Essence Of Juniper

In the chapter Cliffrose And Bayonets from Desert Solitaire Abbey wrestles philosophically and emotionally with his favourite juniper tree: I've had this tree under surveillance ever since my arrival at Arches, hoping to learn something from it, to discover the significance in its form, to make a connection through its life with whatever falls beyond. Have failed. The essence of the juniper continues to elude me unless, as I presently suspect, its surface is also the essence. Two living things on the same earth, respiring in a common medium, we contact one another but without direct communication. Intuition, sympathy, empathy, all fail to guide me into the heart of this being - if it has a heart... At times I am exasperated by the juniper's static pose; something in its stylized gesture of appeal, that dead claw against the sky, suggests catalepsy. Perhaps the tree is mad...

Another significant, highly charged passage - so typical of Abbey. I think it's complex what he means here, a complexity which truthfully reflects our ambiguous relationship with nature. Just look at it closely. He has the tree "under surveillance"! What an interesting and revealing choice of phrase, suggesting both a stealthy wariness (it's almost as if the tree were up to no good or were suspiciously reluctant to bare its secrets) and also a certain clinical, scientific observation.

Abbey goes on to reinforce the idea that "surface" is also "essence" (an idea which should be familiar from my previous posts) - yet at the same time this isn't enough for him. He's obviously frustrated as hell at not being able to penetrate any further into the tree's essential tree-ness. He's actually "exasperated" that the tree is motionless, seemingly comatose, possibly "mad"! Despite his best intentions, he's anthropomorphizing the tree - something he philosophically never wanted to do!

So it seems inevitable and necessary that we have recourse to human words and emotions in order to relate to the non-human world, to bridge the gap between culture and nature. I would go further and say that it is good and right that we do so, and that we've now come full circle from the concept that words and feelings and human culture can alienate us from the natural world to the idea that they may in fact be the very things that connect us to it. But more of this tomorrow when I'll give support to this view from the English nature writer Richard Mabey...

A Hard And Brutal Mysticism

The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here [the desert near Moab, Utah] not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

I think this paragraph from The First Morning, the opening chapter of Desert Solitaire, is hugely important. In it - and in the piece quoted yesterday - Abbey makes clear the philosophy behind his summer sojourn in Arches National Monument, south-east Utah, as park ranger; and flags up the intention behind his writing of the book.

Yesterday's quote shows Abbey to be suspicious of those who claim to have found an "underlying reality", a hidden, universal metaphysic, an abtract, deep ground and meaning to existence. Instead he urges us to look closely, and register sensuously, the beauty and richness which lies before us as revealed directly by our sense impressions: "the surface of things". (And what a surface!)

In the above passage we read that Abbey wants "to look at and into [my italics] a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture" etc, to experience these natural objects as themselves and for what they really are, uncluttered as far as possible with the baggage of nomenclature, human emotional sentiment, anthropomorphism, and "cultural apparatus". He's attempting to get rid of the barrier between the thought-ful human person and the thought-less bird, beast and flower, or nighthawk, cougar and cactus. H's trying to grasp the "elemental and fundamental" in a direct, quasi-mystical way.

Kant gave us the concepts of "phenomena" (objects perceived by our 5 senses) and "noumena" (objects which are "things-in-themselves", existing as essences beyond the reach of human perception). Hence the term "anti-Kantian" - for Abbey dreams of removing that bridge between subject and object, perceiver and perceived.

Paradox - because it's hardly possible to do this, as Abbey himself knows full well, except perhaps in transitory flashes of illumination and insight. Such experiences are beyond rational thought, beyond speech - yet Abbey, and all the rest of us, only have words at our disposal with which to attempt even an approximate description. (Perhaps music is a more suitable and direct medium.) It's a human need and necessity to describe, collate, measure and put in some sort of order the world around us - yet by doing these things we automatically create a verbal and mental division between ourselves and raw, unhumanized nature.

So Abbey can only "dream" of this "hard and brutal mysticism". Indeed, if it's achieved, it's a risky business, and he says he may end up compromising "everything human" in himself.

The Surface Of Things

Like Chris Townsend and Forest Wisdom, I've been considering the legacy of Edward Abbey recently (Abbey died just over 20 years ago on 14th March 1989). For my money the man had all the right ideas about wilderness and the natural world and civilization. His book Desert Solitaire: A Season In The Wilderness is an unquestioned masterpiece - it's eloquent, passionate, poetic, unsentimental, witty, provocative, opinionated and belligerent. His aim is to shock us out of our habitual torpor. And he succeeds. I'd like to ponder this book in more depth when I've more time and energy than I have right now (I've been driving 1000 miles a week lately - don't know what Abbey would have made of that!) In the meantime here's a wonderful quotation from the author's introduction to the book, in which he sets out his stall:

I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact...

It will be objected that the book deals too much with the surface of things, and fails to engage and reveal the patterns of unifying relationships which form the true underlying reality of existence. Here I must confess that I know nothing whatever about true underlying reality, having never met any. There are many people who say they have, I know, but they've been luckier than I.

For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces - in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of friend or lover, the silk of a girl's thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind - what else is there? What else do we need?

Earth-Secrets

I know it's not August, and I know it's not yet midnight, and I know I said I'd put Hardy aside for a while ... but ... I've just read this, and it's so utterly delighful that I had to share it.

An August Midnight

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter - winged, horned and spined -
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While 'mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands ...

Thus meet we five, in this still place,
At this point of time, at this point in space.
- My guests besmear my new-penned line,
Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.
'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why?
They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

THOMAS HARDY

(A dumbledore is a bumble-bee or a cockchafer.)

Primitive Pleasures

What's the point of clearing a wider path to poetry? For me, the answer is essentially to do with poetry being primitive - a fundamental requirement of the human spirit. Think about how we first encounter it, in the corner of the playground, chanting. Taking a basic pleasure in like sounds. Relishing rhythm and rhyme. Enjoying the mystery and nonsense of words as well as their fixity and sense. We might grow up to learn sophisticated ways of elaborating those sounds, and a differently complicated language in which to appreciate and criticize. But if we do so in ways that ignore or suppress our primitive pleasures, we're denying something essential to poetry and essential to ourselves. In this respect, and remembering Keats's great remark that poetry had 'better not come at all' if it 'comes not as easily as leaves to a tree', I would say that poetry is as natural and necessary as breathing.

Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, writing in today's Guardian Review. (His tenure of the post comes to an end on 30 April this year.)

There's an excellent new poem by Andrew Motion also in today's Guardian - you can find it here.

So Various

I'll end this 9-post riff on Hardy with some quotations I jotted down while reading Claire Tomalin's terrific biography Thomas Hardy:The Time-Torn Man.

The wounds inflicted by life never quite healed in Hardy. Humiliation, rejection, condescension, failure and loss of love remained so close to the skin that the scars bled again at the slightest occasion. This is why many of his poems return to the griefs of the past. It is also why the rage that appears in his last novel, Jude The Obscure, was fuelled in the 1890s by the anger he felt in the 1860s.

The shifting feelings in a marriage, and in a family, are as complex and unpredictable as cloud formations.

Looking at the expensively dressed ladies at an evening party, he [Hardy] famously asked himself, 'If put into rough wrappers in a turnip-field, where would their beauty be?'

Hardy took some of his pessimism from Schopenhauer, who saw the world as malignant, God and immortality as illusions, and the extinction of the human race through chastity as an end to be sought: best of all not to be born. Yet he [Hardy] was always too imaginative to follow any one philosopher.

Here she [Tess] is reviving after disaster: 'some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpended youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.'

He [Hardy] was exact when he said a novel is not an argument but an impression, and this novel [Tess Of The D'Urbervilles] lives through its impressions of Tess and the landscapes through which she moves.

No one has ever claimed that the book [Tess Of The D'Urbervilles] is perfectly written or constructed, or without clumsiness, but it glows with the intensity of his [Hardy's] imagination; and Tess's capacity to arouse visceral distaste in some and profound affection and admiration in others is a measure of the sexual power he built into his heroine.

Leonard and Virginia Woolf paid a visit to Hardy in July 1926. Leonard Woolf wrote about the encounter: He is one of the few people who have left upon me the personal impression of greatness... He was a human being, not 'the great man'.

[The poem] So Various describes a man made up of contradictions, highly strung but also stiff and cold; a faithful lover but fickle too; pleased with his own cleverness but easily put down; always sad but cheerful company; cool to friends yet eager to please - all of course versions of himself.

(These posts have been a kind of blogging experiment in which I've tried to approach Hardy from all sorts of different perspectives - novels, poems, biography, philosophy, religion, romanticism, realism, nature, walking. No post was particularly preplanned. Each post just seemed to evolve spontaneously from the previous one - in the typical way of blogs. I hope something of my enthusiasm for Hardy has communicated; and if I've encouraged anyone to read or reread Hardy, that's great.)

(During my recent reading about Hardy I also jotted down all the adjectives I could find which were used to describe him by his family, friends and acquaintances. These are some of them: shy, introverted, kind, elusive, sphinx-like, ill-at-ease, depressive, private, lively, grey, self-possessed, unassuming, snobbish, mean, generous, unfathomable, quiet-mannered, curious, charming, unaffected, observant.)

Mechanic Speech And Mind-Chains

These are 2 of my favourite Hardy poems. The 1st is about the death of youthful romanticism and idealism - but paradoxically the poem's very existence, its form and expression, breathes fresh life into them. The 2nd poem is about the freedom of solitude, the liberation of mind and soul bestowed by the hills, compared with the memory-laden lowlands and the mean-spirited towns. Here, on the heights, one can keep ghosts at bay, and be rid of clanking "mind-chains". I have a feeling both of these poems may strike a chord with some of you.

Shut Out That Moon

Close up the casement, draw the blind,
Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.

Step not forth on the dew-dashed lawn
To view the Lady's Chair,
Immense Orion's glittering form,
The Less and Greater Bear:
Stay in; to such sights we were drawn
When faded ones were fair.

Brush not the bough for midnight scents
That come forth lingeringly,
And wake the same sweet sentiments
They breathed to you and me
When living seemed a laugh, and love
All it was said to be.

Within the common lamp-lit room
Prison my eyes and thought;
Let dingy details crudely loom,
Mechanic speech be wrought:
Too fragrant was Life's early bloom,
Too tart the fruit it brought!

1904

Wessex Heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend -
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -
Men with a wintry sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night,
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white,
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

1896

The Memory Of Belief

He could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief... From CLAIRE TOMALIN's biography Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man.

Hardy's novels were ahead of their time in the way they introduced subjects such as class inequality, sexual passion, and strong, independent women. Because of this he shocked and angered many of the more traditional critics and reviewers. His attacks on institutions like marriage and the Church resulted in the expurgation of his novels (which first came out in serial form) by his publishers - to Hardy's disgust. But he bowed to this, as he was modest and quiet-mannered in character; and, after all, he did want to make a living. Subsequent editions of his works were textually restored in their entirety.

As is the case with many imaginative novelists and artists, Hardy was ambivalent about many things, including religion. But there was no going back to the old certainties of Christian faith after the publication of Darwin's On The Origin Of Species in 1859 (Hardy was 19 years old when this earth-shattering, God-shattering book came out). He did of course know the book, and he had also read Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach - a pivotal poem of the 19th century about the melancholy induced by loss of Faith.

Here is the desolate but beautiful last verse of Matthew Arnold's famous poem (Arnold, poet, critic, essayist and school inspector - his father was Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School - was very much a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism, as Hardy was himself in some ways):

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The adjective "darkling" purposefully recalls the Romantic use of the same word in Ode To A Nightingale by Keats; and Hardy himself chooses this word in his celebrated poem The Darkling Thrush, which I posted previously.

I remember very well the effect that Dover Beach had on me the 1st time I read it in my teenage years. For me it was a kind of rite of passage poem. Somehow it marked a setting aside of childish things and the beginning of adulthood. One can see quite clearly how this poem points the way to the Existentialist ideas of the next century.

Beware The Ides Of March

I seem to have survived the Ides of March today relatively unscathed. I hope it's the same for all of you. Julius Caesar however was not so lucky:

Caesar. The ides of March are come.
Soothsayer. Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

Shakespeare's Caesar seems quite phlegmatic about death a short time before his assassination:

Caesar. Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

The conspirators stab Caesar, Brutus being the last to plunge in the knife, Brutus - Caesar's angel and his best loved senator:

Caesar: Et tu, Brute? - Then fall, Caesar!

Marc Antony laments Caesar's death:

Antony. O mighty Caesar! dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure?

There follows a battle of words between Brutus and Marc Antony which Antony wins hands down. Antony's speeches before the crowds in the Roman Forum are some of Shakespeare's greatest speeches - masterpieces of rhetoric, models of subtle insinuation and audience manipulation:

Antony. Friends, Romans, countrymen. lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar. not to praise him.

Antony. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
You all do know this mantle: I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on...

He keeps repeating that Brutus is an honourable man - the ironic repetitions casting doubt on the literal truth of this.

Antony wins over the hearts and minds of the Roman people, and the final outcome is curtains for Brutus - the noblest Roman of them all, as Antony ambiguously calls him at the end of the play.

One of the many great things about this drama is Shakespeare's complex portrayal of Brutus as patriot, misguided idealist and murderer.

(I was lucky enough to see a production of Julius Caesar performed by the RSC at Stratford in 2006.)

Something And Nothing To Say

A few last words about The Return Of The Native. As I've already said, this was Hardy's favourite among his novels, and it contains lightly disguised autobiographical elements.

Hardy was often called a Romantic by his readers and critics. Which he strongly repudiated, considering himself a Realist. This dichotomy is realized in his portrayal of Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye on the one hand, and Diggory Venn on the other. Clym and Eustacia embody 2 different kinds of romantic idealism - an idealism based on illusion, which founders in dejection, disappointment and, in Eustacia's case, death. Clym is enthusiastic about ideas but careless about outward things; Eustacia longs for a world beyond the Heath where she believes the grass grows greener. In contrast Venn, the reddleman, is rational, realistic, artful, practical and premeditated in his ways. He's isolated and independent, his own man, and closely associated with the Heath itself. He reminds one of Gabriel Oak in Far From The Madding Crowd. Although Venn finally marries Thomasin, Hardy did not originally intend this ending, preferring a wholly tragic conclusion. In fact there are both Romantic and Realist aspects to this novel - unsurprisingly, for Hardy himself was just such a mixture of opposing characteristics, as I described in yesterday's post.

Venn is a man of few words, but he's not afraid to speak when he has something to say. On this occasion he remains untalkative: 'Upon my life, it fairly startled me when the man spoke!' said Fairway, handing a candle. 'Oh - 'tis the reddleman. You've kept a quiet tongue, young man.''Yes, I had nothing to say,' observed Venn. In a few minutes he arose and wished the company good-night.

To finish with, here are some words Eustacia says to Clym: Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life... This is one of the novel's themes. The bitterness resulting from pride, stubbornness, deception and uncontrollable desire leads relentlessly to tragedy.

Walking: Creation And Revelation

The road became a theatre for action in his imagination... CLAIRE TOMALIN on THOMAS HARDY

I've finished The Return Of The Native (Hardy's own personal favourite of his novels) and I'm now immersed in Claire Tomalin's excellent and very readable biography Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (Viking, 2006). The blurb of this book presents Hardy as a paradoxical figure: one of the great Victorian novelists - and also one of the great twentieth-century poets ... a believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; a driven man who who ended his days in simplicity and serenity. Simplicity and serenity. Not a bad way in which to end one's days.

Every day the boy Hardy walked the 3 miles from his family cottage in Higher Bockhampton to school in Dorchester and back. Later he did the same trip in his 1st job as an architect's apprentice. A keen observer of nature and of people, he took in everything he saw during these daily walks - and these details impressed themselves on his mind and found their way into many of his writings.

As Tomalin says early in her biography: Walking the roads, meeting others on the road, exchanging news with travellers, being overtaken by riders, carts and carriers, or offered lifts, were all part of his daily experience throughout his boyhood, so that it is not surprising that the road became a theatre for action in his imagination and walking a central activity in his writing, used dramatically and to establish or underline character. Most of his charcters are prodigious walkers. Tess and Jude both walk themselves through the crises in their lives, and Jude effectively kills himself by walking in the rain. Gabriel Oak walks to find work, and Fanny Robin walks through the snow to plead with her lover, and then drags herself along the road to the workhouse, leaning on an obliging dog, to die. Elfride in A Pair Of Blue Eyes runs 'through the pelting rain like a hare; or more like pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a mind to fly, but does not.' The newly-wed lovers in Two On A Tower walk nine miles across country to a railway station to avoid being noticed. The Hand Of Ethelberta opens with Ethelberta, a young widow, taking a solitary walk on a heath, where she sees a wild duck being pursued by a hawk, runs after the birds to see what will happen and loses her way. At the beginning of The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Henchard is shown on the road, his character to be read not in his words but his walk: 'his measured springless walk was the walk of the skilled country man as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference, personal to himself.' And at the end of the book he leaves Casterbridge on foot, a diminishing figure going into the distance, and observed in fine detail: 'the yellow straw basket at his back moving up and down with each tread, and the creases behind his knees coming and going alternately.' In The Return Of The Native, Mrs Yeobright recognizes a distant, anonymous furze-cutter simply by his walk: 'a gait she had seen somewhere before; and the gait revelaed the man to her... "His walk is exactly as my husband's used to be," she said; and then the thought burst upon her that the furze-cutter was her son.'

(Claire Tomalin has also written acclaimed biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Dickens, Katherine Mansfield, Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys. She is married to the playwright, novelist and translator Michael Frayn.)

Education, Ambition, Career

Some quotations from The Return Of The Native. Humphrey, who is building a stack of furze-faggots for the old man, Eustacia's grandfather, says to him:

'They say, too, that Clym Yeobright is become a real perusing man, with the strangest notions about things. There, that's because he went to school early, such as school was.'

'Strange notions has he,' said the old man. 'Ah, there's too much of that sending to school in these days! It only does harm. Every gatepost and barn's door you come to is sure to have some bad word or other chalked upon it by the young rascals: a woman can hardly pass for shame sometimes. If they'd never been taught how to write they wouldn't have been able to scribble such villainy. Their fathers couldn't do it, and the country was all the better for it.'

(Clym Yeobright is the Egdon Heath native who returns home from Paris where he worked in a jeweller's shop.)

Some pages later Clym is talking to his status-conscious mother who nurses high ambitions for him. He confesses he is tired of the jewellery trade:

'Mother, I hate the flashy business. Talk about men deserving the name, can any man deserving the name waste his time in that effeminate way, when he sees half the world going to ruin for want of somebody to buckle-to and teach 'em how to breast the misery they were born to? I get up every morning and see the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain, as St. Paul says, and yet there am I, selling trinkets to women and fops, and pandering to the meanest vanities - I, who have health and strength enough for anything. I have been troubled in my mind about it all year, and the end is that I cannot do it any more.'

Mrs Yeobright responds disappointedly:

'And yet you might have been a gentleman if you had only persevered. Manager to that large establishment - what better can a man wish for? What a post of trust and respect! I suppose you will be like your father; like him, you are getting weary of doing well.'

'No,' said her son; 'I am not weary of that, though I am weary of what you mean by it. Mother, what is doing well?'

Mrs Yeobright was far too thoughtful a woman to be content with ready definitions, and, like the 'What is wisdom?' of Plato's Socrates, and the 'What is truth?' of Pontius Pilate, Yeobright's burning question received no answer.'

We can see above a local countryman's view of education. Clym Yeobright has been educated. A glittering career was expected of him in Paris. Yet he returns to his native soil - with (as it becomes clear a little later) idealistic but impractical ambitions.

I'll leave it at that. With just a few questions to ponder: what is education? Is it always a good thing? Is it a good thing to come back to one's birthplace - for good? (Clym, it turns out, has returned once and for all - finally to become a humble furze-cutter.) What is 'doing well'?

Socrates asked, 'What is wisdom?'

Pilate asked, 'What is truth?'

The Dew-fall Hawk

Leafing through my copy of Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (edited by Walford Davies, Everyman's Library, 1982), I find I still like many of the poems very much, but this one remains my firm favourite:

Afterwards

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
'He was a man who used to notice such things'?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
'To him this must have been a familiar sight.'

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.'

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
'He was one who had an eye for such mysteries'?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
'He hears it not now, but used to notice such things'?

Firstly there's the whole, luscious sound of it - "glad green leaves", "delicate-filmed as new-spun silk", "dewfall-hawk", "mothy and warm"...

Then there's the poignancy of it - Hardy is talking about a time when he will no longer be there to "notice" and witness the delights and "mysteries" of nature, and, by extension, to describe and celebrate these things in his writings.

And finally there's the unanswered question - "...will the neighbours say, 'He was a man who used to notice such things'?" Hardy hopes the answer is "yes" - and he would probably feel fairly sure of this answer, especially since all of his novels and many of his poems had already been published before this particular poem was written. But can we ever be sure of our own legacy, and whether or how we will live on in the minds and memories of others? Will our thoughts and actions, will our love of nature and "innocent creatures", will what we may like to think of as our keen senses and sensibilities - will they actually be remembered? Many prolific writers even, famous in their day, are now forgotten...

(I quoted briefly from this poem once before in my post Glad Green Leaves.)

Some Blessed Hope

Almost back to winter again this morning with frost and fog and a temperature of -2 degrees. This blog's been occupied with cold weather, songbirds and Thomas Hardy lately - so what better poem to quote today than Hardy's The Darkling Thrush.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

31 December 1900

Perfection.

The Novelty Of Pageantry

Loren Webster is discussing the novels of Thomas Hardy in his blog, starting with The Return Of The Native. I've been reading The Return Of The Native too. It struck me that there's a lot of walking done in Hardy's novels. At the beginning of Tess Of The D'Urbervilles Jack D'Urbeyfield walks tipsily home from the inn. Bathsheba Everdene meets Sergeant Troy for the 1st time on her routine evening ramble round her farm in Far From The Madding Crowd. And The Return Of The Native opens with an old man - who turns out to be The Captain, grandfather of Eustacia Vye - walking across desolate Egdon Heath.

As an example of the loveliness and smooth flow of Hardy's prose, I've chosen this paragraph which comes at the start of Chapter 1 of Book Second of The Return Of The Native. As a bonus, the passage also mentions walking!

On fine days at this time of year, and earlier, certain ephemeral operations were apt to disturb, in their trifling way, the majestic calm of Egdon Heath. They were activities which, beside those of a town, a village, or even a farm, would have appeared as the ferment of stagnation merely, a creeping of the flesh of somnolence. But here, away from comparisons, shut in by the stable hills, among which mere walking had the novelty of pageantry, and where any man could imagine himself to be Adam without the least difficulty, they attracted the attention of every kind of bird within eyeshot, every reptile not yet asleep, and set the surrounding rabbits curiously watching from hillocks at a safe distance.

What a wonderful description of the slow, rustic life of this remote, bleak heathland with its scatttered cottages and farmsteads - an existence where ordinary, unremarkable activities take on an aura of great significance.

Egdon Heath - gloomy, glorious, monotonous, mysterious. Egdon Heath - in many ways the main 'character' in the novel, and the backdrop against which the human characters play out their tragic destinies. Egdon Heath - symbol of Reality. If I may quote what Loren Webster commented to me about the Heath: I think Hardy uses Egdon Heath to symbolize REALITY, the Nature of things. It is our reaction to reality, and not to our stereotypes of reality, that determines our happiness. Reality is not always a pleasant place, so at best people are going to be unhappy and miserable at times, but they have their best chance for happiness if they understand and adapt to that Reality.