In Our Time - Thomas Hardy's Poetry

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

After 27 years, Melvyn Bragg has decided to step down from the In Our Time presenter’s chair. With over a thousand episodes to choose from, he has selected just six that capture the huge range and depth of the subjects he and his experts have tackled. In this second of his choices, we hear Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss one of his favourite poets.Their topic is Thomas Hardy (1840 -1928) and his commitment to poetry, which he prized far above his novels. In the 1890s, once he had earned enough from his fiction, Hardy stopped writing novels altogether and returned to the poetry he had largely put aside since his twenties. He hoped that he might be ranked one day alongside Shelley and Byron, worthy of inclusion in a collection such as Palgrave's Golden Treasury which had inspired him. Hardy kept writing poems for the rest of his life, in different styles and metres, and he explored genres from nature, to war, to epic. Among his best known are what he called his Poems of 1912 to 13, responding to his grief at the death of his first wife, Emma (1840 -1912), who he credited as the one who had made it possible for him to leave his work as an architect's clerk and to write the novels that made him famous.WithMark Ford Poet, and Professor of English and American Literature, University College London.Jane Thomas Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hull and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of LeedsAnd Tim Armstrong Professor of Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonProducer: Simon TillotsonSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, in the 1890s, Thomas Hardy stopped writing novels and returned to his first love, poetry, and he stayed writing poems for 38 years, the rest of his life.

In different styles and meters, he explores genres from nature, the Darkling Thrush to war, drummer Hodge, and to epics, the dynasts. And among his best known are what he called his poems 1912 to 13, responding to his grief at the death of his first wife, Emma, who was neither his first love nor his last, but was the muse who'd made his writing possible. With me to discuss Thomas Hardey's poetry are Tim Armstrong, Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Jane Thomas, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hell, and senior visiting research fellow at the University of Leeds and Mark Ford, poet and professor of English and American Literature University College London. Mark Ford, what do we need to know about how this early life that's relevant to his poetry? His enthusiasm for poetry did develop while he was a teenager. He was born in 1840 in High Bocampton, which is about three miles from Dorchester, quite near Stinsford, which becomes the Melstock of Wessex.

his father was in the church choir, I think it's an important point, that he played the violin in the church choir. So Hardy's interest in music is one of the things that really is really important when we come to sort of discuss his poetry, that his fascination with the process of making music, particularly for the church, was something that was drilled into him from a very kind of early age. His mother, Jemima, was probably the dominant influence

in driving him to become the ambitious young person. a very, very successful writer. Although she came from a pretty poor background. Her own mother was actually on poor relief, but she was very concerned with education. And Hardy went to excellent schools. Local schools. Yeah, local schools up until the age of 16.

Well, fairly local. From the age of 12 to 16, he went to one in Dorchester. And after that, he was apprenticed to a architect, and it was while he was working as an apprentice architect that he became obsessed with Latin, Greek, and that would develop into a love of English poetry. He would get up at 4 o'clock in the morning before he went to work to learn some of the Latin poets.

Is that right? That's right. And he taught himself Greek as well. He was an autodidact from the age of 16 onwards. He did study Latin at school from the age of 12, but he was an autodidact after that. And the architect's office that he worked in in Dorchester was a fairly kind of cultured place,

and they would kind of swap translations of Latin and so on. But he moved to London to continue his workers, an architect, Clark, he still kept writing poetry there? Well, that's when he really, really got obsessed with poetry. It's almost like an addiction, the way he talks about it. His concern with reading and writing poetry was the thing that dominated his life in London, though he did also go to kind of music halls in the theatre and saw lots of Shakespeare and he went to the National Gallery.

But he tells us he would stay up until after midnight, every night in his room in Westbourne Park Villas, reading and writing poetry. and he would send this poetry out in the hope of making a name for himself, but he tells us it was all rejected. We actually haven't got any rejection slips, so he can't verify that. But he came to the conclusion that the editors of poetry magazines

didn't know good verse from bad, and they certainly didn't embrace his work. There's one of his very earliest poems called She to Him. It's one of four poems, but I think this one is particularly powerful for a young man. when you shall see me in the toils of time my lorded beauties carried off from me my eyes no longer stars as in their prime my name forgot of made fair and free when in your being heart concedes to mind and judgment though you scarce its process know recalls the excellent i once enshrined and you are irked that they have withered so remembering mind the losses not the blame, that sportsman time but rears his brood to kill,

knowing me in my soul the very same, one who would die to spare you touch a bill. Will you not grant to old affections claim the hand of friendship down life's sonless hill? I think that's fantastic. I just wanted an indication of what he was writing at the time he was rejected. He was writing a lot of sonnets in the very, voice of this woman who is

probably based on a woman he was seeing at the time called Eliza Nichols and there are four of these sonnets, the She to Him sonnets that derive a lot from kind of Shakespearean and from John Dunn. There's a kind of Elizabethan tinge to them and they're rather complex

poems that they illustrate Philip Larkin's contention that every hardy poem has a spinal cord of thought running through it. They're quite cerebral poems but they're also quite complex and quite a Well, I think they're very emotionally charged. I mean, it's just this woman is saying, everything's gone,

but it's, you mustn't blame me and remember the time when I would lay down, I'd do anything that you wanted in your life. It's extraordinary poem. I mean, I just amazed that they missed it at the time, but now we've got it here, so that's all right. Yeah, and there was a vote for sonnets in the Victorian period. And I think they reflect the influence of George Meredith as well, particularly the modern love sequence. Jane Thomas, we may come back to earlier poems later, I hope.

He stopped the poems and he started to write novels. Now, why was that? Because he knew he would make more money. Writing poetry was not the best way to make money. Between 1871 and 1878, he was writing roughly a novel a year, which is phenomenal when you think about it. Around about the 1880s, he lost his way. The novels he produced, Alia de Sien, Hand of Ethel,

were not well received. He also had a physical breakdown and was extremely ill for quite a long time. In 1883, he moved to Dorchester, thinking that if he could, you know, sort of immerse himself in the place and the people that he knew well, it might add something to his writing. And in 1884, he moved into Max Gate, and of course, that was the year that the Mayor of Casterbridge was published. And that initiated that great tragic phase where we get the woodland, Anders, Tessa the Derbaville's, due the obscure and The Well-Belove. And he'd always claimed that he'd aimed at making his novels as close to poetry as possible, but he felt hampered by the constraints of realism. And I think if you read The Well-Belove, you can see that working there.

He's moving against realism and towards something more poetic. Can you tell us about Emma, his first wife, and what she meant to him at first? She opened the door. She opened the door, indeed. Mock's already mentioned that his mother was a great influence. once in helping him to concentrate on being a writer rather than an architect, and so did Emma. They both were responsible for encouraging him.

He met Emma on the 7th of March in 1870 in St. Juliet, where he'd been sent by Crickmay, the architects of Weymouth, to draw up plans for the rebuilding of the church. And he was completely entranced by her. It only took four days. He was entranced by her unreserved manner out of doors, her skills as a horsewoman. He returned in August 1870

and by the end of his visit they considered themselves betrothed. Now at that point, Hardy had had two rejected novels and he had to choose between being an architect which would mean they could marry sooner rather than later or being a writer and their courtship might be postponed for quite a long time if that was the case. It was Emma who persuaded him to concentrate on being a writer and many years later, many years after her death in fact,

Hardy said that she had in fact done a fine thing to put her own desires to one side. It was four years before they could marry in 1874. And Emma really encouraged him. She helped him to revise and edit his novels and you can see her influence in the heroine of Desperate Remedies, of course in the heroine of pair of blue eyes, which tells the story of their romantic courtship.

I think Hardy was very clear that if Emma hadn't encouraged him at that, point, we would have lost one of the greatest writers in the English language. Thank you very much. Tim, Tim Armstrong, for the purposes of this programme, we're concentrating much more on poetry. So, extraordinarily, after the great success he had with his novels, particularly with the Thess of the Derbiville's, he quit novels and the strange reception for Jude the Obscure. And for the next 38 years, went back to and wrote poetry, wrote over 900 poems.

Can you discuss that switch? Initially he portrayed it as a flight from the public sphere into something much more personal after the Bishop of Wakefield threw Jude the Obscure into the Fire and there was a great deal of negative commentary even from some of his friends So you're saying that the reception of Jude the Obscure was one of the big things that made him stop writing novels? Yes, though in fact he had been planning to publish a volume of poetry for some time and had also planned to put together the dyness, this huge verse epic from around

1890. But he was at first tentative, so he published Wessex poems with a series of quirky drawings, which really are quite personal. He wrote a very defensive preface to it, and he included a lot of those early love lyrics, about a third of the poems were written in the 1860s, as well as some more recent poems. But after that, his career as a poet begins to take on a momentum. So he publishes another volume quite quickly. Three years later, he publishes the dynas. He begins to write poems for public occasions like the

death of Queen Victoria, and by the time you get to the general preface that he wrote in 1911, he said that he wants to express, quote, most of the cardinal situations that occur in social and public life in his dramatic and narrative poems and in lyric

a round of emotional experiences of some completeness. The first collected poems is published in 19 and by then he's established. And he had an extraordinary late career. He published in the last 14 years of his life up to his

death at 87, around 650 poems and five volumes. And it's hard to think of a comparator really in terms of that late productivity. He was a man we're told that he fell in love very easily. He began to become

interested in women other than his wife in the period around 18, and had a number of liaisons with women in that period. And that included people like Florence Henneker, who remained a friend for the rest of his life. He also began to have a relationship with Florence Dougdale around 1905, the person who became the second Mrs Hardy. That was part of the tension between him and Emma,

who was clearly aware of what was happening to some extent. I think we can move back to Mark. Mark. Maybe we could discuss a poem called Neutral Tones, and so where that came or what it meant. Yeah, Hardy wrote a lot of poems in the 1860s when he was living in London as a young man, and the one poem of his that really stands out from this period is called Neutral Tones,

and it seems to be the commemoration of the end of a relationship, possibly with Eliza Nichols, who was a lady's maid who lived quite close to him in Westbourne Park Villas. She lived in Orsett Terrace. And this poem is a terrifically bleak. and despairing one. And it's astonishing to think of somebody who's only sort of 27,

writing a poem that has so jettisoned all the major belief systems that were so present in the Victorian age. It actually uses the same metrical scheme as in Memoriam, but it has none of that belief in God. I think Hardy's loss of belief during his period in London in the mid-1860s

is really crucial to understanding how his poetry expressed a skepticism which was really modern, and different from that to be found in any other Victorian poet. And that may be one reason why his work wasn't accepted. But this poem describes two lovers who are breaking up beside an ash tree, which is near a pond, and the leaves from the ash tree have fallen and are grey,

and the sun is described as chidden of God. And all they can think about is how they are completely bored of each other. There's absolutely no reciprocity. He compares them to riddles of long ago. There's no mystery, no magic. And what is odd is that hardly associated poetry so much with romance that for him to be a poet was to be involved in romance in some ways. And yet these early poems, particularly neutral tones,

express an utter scepticism towards romance itself. And all he learns from this experience of breaking up is that love rings with wrong, that things are always about to go wrong. And that's the kind of crucial initiation, I suppose, into the world of the Hardian, that things don't work out as you hoped they would. There's a sense that romance in him is connected with loss and death.

It is. Death prompts great love. Yes, I mean, some go as far as to think of Hardy's almost like a necrophiliac, someone who was only able to kind of love women after they had died. And certainly the poems that he wrote about women nearly all came after those women had died. and that was somehow they resurfaced in his memory in all their vivacity and liveliness and potential

and he recreated them out of this sense of loss and despair and grieving. Jane, how do you react to us? How does the great poet of desire and loss and what greater object of desire than a dead beloved? And this is particularly the case with Emma. I don't know whether you want me to talk a little bit about that. The context of those poems. Emma and Hardy's happiest time was in there,

the first eight years of their married life, 1870 to 1878, at which point they moved to London, and as Hardy says, that's when their troubles began. Because at this point, I think Emma felt she'd lost him. She'd lost him to fame, she'd lost him to the literary... The fame as a novelist, yeah. The fame as the novelist, yeah. She'd lost him to the society women,

who were keen for him to attend their literary salons, and she felt very left behind. After Hardy's illness, which I've mentioned in 1880, they moved to Max Gate and Emma became, I think... The house Hardy designed. And his father and brother built for him. Emma became increasingly lonely, isolated and consequently a little bit eccentric. Tim's already mentioned Hardy's infatuation with other women,

which she didn't really keep very secret, but poems about them. So Hardy was quite embarrassed by him, and I think it's clear to say he was rather cruel to her as well. like he debarred her when he received his order of merit. And eventually she moved up into two small attic rooms that Hardy had enlarged at her request. Hardy moved in Florence, Dougdale. Emma confided to France.

138 years younger than him. Yes, ostensibly quite cleverly, if you like, as Emma's companion. Emma confided to Florence that she thought Thomas was resembling Cripping, who'd been on trial at that point for the murder of his wife. they were very estranged. And she was quite complicated. Her father had been in an asylum.

Well, I think a lot of that is speculation. Well, it was certainly an alcoholic. Is that not speculation? Well, there was alcoholism in the family, yes. Excuse me for saying this, but I think a lot of the stories of Emma has been written by male critics who very much take Hardy's side.

You don't need any excuses for that. I'm sure. But writers and academics can be very selfish people. and I think their wives and their companions can often feel left out of their lives as a result. So there are all sorts of reasons why this marriage founded, but it certainly did. However, Emma became increasingly ill of the heart failure that eventually killed. And Hardy doesn't seem to have noticed this because they led these separate lives. But on the 27th of November 1912, Emma's maid, Dolly Gale, came down to Hardy in a state of distress,

very concerned about her mistress. Hardy apparently told her to straighten her collar before making his way, in his own time, up to Emma's attic, where he found her indeed dying. And she died in his arms of heart failure. And the shock was so great to Hardy that it resulted in this magnificent outpouring of loss and grief, regret and guilt.

I mean, even on her wreath, he wrote for her lonely husband with the old affection. And he talks about how, he said, A loss like that made the old brain vocal. And in her papers, after she died, he found two significant little bits of writing. One was called What I Think of My Husband, which he read and promptly burnt. And the other was some recollections which tells the story of their early culture. Why did he?

What did he? Well, we don't know because none of it survives. But you can imagine, can't you, that she was writing really an outpouring of her own sense of abandonment, of rejection, of Hardy's cruelty. But I think those combined, plus the pilgrimage that he made to St. Juliet that he'd never made in her lifetime, but he went with Henry, his older brother, on a pilgrimage. And all of this stimulates that imaginative recreation of their early romance.

And those extraordinary poems. Can we tell to you, Tim, can you unpick those poems, the collection 1912? There's a few years where more than a score of poems around Emma which bear some of the best love poems in their language. Yes, Hardy takes the traditional

allergy and turns it into a sequence which really goes through many different stages of grief and reaction beginning with some hostility in a way and cruelness and eventually moves the scene from Dorchester to

Cornwall, where he refines Emma. If you look, for example, at the second poem, your last drive, it ends with the line, you are past love, praise, indifference, blame. And indifference, if that's the middle term, there's a kind of another term, hate which is sort of lingering at the end of the poem. So he recognises his own culpability in their relationship, but he nevertheless, as Jane says, seeks to refine her. And the key poem there is after a journey, which is the 13th poem in the sequence. of the 21, where he finally does move to Cornwall, where he finds the young Emma again.

He says, through the years, through the dead scenes, I have tracked you, what have you found to say of our past, scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you? And that's a rather... She is, in fact, a ghost, though. She is. In fact, in revising the poem, he pushed her even further away. So in the early printings of the poem, he says at the beginning,

here too, I come to interview a ghost. and then he changes it to the final version Here too I come to view of Wiceless Ghosts So he shifts the poem from interviewing her Talking the idea of interchange To looking at her

Finding an image for her What do you make of this great sequence of poems I mean he's treated her As we've been told in no uncertain terms Very very badly indeed He's neglected her He's taken on a young woman Who's supposed to be her secretary

He's flirting with society ladies All over the place she leads and one can only imagine how difficult her existence was and he brings this great outpouring of largely positive regret how do you count for that

Hardy always said that he had a faculty for bearing emotion inside him and then reinterring it and that's really what he does and he's also very interested in the idea that you can come back to your early experience and re-find it and see the truth of it so he gradually comes to see

across the sequence, in a sense, the meaning of his life, the meaning of his early romance, the meaning of everything that's happened since. And he becomes obsessed with that idea of recovering the image of Emma and the landscape in which they had their romance. Thank you very much. Mark, these poems take into Cornwall, as has been said, as much as Dorset. Can we just talk about the role of landscape here? Can you tell us a bit about the Cornish connection? Yes, he made this journey, as Jane has pointed out, to Cornwall in 1870, and it was for him like a journey to a mythical kingdom, the way he represents it after, to Leoness, and she actually lived quite near Tintagel.

So the fact that she was dissolved and he was Tristan was one of the sort of myths which he plays when he reconfigures her. And this mythical journey to Cornwall was one in which he escaped his family, and he found this very unpredictable woman who had this pony called Fanny, and she used to ride up and down the shore on this pony. And it took him out of his entire kind of cautiousness. And he fell in love with the fact that he didn't know what she was going to do next. And that is all kind of mapped on to the Cornish landscape

and the unpredictable Cornish weather. Oh, the open, the sapphire of that wandering western sea as he opens Beanie cliff. And so the Cornish landscape is one in which Emma is figured as the genius Lockheye, to use the kind of Latin phrase, the idea that she is the spirit of the place. She actually didn't like Cornwall very much. She was from Devon, and she spent only seven years in Cornwall, and she was rather harsh in some recollections about the Cornish people,

and Plymouth was always her favourite city, and she believed that she was a Devonian. But Hardy, in his imagination, has this image of her on her horse, on the Cornish coast, and that has become one of the most powerful images in English poetry, I think, and it incarnates for him freedom, excitement, exhilaration, romance, all the things which had previously been lacking in his life. He does have the generosity to say that she unlocked something in him which he now had him to write a lot better.

Oh yes, he was very, very generous in his depictions of her. As well as those 21 poems in poems 1912, 13, there are over 100 other poems about Emma. I mean, he literally could not stop writing poems about Emma, and they are tributes. The terrible thing is that none of these poems were published before she died. He only published one poem called Ditty, which is a sort of tribute to her.

before she died. After she died, the floodgates opened and he recreates with this astonishing ability to remember events from 40 years before, as Tim quoted that a bit from his autobiography about being able to disinterer emotion as fresh as one first experienced. And what is so startling about these poems,

not just the 1912, 13, but the other Emma poems is how he can recreate tiny incidents like the fact that she left the greenhouse unwarmed one night and all the plants died and that becomes the donne of a poem or once he sees her standing in a quarry with green slates and that becomes the donne for a poem. So these little incidents from that magical week that he spent with her are all transformed into this myth. The magical first week. Yeah, the magical first week of March 7th to March 11th or just five days really.

And then he's left regretting that he never was able to say to her in life the things that he was able to to say to her in these poems which he wrote after she died. Would you like to take that up, Jane? I think we have to make a big leap of faith and try and detach the poems from the biography because when we do that, we see how the poems can really generously open up that limited plurality of meaning, which means that they can speak to us now without knowing the biography.

We don't know how much of that is true. We're looking at the art to recreate the life. and art, as we know, is fiction. It's fabrication. You mentioned, I think, Ditty. In that poem, the narrator says, Here is she, seems written everywhere to me. So he's already talking about the spirit of place,

that this idea of Emma is embroidered on the landscape, a bit like a sampler. You could see that poem as the beginning of this creation of the genius, Lockheye, the creation of the landscapes of the mind. Does the poem The Voice have any bearing on this? The poem, the voice has a lot of bearing on this as well. Could you tell us something about it?

Yes, it's, I think, one of the greatest elegies, again, in the English language. What do you read a little bit? I used to know it by heart. I'll try. And I'm glad you asked me to read it, because what's interesting about that is the narrator is totally engendered. And once you engender the narrator, that voice then becomes a poignant expression for anybody who's ever lost anybody dear to them. It's a great poem for our time, I think. our times now.

Could be a mother, could be a sister, could be a lover, could be anybody. Woman much missed. How you call to me, call to me, saying that now you were not as you were when you had changed from the one who was all to me, but as at first when our day was fair, can it be you that I hear?

Let me see 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? Or is it only the wind in its wistlessness coming across the wet me here? You being ever dissolved to one whistlessness heard no more again, far or near. Thus I, faltering forward, leaves around me falling, wind oozing thin through the thorn from Norwood and the woman calling.

You see, I can't read that without getting that. When you do read it, you're right by heart. You get that catch in that last stanza And we have to think about the artistry Of how Hardy writes these poems He is a poet He says poetry is emotion put into measure The emotion must come by nature But the measure can be acquired by art

And when you see that poem Moving from those lovely lyrical Dactylics, you know, strong week-week All the way through, it lowers you in And at the end you get that break Thus eye gap faltering forward. And it's a wonderful poem about the on-pass of grief,

about how one moves forward after grief, one falters forward after grief. And you do get that sense of the narrator of the poem, let's leave Hardy out of it, the narrator of the poem stuck in that trying to recapture, trying to see the person who's been lost, but knowing that they never will. Whose voice is it we hear?

Is it the woman's voice? Is it the narrator's voice? Who's actually narrating the poem for us? or is it just the wind? That's that wonderful thorny aeolian harp image of the wind oozing thin through the thorn from Norwood. And I think he gets that from Sappho, actually, that idea of the broken tongue,

that wrestling of language into communication so that you can communicate with people across the centuries about that sense of loss that he's describing there. It's one of my favourite poems. That's wonderful. Tim, just to take that on or up anyway, how can you distinguish what he thinks or what he is, or whether the poem is something apart from him that takes on its own life now? That might sound like a model to some people, but not to people who write, and I'm sure not to you.

So could you explain it? It's a very difficult question because Hardy himself insisted that his poems were personas, projections. Walter Dillamere put it very nicely when he wrote an understanding. early review that the effect of even the most objective of his poems is that of a tale being told of an experience being described, of a memory or secret being related by a man whose face we can see, whose voice we can hear, whose ghostly presence. It's extraordinarily close to us. So it's not just a dramatic monologue. It's something that sucks us in with a kind of presence with the idea of the secret of the self and the feeling persons somehow behind it, but

abstracted and often de-contextualized. He writes a number of poems like, for example, the wound or the something that saved him, which we get an emotion. In the wound he says he sees the sunset and he says it's like that wound of mine, but then he

doesn't ever tell us what the wound was. He doesn't tell us what the something that saved him was. So we get emotion that's curiously abstracted in that kind of poem. Mark, can we talk about Hardy was keen on philosophy? Yes, a lot of his poems present the death of God in a sort of in a nutshell.

There's one called God's Funeral, and that sort of sums up pretty much. The main philosophic message that he wanted to communicate to his readers was that the old faiths no longer held. And that's what makes Hardy kind of modern. And he, as he read very widely, from Darwin through to Einstein in terms of he kept up with modern thought. and he did incorporate modern ideas. He read Korn Bergson as well, and he did incorporate modern ideas into his poems so that he does look forward to 20th century ideas

in which the great problem is, how do we live in a world in which nobody believes in God anymore? And Hardy took that, sort of, that was his major philosophical breakthrough that God didn't exist. And yet he was very, very churchy, to use his own phrase,

and he loved churches. I think there were like 70 poems set in gravey. yards in Hardy's Irv so he really was obsessed with the whole left by the loss of God. And his own poetry both insists on that time and again, but also finds ways of not exactly making up for it, but what he puts instead was the notion of loving kindness. Was he going against the grain of his audience of the time when you were saying that so emphatically? Yes, I mean, the mid-Victorian period was the period in which belief God was extremely strong

and the whole Gothic architecture movement in which Hardy committed to himself initially was a kind of idealistic religious movement. One of the reasons Hardy couldn't go on being a Gothic architect was because of the loss of belief in what Gothic churches were for which is

to communicate with God. But I would slightly at this point like to mention how important Gothic was to him as well as a way of exploring philosophy that the Gothic was this vast notion that the artwork could have lots of different facets to it and be all over the place. And Hardy's enormous 900-page collected poems is like a vast Gothic cathedral with niches here and niches there of all kinds of gargoyles, funny poems, ballad poems, sonnets.

There's dozens and dozens of sonnets by Hardy. He could turn his hand to anything like a good Gothic architect. And that creation of poetry was for him, in my belief, a kind of substitute. for the loss of belief in God. Jane, he wanted to pay attention to the world as it was, and the world as it was then. It was a great deal to do with war. But can you talk about his war poetry?

Because I don't think it's very often mentioned. No, he's not often collected because he wasn't a combatant, so I think people felt that he didn't really experience war, but of course, Dorchester was a garrison town, and he knew a lot of the people who actually went and died on the fields in South Africa and the two war wars, but also in World War I. You know, he rubbed shoulders with people who had lost brothers and sons and husbands.

So, you know, he writes about the people left behind, the people who were dealing with loss. The people below history? Yes, the people who are not part of history. Hardy said, what are my books, but one plea against man's inhumanity to man, woman and the lower animals. And for him, war was an abomination. He just couldn't understand.

He has a poem called The Sick Battle God. It's interesting to compare his drummer with Rupert Brook, isn't it? Oh, indeed, yes. How would you do that? Well, Hardy is anti-nationalism, he's anti-patritism, he's anti-empire. We're all part of the Great Web. If you read transformations, he believes that we're all connected, men, women, animals, we're all connected there.

And Rupert Brooks soldier, there is a portion of a foreign field that is Forever England. Hardy's drummer Hodge, portion of that unknown. Field will Hodge forever be. There you get the difference, I think. Drummondoge is another wonderful, understated, magnificently touching poem. It's artfully put next to a poem called a Christmas ghost story where a mouldering soldier says, what's happened to the cause that Christ died for? You know, we're still killing one another.

And then you get Drummer Hodge the way that human beings can feel unhoused, unhomed, by dreadful things like war. How can you comprehend the idea of war? And Droma Hodg is unhomed by being on the South African plain. The stars are foreign, the constellations are foreign. He doesn't understand them. He doesn't recognise patterns, and you'll know that Hardy's heroes like Gabriel Oak

recognize star patterns. They can tell the time of the day. They can tell the time of the year from the star patterns. Hodge doesn't recognize this foreign landscape. And yes, he's thrown in. They throw in drummer Hodge on coffin just as found. As a boy, yes. As a boy.

And of course he's Hodge. So he stands for the amalgamation of the rural peasantry that the Victorian middle class like to dump altogether as Hodg. Hardy specifies him. He's a specific person. He's also a drummer. So he's not carrying arms, which makes it more poignant. He's leading them into battle.

And if you read his account of the Napoleonic Wars and the dynast, I think that the most touching passages there are often to do with those who are thrown out of history with the English army dying at Walsharing or the retreating French soldiers dying on the return from Moscow that the people whom he calls in another poem the hurt misrepresented names who come at each year's brink and cry to history to do them justice

or go past them dumb. In this body of work, Jim, is there much experimentation? There is quite a lot about Hardy that could be called experimental. One thing is his use of words, his lexicon, which, as all the reviewers noted, included what one reviewer called Seeing All the Words in the Dictory on One Plain. So he mixes old and new words, coinages like whistlessness, dialect, jagged, syntactic edges. He's also quite surreal sometimes in his imagery. One of my favorite images is that of the moon described.

like a drifting dolphin's eyes seen through a lapping wave. And he's also, I think, quite exploratory in his topics. So he writes a poem on abortion. He writes a poem on what it's like to burn a photo of someone you loved. He writes about Dorset dialect being rather like German in the middle of the war. He writes about Jesus being fathered by a centurion. So he writes all these poems which are quite transgressive in a way in the subject matter. Mark, can you talk a little about...

the way he compared himself to the great writers. He hero-worship Shelley, and Keats also was someone... Does that part do with Shelley being a baronet? Well, Shelley had a pretty lively life, and Hardy rather envied his kind of sexual irresponsibility, very different from Hardy's own cautiousness. But I think we can't escape the fact that Hardy really like the idea of social mobility being him. Hardy is one of the most astonishing feats of upward mobility

in the history of the 19th or 20th century, that he goes from being the son of a Mason to hobnobbing with the aristocracy and dining with the Prime Minister and being buried in Westminster Abbey or most of him, his heart was left in Stinsford. And his poetry, he always thought of as a higher form of achievement

than his novel writing. Why was you so sure that that was the case? The poetry granted immortality. Because in 1861, he got Paul Graves' Golden Anthology and that was made by a friend of Tennyson's Paul Grave and he thought this was the book that he wanted to write a poem that would go in a book as good as Paul Grave.

He said that was one of his last thoughts in a notebook was I just wanted all my life to have a write a poem that could get into an anthology as good as Paul Graves. Well, in the end he wrote a lot. And he found, he struck a chord with lots of young modern poets as well.

Tim has mentioned Walter de la Merr, enormous admirer, so was Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost in America takes a lot of his concept of the speaking voice. It takes a lot from him, doesn't it? From Hardy, yes, indeed. And then he had a huge influence on subsequent generations of poets.

But the ones, I think he ends pretty high. Shakespeare, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning were the poets with whom he felt he could kind of get into the ring. At the core of him, there is this, an ambition to be a great poet, which runs throughout his life, goes underground while he's a novelist, but it is the central vision of his own destiny. that he will be a great poet. Joan? Well, he had a great influence on the modernist poets

and one doesn't always think about that, really. I mean, Elliot couldn't stand him, but Pound was a massive fan. Orden thought that he would never have got through from the Tennysonian idea of the Victorianism through to Elliot of the modernism. It hadn't been for Hardy. Hardy carried him through,

Orden said he was half in love with Hardy. And Pound said, no man can read Hardy's poems collected, but that his own life, forgotten moments of it, will come back to him. A flash here and an hour there. Have you a better test of poetry? Can we use... As we come into all at the end of the programme,

go towards one of the things that people reached to him for, his observations of nature. What about the darkling thrush? Hardy was the great poet of occasion, and he liked to write a poem on New Year's Eve. There are lots of poems. So he would set out New Year's Eve with his notebook and his pencil looking for a subject.

It's that New Year's Eve always used to inspire him. Of course, the Darkling Thrush is the end of the decade, the end of the century, the end of the millennium, and therefore very poignant. And in the Darkling Thrush, I think you have that wonderful undecidability that you get in the voice. Depending on your state of mind, you can read the end of that poem, some blessed hope whereof he knew and I was unaware positively. This is an aged thrush, singing his last song on the bleakest day of the year. A very aged thrush.

A very aged thrush, frail gaunt and sports. Small. Thank you, just like Hardy, at that time. They resembled one another. Is this a great outpouring of hope for the new century, or is it some blessed hope whereof the narrator simply couldn't see it? I was unaware. I couldn't see it.

And that tension, I think, is what drives that poem forward. I think what's particularly interesting is a late sequence of poems he wrote in the 20s, in which he simply observes the natural world. Almost nothing happens in them. They're not concluded. and that might include watching a cat in the snow in a London garden, it might include watching birds. He was fascinated with birds and wrote dozens of bird poems,

some of them are about cage birds, but he saw birds as the way that nature renews himself. The song is always the same, the song returns, but it's a different bird. It's very much a Darwinian vision of nature, though, isn't it? It's that one bird is replaced by another bird, and each bird begets a further generation of birds. So it is a notion that the world is driven by necessity, and nature is not idealised in Hardy at all.

It's often terrible weather in Hardy poems, for instance, and often things are not particularly pastoral or idyllic at all. So it's often a scene which is very recognisable. A kind of muddy field would be the kind of archetypal hardy nature. So it's not that he was romanticising nature in the way in which someone like Wordsworth addresses nature is somehow educating him. He sees nature.

in some ways, as in that permanent neutral tones which we discussed, something which is inscrutable. It doesn't mean anything necessarily. We happen to be in nature, and we don't know why, and that's our situation. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Jane Thomas, Mark Ford and Tim Armstrong, and to our studio engineer, John Boland. Next week, it's the gold standard,

which spread from London around the world from the 1870s and its claimed helped trade flourish. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Does anybody want to read a poem? Do you like to read something? Shadow on the Stone, can I read that one?

Yeah, sure. Which is sort of Orphic, isn't it really? Yes, yeah. Can we say a little about it before you, if you want to? It's part of the, is it part? No, no, it's not. This is what's interesting about poems 1912 after 13, because they are magnificently structured.

They're not just outpourings of grief. and he adds three poems to them. He takes some away, doesn't he? And then he pulls out their logic in later poems. Yeah. So the kind of the Orphic quest comes out. That's right. This is very much about Orpheus and Eurydice.

You can see it. And it could have been in poems of 1912-13 because the biographicalist would say it's about being in the garden, expecting to see Emma with her trowel in the garden and feeling, sensing her presence. but again, if you've lost someone dear to you, it will speak to you, this one will speak to you. I went by the druid stone that broods in the garden white and lone,

and I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows that at some moments fall thereon from the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing, and they shaped, in my imagining, to the shade that a well-known head and shoulders through there when she was gardening. I thought her behind my back, yea, her I long had learnt to lack, and I said,

I'm sure you're standing behind me, though how did you get into this old track? And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf, as a sad response. And to keep down grief, I would not turn my head to discover that there was nothing in my belief. Yet I wanted to look and see that nobody stood at the back of me, but I thought once more, nay, I'll not envision a shape which somehow there may be. So I went on softly from the glade and left her behind me, throwing her shade, as she were indeed in apparition my head unturned

lest my dream should fade now he began that in 1913 he finished it in 1916 so you can see him working at that idea to get the right expression of it I read a short one called the self-unseeing

which is about returning to the cottage where he was born in higher Bokhampton 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. Child like I danced in a dream. Blessings emblazoned that day. Everything glowed with a gleam. Yet we were

looking away. He's very characteristic that poem, always in Hardy. He's just missed the experience. He's always writing a poem about an experience that he was unable to experience in the moment in which it happened. So this kind of ghostly poetic recreation of the experience comes through self-unseeing, unself-consciousness in the moment and it then translates into a really hypnotic little poem. We mentioned that Larkin was a great follower of Hardy, but the poet who quotes that poem is in fact Haini,

who took Hardy as someone who could inspire his own localism in his poem The Birthplace. And he cites afterwards Hardy's poem as an example of the marvelous rooted in everyday and calls it a bringing of human existence into a fuller life. So I think Hini is an important inheritor of Hardy too. But yes, the poem I'll read is another short poem in time of the Breaking of Nations, which takes its origin from Jeremiah. As with many of his poems, it's about, in a sense,

rehearing or re-experiencing a Psalm or a fragment of the Bible, and it's suddenly blossoming into meaning in the way that Mark has suggested. So only a man harrowing clods in a slow, silent walk, with an old horse that stumbles and nods, half asleep as they stalk. only thin smoke without flame from the heaps of cooch grass yet this will go on with the same

though dynasties pass yonder a maiden her white come whispering by war's annals will cloud into night ere their story die 1915 It was actually inspired by the Franco Prussian War of 1870

He was in Cornwall and he saw this horse harrowing the field and then 35 years later the image resurfaces and he applies it to the First World War Yes and he's probably also remembering the Volcano-like smoke of Cooch Grass in his own Noel

Desperate Remedies and other traces I mean that's the interesting thing also about his trip to Cornwall that not only is he remembering but he's carrying with him I think his own romance novel a pair of Blue Eyes in which he had written about Emma effectively and those

landscapes though he'd given it a tragic ending within his death. And he rehearses it all in the world beloved. Yes. You know, it's all there in the world beloved way before Hermann dies. But we mentioned... So his own texts are coming back to haunted in that sense. Pound again saw the poems as a distillation of all his novels. You know, he said, oh, there's the harvest of having

written so many novels. So Pound saw a connection between the two careers. I wanted just to say this, because everybody thinks about Hardy as being a miserable writer. and depressing. But it was Larkin who said deprivation is to me

what daffodils are to Wordsworth. And we said that Hardy is the great poet of loss and desire and yearning. I just wanted to quote Florence Hardy talking to Sydney Cockerel in 1920. It's about the mummers at Christmas time had just been and Hardy had enjoyed the mummer's visit. And she said, he is now, this is Hardy.

He is now this afternoon writing a poem with great spirit, always a sign of well-being with him. Needless to say, it is an intensely dismal poem. It can be very funny. I mean, and we'll end on this time. The ruin made is very funny. You ain't been ruined, said she. Yeah, yeah.

Challenge this girl who left the town and been, her eyes, her hands were blue from peeling spuds and all the rest. And she ends up in London. She's met by a friend who, and she's in fine feathers, and she's got a great, lovely dress and all the rest of it, because she's been ruined. Some polish she's gained with one's ruined. That's right.

He's there for the pragmatist, isn't he? Even in something like the man he killed, you know, he says, well, I'm sure the man he killed was just the same. He'd just sold up his traps, he'd take the king's shilling, he was after a better life. And here is the ruined maid doing the same and being met with great envy. Again, I think it's a very risky poem, as you were saying, Mark, but...

Yeah, I think it comes out of his going to the musical hall. It's got a musical poem in some ways. The Ruin Maid was a feature in Victorian musicals. Imagine it on the musical stage. It was actually done by Elson. Lancaster when she did a music hall kind of routine. But if you compare it with his depiction of Tess after Angel finds her in the boarding house

as a ruined maid, as a courtesan, and, you know, Angel is completely and Hardy himself is completely aghast at the tragedy of Tess, but here's the other side of it, turning it into a comic turn. Yeah. Well, thank you all very much indeed. That was terrific. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello. I've got a story to tell you.

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