also ‘their crawl’ (not ‘them crawl’). This feeling for the strangeness of bodies is characteristic of Hardy. Leafing through these editions alongside the Collected Poems, taking in everything from primroses to poison gas, I was reminded of the Hardy who compared his dreams to Cubist paintings, who drew on the theory of relativity to help him think about family troubles, and who once observed that, ‘really, after what Einstein says the universe is getting too comic for words.’

Some of the first initiates into the Hardy universe picked up on a quality that doesn’t tally with our received picture of him as a fate-obsessed novelist or melancholic elegist. Havelock Ellis discerned in the fiction ‘a delicate and involved humour, which carries itself solemnly’, while Gosse heard ‘a gaiety not quite consistent’ with ‘the most pessimistic of poets’. Hardy’s poems are often, in the words of one lyric, ‘Strange orchestras of victim-shriek and song’, and I can understand why when some contemporary poets – Fanny Howe, for example – pay him their respects they think of Beckett. An early masterpiece like ‘Neutral Tones’ is illuminated by a light source (‘the sun was white, as though chidden of God’) much like the one that opens Murphy (‘The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new’), and the sweet nothings uttered by Hardy’s lovers – ‘The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing/Alive enough to have strength to die’ – seem to come from a world not dissimilar to that of Imagination Dead Imagine. The Hardy who wrote to praise a friend for ‘the sub-humour (is there such a word?) of your writing’ is of a piece with the Hardy who had a passion for circuses, and who liked to watch the clowns when they were offstage, ‘their true domestic expression being visible under the official expression given by the paint. This sub-expression is one of good-humoured pain.’ A connoisseur of domestic troubles, and someone given to humouring pain, he devoted much of his later writing life to the poetry of the sub-expression.

That New Year’s note about ‘the failure of things to be what they are meant to be’ (first published in The Early Life of Thomas Hardy) was followed by a mention of a poem he composed at the time, ‘A January Night’, in which ‘There is some hid dread afoot/That we cannot trace.’ The Life adds a brief postscript: ‘It was in this house that their troubles began.’ Subsequent biographers have traced the hid and not-so-hid dread of Thomas and Emma Hardy as their marriage deteriorated, going into much fuller detail than the husband had cared to in the Life. (One of Hardy’s most pronounced acts of evasion was the pretence that his second wife, Florence, wrote the biography, when in fact he did so himself, before taking careful steps to conceal the evidence.) Soon after Emma’s death in November 1912, he apparently found and destroyed a notebook she had entitled ‘What I Think of My Husband’, but some sense of what she thought can be gleaned from advice she had given to a newly married friend, Elspeth Grahame, some years earlier: ‘expecting little neither gratitude, nor attentions, love, nor justice, nor anything you may set your heart on. Love interest – adoration, & all that kind of thing is usually a failure – complete … it is really a pity to have any ideals in the first place.’ Florence recalled Emma asking her whether she had noticed that Hardy looked like the wife-murderer Dr Crippen. ‘She added darkly that she would not be surprised to find herself in the cellar one morning. All this in deadly seriousness.’

Hardy was not easy to live with. He was the kind of man who could write this to a friend who had just lost his ten-year-old son: ‘To be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.’ Even his ‘happiest’ courtship days with Emma were strangely rendered at the time; a diary entry from March 1870 reads: ‘Went with E.L.G. to Beeny Cliff. She on horseback … On the cliff … “The tender grace of a day”, etc.’ A rather perturbing et cetera, since Tennyson’s poem continues: ‘But the tender grace of a day that is dead/Will never come back to me.’ His first published poem, which appeared soon after he married Emma, was called ‘The Bride-Night Fire’, and in later collections one never has to wait long for an unhappy couple. ‘In the Nuptial Chamber’ begins: ‘“O that mastering tune?” And up in the bed/Like a lace-robed phantom springs the bride.’

On the tricky question of the way private troubles bear on one’s writing, Hardy sometimes sounds very decided. ‘What should certainly be protested against,’ he wrote in the year of Emma’s death,

is the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions. Infinite mischief would lie in that. If any statements in the dress of fiction are covertly hinted to be fact, all must be fact, and nothing else but fact, for obvious reasons. The power of getting lies believed about people through that channel after they are dead, by stirring in a few truths, is a horror to contemplate.

Perhaps, but then Hardy liked to contemplate horrors – and to perpetrate them. By emending and suppressing elements of Emma’s memoir, Some Recollections, after her death, and by using adjusted parts of it in his poems, he was courting mischief (a late lyric, written as though spoken by a lonely wife, comes with the note ‘Versified from a Diary’). And, of course, in matters of the heart, ‘unknown proportions’ of fact and fiction are a priori; although Hardy once described a poem about the end of his first meeting with Emma as ‘literally true’, in the poem itself all is ‘Strange, ghostly, unreal’. The a posteriori only adds to the difficulties: ‘Our imperfect memories insensibly formalise the fresh originality of living fact,’ he wrote elsewhere, ‘from whose shape they slowly depart.’

Hardy offers temptations – and traps – for those inclined to read lyric as confessionalism; Florence herself claimed that ‘there is more autobiography in a hundred lines of Mr Hardy’s poetry than in all the novels.’ The OED credits him with the neologism ‘personalised’ (from A Pair of Blue Eyes, ‘a personalised loneliness’), but that novel also contains another coinage – ‘private world’ – and I think his transition to poetry involved an increased rather than diminished commitment to this world. Pite and Bromwich’s editions take different approaches in this regard. Pite, who has written a fine biography of Hardy, The Guarded Life (2006), provides more than a hundred pages of notes (many of which situate the poems in relation to the life and times), whereas Bromwich has just nine pages which avoid ‘the back-loading of historical or biographical data that are easily available elsewhere’. This could imply either that the ‘elsewhere’ should be sought out, or that the poems should stand without such distractions. Pite includes sections from Hardy’s prefaces that cut both ways: Hardy tells readers that ‘the pieces are in a large degree dramatic or personative in conception; and this even where they are not obviously so,’ but can’t resist adding that he’s sometimes added dates for ‘personal and local reasons’. Later he refers to the poems as dramatic monologues, ‘in the main’.

We can read the ghostwritten Life as a first person hidden behind a third person, but the poetry can be read in the opposite direction. Yet the suspicion lingers – and Hardy wants it to – that the power of his lyricism is related to the sense that, as D.W. Winnicott put it, it is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found. Florence once found Hardy composing a poem about his dead cat and became upset when she read the line in which the cat is described as ‘his only friend’; on which ‘the culprit seemed highly delighted with himself, & said smilingly, that he was not exactly writing about himself but about some imaginary man in a similar situation.’ Not unlike the God he complains about, Hardy’s smilingness is often in league with his sadism, and writing poetry was a way for him to plead innocent and guilty at the same time. As he pointed out, a poem can express a mood that may end with the writing of it, and he also admitted that ‘half my time – particularly when writing verse – I “believe” (in the modern sense of the word) … in spectres, mysterious voices, intuitions, omens, dreams, haunted places, &c, &c.’ In and out of poems, Hardy apprehends the self as one of those spectres:

For my part, if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts and taking their views of surrounding things. To think of life as passing away is a sadness; to think of it as past is at least tolerable. Hence even when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment, only fit to behold and say, as another spectre said: ‘Peace be unto you!’

Hardy describes his attraction to such droll resurrections as ‘whimsical’, but, for him, whimsy is usually accompanied by anxiety. Elsewhere he says that people who imagine and speak to ghosts are driven by ‘a fear of life’, and this fear often shadows his best poetry. This is ‘Nobody Comes’:

Tree-leaves labour up and down,
   And through them the fainting light
   Succumbs to the crawl of night.
Outside in the road the telegraph wire
   To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travellers like a spectral lyre
    Swept by a spectral hand.

A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
   That flash upon a tree:
   It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own,
   Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
   And nobody pulls up there.

As so often in Hardy, what doesn’t happen carries all the force of an event. The strangeness of the last word, heightened by the rhyme, speaks volumes: the speaker is very much here, not ‘there’ – unless he is the haunter of his own life.

Hardy must be the first, I think, to have smuggled the word ‘whang’ into a poem. It’s a remarkable line, partly because people, and not objects, are capable of being ‘in a world of their own’, and in a universe where a car can be accorded a glimmer of consciousness, it’s equally possible that a person could be swallowed into the thingness of their surroundings (‘a blacker air’ is also an apt description of Hardy’s utterance). But Hardy often wants more than a merely tolerable sadness. He wants an anxiety he can replay and reinhabit, hence the self-lacerations of his lyrical present – a time in which a car ‘comes up’ (not, say, ‘goes by’) forever, even though it’s always gone. The poem first appeared in the collection Human Shows, along with a date: ‘9 October 1924’. Inserted for ‘personal and local reasons’ no doubt. Pite’s note says that Hardy was waiting for Florence to return from London, where she had just undergone an operation to remove a tumour. And yet the mood soars beyond the personal. ‘It has nothing to do with me.’ This is part of what poetry is for Hardy – a spectral lyre swept (not ‘played’) by a spectral hand, a realm in which these words can somehow occur even though he’s ‘mute’. ‘Makers of things,’ he suggested in a notebook, ‘e.g. painters, writers, builders, furniture makers, are present as ghosts before their works.’

Paying homage​ to Hardy, Robert Frost seized on a vital quality: ‘He has planted himself on the wrongs that can’t be righted.’ Emma’s death is one such wrong, and in Woman Much Missed Mark Ford weaves together the life and poetry without reducing one to the other and offers a fine-grained analysis of their relationship and its bearing on Hardy’s work. Moving from his depictions of Emma’s life before they met to their courtship and marriage, to her death and its aftermath, Ford’s is the first book-length study of what he calls ‘the entire corpus of Emma poems’. He claims that around a fifth of Hardy’s 919 published poems are concerned with her; in which case one of the many ironies of this prolonged poetical ‘dedication’ is that he composed nearly all of them after her death. Years earlier, Emma took her husband’s move to poetry as a betrayal; excluded from the writing process (she had previously helped to make fair copies of his novels), she read some of the poems as a direct attack (‘The Ivy-Wife’ brings her ‘bark-bound’ husband to the ground, and he ‘in his fall felled me!’). In a letter to the Nation on the suffragette cause in 1908, she pointed out that male praise ‘has seldom been for a good woman except safely on a tombstone’, and one of Hardy’s poems, ‘When Dead’, seems to concur. Ford reads it as his ‘self-elegy’, but it could well be spoken from the woman’s perspective, looking forward to the time when she really will be appreciated: ‘I shall be more myself, Dear, then,/Than I am now.’

The life of Ford’s study is often to be found in asides: he hears Macbeth floating around in the margins of ‘The Voice’, and observes in passing Hardy’s ‘fascination with the contact between airborne seeds and women’s clothes’. In the preface he explains that he’s generally focused on Hardy’s conjugations of ‘romance’ (‘a concept fundamental both to his vision of himself as a poet and to his understanding of human motivation’). The word and concept don’t appear very much in subsequent chapters, so readers are left to join the dots, but Ford’s sense of Hardy as a class-torn man – and of romance’s relation to trauma – can be felt throughout. Emma’s parents were gentry, Hardy’s most definitely not, and neither family was happy about the marriage. Emma’s father saw her husband as ‘utterly worthless’, while Hardy’s mother was adamant that none of her four children should marry; she wanted them to live together as sibling pairs. Only Hardy defied this injunction. Nobody from his family attended the wedding and years later Emma accused Hardy’s sister Mary of spreading ‘evil reports’. ‘You are a witch-like creature,’ she wrote in a letter. ‘I can imagine you, & your mother & sister on your native heath raising a storm on a Walpurgis night.’ Ford writes well on the way family tensions inform the poetry. ‘During Wind and Rain’ is read as a mixture of imaginative sympathy and covert retaliation, one which draws on Emma’s writing from Some Recollections in order to resurrect and to bury her family (‘Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs’), even as it ‘testifies to their power to haunt Hardy’s fantasies’.

The ‘evil reports’ Emma spoke of related to rumours of madness. Her violent, alcoholic and delusional father was admitted to an asylum on several occasions in the 1860s and 1870s, as was her brother in 1888, after attempting suicide. Emma’s niece, Lilian, was also institutionalised in a paranoid state in 1919, and in his letters Hardy referred to Emma’s ‘mental aberration’ (‘a little unhinged at times’). Yet aberration was something he appeared to need from her. D.H. Lawrence observed that characters in Hardy’s novels don’t tend to ‘develop’; instead they ‘explode … bursting suddenly out of bud … out of a … tight, hide-bound cabbage state into something quite madly personal’. The madly personal in Emma attracts and delights him, but, as Ford notes, it ‘also calls forth a Tiresian resentment at her unselfconsciousness’. In Some Recollections, Emma speaks of wanting to capture the ‘fresh, peculiar, and not yet written about’, and the nervous energy of her sentences often has this quality (one contains talk of meat and bread – but also a tortoise, a tame seagull, cockroaches and dead kittens). Her phrases, rhythms, allegiances and memories find their way into some of Hardy’s finest poems. ‘He found a “mine” in me, he said.’ A compliment, certainly, but the glimmer of a pun betrays possessiveness and solipsism too.

The elegies first appeared as a set, ‘Poems of 1912-13’, in Satires of Circumstance (1914). Hardy once noted the value of the ‘chance little shocks’ that occur as a result of the sequencing of poems within a collection. Ford is attentive to these shocks (they often get lost in selected editions) and sends you back to the poetry on the lookout for the ways in which they might matter. Neither Pite nor Bromwich places ‘Under the Waterfall’ immediately before ‘Poems of 1912-13’, but in Satires of Circumstance it acts as an odd prelude to the work of mourning, spoken as though by Emma looking back on the couple’s courtship and recalling a moment (first recorded in Some Recollections) when they lost a picnic tumbler in the water. In the poem the wife describes it as a ‘drinking-glass’, then a ‘vessel’, then a ‘glass’, and then finally, weirdly, as a ‘chalice’. Ford suggests that in retrospect, at any rate, it ‘can be viewed as their love’s holy grail’; but perhaps it’s poisoned. All she will say by way of ending is that the chalice lies intact underwater, and that ‘No lip has touched it since his and mine/In turns therefrom sipped lovers’ wine.’ So when Hardy’s opening elegy (‘The Going’) follows, with talk of the wife who wouldn’t ‘lip me the softest call’, one senses that his words carry the spectre of hers. ‘Poems of 1912-13’ begins with a primal word of elegy – ‘Why’ – and yet Hardy forgets (or can’t bring himself) to close the sentence with a question mark. The next poem in the sequence asks questions of Emma that don’t manage to sound convincingly rhetorical: ‘But shall I then slight you because of such?’ Everywhere in the collection one detects a crisis of intimacy from a voice not just unsure whether it wants answers, but whether it’s asking the right questions.

In Hardy’s hands, elegy is besotted with what it cannot bear. ‘After a Journey’ is aroused all over again by ‘the unseen waters’ ejaculations’, the memory of Emma’s hair and eyes, ‘and rose-flush coming and going’, but the very fact of coming and going is the problem. Transience is as delectable as it is threatening, and the poems often read like Freud’s fort/da game gone wrong. The last lyric in the original sequence, ‘The Phantom Horsewoman’, is spoken by a perplexed onlooker not unlike the reader. The speaker begins by admitting, ‘Queer are the ways of a man I know,’ who comes and stands ‘In a careworn craze’ and stares at the coast. ‘And what does he see when he gazes so?’ He sees a ‘phantom of his own figuring’, a ‘ghost-girl-rider’ who ‘Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide’. Which is she to be: horsewoman or girl-rider? Behind this indecision is a vision of Emma as someone who is beyond Hardy. One of the parts of Some Recollections that he included in the Life was a memory of her riding her favourite horse in a paragraph that begins, ‘Scarcely any author and his wife could have had a much more romantic meeting’; but he doesn’t include the moment Emma first mentions the horse: ‘I loved it well, rode much upon it and for many years it was the joy of my life. When hints about marrying fell upon me from the officious, I would say “I prefer my mare to any husband.”’ This is the girl who continues to ride at the end of ‘Poems of 1912-13’. When the speaker says ‘Time touches her not’ he means not simply that she is dead, but that she is the girl who never grew up to be touched by Hardy.

In the final chapter of Woman Much Missed, Ford offers a probing and nuanced account of what he calls the ‘divided allegiances in the hereafter’, as Florence competes with Emma in Hardy’s imagination. In the lyric that follows ‘Poems of 1912-13’ in Satires of Circumstance a wife tells her husband that she’s seen a vision of a pale, passionless lady who laid critical eyes on her; the husband says he’s seen nothing, before confessing to the reader that his ‘dead Love’ used to tell him, ‘with a small smile’, that she would come back posthumously ‘To any newer Love I might have found,/But show her not to me.’ It’s unsurprising that the ‘newer’ love was upset by the collection when she read it. ‘Call me anything but Mrs Hardy,’ Florence later said to Siegfried Sassoon. ‘That name seems to belong to someone else.’ Hardy’s tactlessness after Emma’s death involved writing at length to Florence about her predecessor (‘the good lady’s virtues are beginning to weigh heavily on my shoulders,’ she complained, ‘I had three pages of them this morning’); taking her on a trip, three months after their wedding, to see Emma’s family tombs (‘rather depressing’); and insisting on visiting Emma’s grave on various subsequent anniversaries (‘To Stinsford with F.,’ Hardy noted in his diary. ‘E. first met 54 years ago’). The man who didn’t acknowledge his wife’s birthday when she was alive now had the calendar on his desk perpetually set to Monday, 7 March, the day of their first meeting.

And so F. follows E. His poetry ‘pains me horribly & yet I read it with a terrible fascination,’ Florence confesses in a letter of 1914. She too moves her study into the attic at Max Gate; she becomes tormented by Hardy’s attraction to other women. A few months after their wedding Florence admitted that she sometimes felt like ‘a mother towards a child with whom things have somehow gone wrong’. Hardy fulfilled his own mother’s doom-laden predictions about marriage (it was ‘Mother’s notion, and also mine’, he said, that ‘a figure stands in our van with an arm uplifted, to knock us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in as probable’). Perhaps Mother also came to be that figure; he had betrayed her by marrying – she made that very clear – but instead of punishing her for judging him, he punished his wives by proving her right. Marriage became what his poetry always said it would be: ‘Love’s sepulchring’.

To encounter Hardy – through his life or works or some combination of the two – is to be put in touch with experiences that are never quite worked through (‘Experience unteaches,’ he once noted). He was drawn to women, Bromwich suggests, ‘with a desire that mattered to him more than fulfilment’, and his transferences kept his desire intact, kept giving him a second chance, even though it remained unclear whether the second chance was a loophole or a noose. ‘For winning love we win the risk of losing,’ he writes in an early poem, and this may be the reason his most enduring work in the elegiac mode contains not just nostalgia or regret, but expectancy – the sense of something being courted (as opposed to simply being borne):

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view 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!

The first ‘then’ is both retrospective (‘back then’) and proleptic (‘consequently’). It’s characteristic of Hardy that he should ask his lost love to show herself not as someone possessed, but as imminently possessable. His most treasured ghosts are always unlaid, not least because what he really wants them to do is wait. He lives, to recall the title of one poem, in ‘The Minute before Meeting’, in ‘close expectance never closed’, and this is what gives many of his elegies their flashes of erotic thrill-seeking. ‘Yes, as I knew you then’: despite his reputation as a nay-sayer, no lyric poet has recourse to the word ‘yes’ more often than Hardy. Here it feels like an electric shock – an assent to something she might have whispered in his ear (‘In that dress you like?’), or possibly his own seizing of the initiative. Either way, what he yearns for in ‘the original’ is not just a return to early days, but a motion forwards, as though to say: ‘Yes, that dress … and whatever it might yet lead to.’

Roland Barthes suggested that grief is not so much a crushing oppression as ‘a painful availability: I am vigilant, expectant, awaiting the onset of a “sense of life”.’ This is the final non-resting place of Hardy’s lyricism, and a line from a fragmentary poem – ‘The sense of waiting here strikes strong’ – is a good description of what it’s like to read swathes of him in one sitting. In a part of Some Recollections that didn’t make it into the Life, Emma recalls a childhood image that haunts her: ‘a huge stone basin, “a dripstone” … under which a bucket received the water drop by drop purified – a monster drop long a-coming, and long delaying its fall’. Hardy’s poetry is transfixed by such images; its speakers wait in landscapes where ‘drops on gate-bars hang in a row’, on the watch for an impending fall:

A vacant sameness greys the sky,
A moisture gathers on each knop
   Of the bramble, rounding to a drop,
       That greets the goer-by
With the cold listless lustre of a dead man’s eye.

The first and last lines here capture two sides of Hardy: there’s the vacant viewer who inclines towards the blank, the unemphatic, the ‘almost not there’ (as Thom Gunn put it); and then there’s the man who never feels completely himself unless the dead are around, the man who works himself up by giving lustre to the listless.

The romancing and remaking of Hardy – in biographies, editions and critical studies – has tended to lean on chronology, and often that has meant seeing Emma’s death as the making of him (Claire Tomalin began her biography by saying: ‘This is the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet’). But he was a great poet decades before this, and from the start he was measuring his own sensations by the strain he felt around other couples. At the start of the Life he returns to a primal scene: his father loved to play the fiddle and dance (taught by him, Hardy himself became an accomplished fiddler). He played hornpipes, jigs and other folksongs, ‘performing them with all the old movements of leg-crossing and hop, to the delight of the children, till warned by his wife that this fast-perishing style might tend to teach them what it was not quite necessary they should be familiar with’. His father kept going with the fast-perishing stuff ‘in his early married years’ – by which we are to infer that mother’s warnings were finally heeded. Hardy remembered being moved to tears by the tunes, and ‘strenuously’ trying to hide his emotions by dancing. Then, around twenty years later, he drew this poem, ‘The Self-Unseeing’, from the ‘not quite necessary’:

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;
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!

As an adult, Hardy often associated players with potency. When Troy goes in for ‘some loose play’ with Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd, from ‘behind the luminous streams of this aurora militaris, she could see the hue of Troy’s sword arm, spread in a scarlet haze over the space covered by its motions, like a twanged harpstring’. The immensity of the excitement in ‘Bowing it higher and higher’ isn’t exactly sexual, but it’s not not sexual either; one feels the child’s rush of feeling more than he can take in, and the wonderfully unanchored ‘it’ gestures beyond the instrument to the whole of life. Yet the whole is hard to grasp; next to ‘She sat’, the distant oddity of ‘He who played’ makes the father a little less reachable (she sat ‘here’, but he stood ‘there’).

Hardy made just one tiny change from the fair copy: ‘Childlike, I danced in a dream.’ He added the comma, and the music of the punctuation – the poem’s only mid-line pause – turns this from a mere description of the past into a re-ignition of it. The comma nurtures a bewildered, hypnotised awe (with memories so powerfully unbidden, the ‘all’ never quite comes back). The self-unseeing is not just the child he was, but the person who is cast adrift into his past from the present. That self continues to be unseeing in another way too, because in the act of remembrance he is still ‘looking away’, still subject to a sense of not being in the moment.

Unseeing will always remain a condition of selfhood most intensely realised, and the image at the centre of this lyric – that of someone being beside themselves when they play, and another finding themselves in a similar mood as they become absorbed by the tune – is very close, I think, to Hardy’s fantasy of what poetry is. Elsewhere in the Life he recalls meeting one of the Mellstock fiddlers ‘who kept me talking interminably: a man who speaks neither truth nor lies, but a sort of Not Proven compound which is very relishable’. The not-proven compound of the syntax is relishable too (who, exactly, is doing the interminable talking?), and gestures towards a condition of poetic utterance as Hardy understood it, a realm in which a speaker doesn’t so much make statements as listen to the statements he’s made – as the closing poem of Late Lyrics and Earlier puts it: ‘“You taught not that which you set about,”/Said my own voice talking to me.’ Most editions of Hardy (including those by Pite and Bromwich) end with the final poem of his final collection, Winter Words. In a lyric entitled ‘He Resolves to Say No More’, the speaker insists that ‘none shall gather what I hide’ and that ‘What I discern I will not say.’ But Hardy is an odder, less knowing, more daemonic poet than this last will and testament imply, and a comment from the Life provides a better gloss on his writing. On being asked for details about ‘Let Me Enjoy’ – a poem written in ‘minor key’ in which he talks of pouring out raptures that belong to others as if they were his own – he remarked: ‘I fear I am not clear on the precise mental state of the singer of that lyric.’