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In Our Time
Thomas Hardy's Poetry (Archive Episode)
00:50:45
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Hardy's goal of being a great poet and how he succeeded.
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- [00:00]
Melvyn Bragg
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Flu season is here and our pharmacies have you covered with a free flu shot with most insurance plans. Plus it's cough and cold season and now through December 2nd. Stock up on all the season's essentials and get ready for relief with discounts on items like Mucinex, Cold and Flu Kickstart, Mucinex, Fast Max products, Vicks, Dayquil and Nyquil Combo Pack. Alka Select Also Airborne and afrin offers end December 2nd. Restrictions apply and offers may vary by location. Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.
- [00:39]
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- [01:39]
Melvyn Bragg
And now, to mark the end of his 27 memorable years presenting in Our Time, we have Melvin Bragg to introduce the next in our series of his most cherished episodes.
- [01:51]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
What's made My time Presenting in Our Time so stimulating is that one week I'd be getting to grips with something I know little about the innermost workings of the atomic nucleus, for example. And another could be something very close to my heart. Thomas Hardy's poetry is one of those. We recorded this just as we were returning to normal after Covid and so everyone could be back in the studio. It was glorious to resume face to face conversations with our 3D deeply read guests who cared deeply about Hardy. 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 1912-13, responding to his grief at the death of his first wife Emma, who was neither his first love or his last. It was the muse who'd made his writing. Possible with me to discuss Thomas Hardy'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 Hull 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 Hardy's early life that's relevant to his poetry?
- [03:19]
Melvyn Bragg
His enthusiasm for poetry did develop while he a teenager. He was born in 1840 in High Bockhampton, which is about three miles from Dorchester, quite near Stinsford, which becomes the Mellstock of Wessex. His father was in the church choir, I think, is 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 and then the 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.
- [04:14]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Local schools?
- [04:15]
Melvyn Bragg
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 an 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.
- [04:35]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
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?
- [04:40]
Melvyn Bragg
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.
- [04:59]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
When he moved to London to continue his work as an architect clerk, he still kept writing poetry there.
- [05:05]
Melvyn Bragg
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 dominate 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.
- [05:50]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
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 lauded beauties carried off from me My eyes no longer stars as in their prime My name forgot of maiden 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 mine 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 a touch of ill will you not grant to old affections Claim the hand of friendship down life's sunless hill. I think that's fantastic. I just wanted an indication of what he was writing at the time he was rejected.
- [06:56]
Melvyn Bragg
He was writing a lot of sonnets in the voice of this woman who was 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 Donne. 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 emotionally charged.
- [07:30]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Well, I think they're very emotionally charged. I mean, he's. He'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 would 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.
- [07:48]
Melvyn Bragg
And there was a vogue for sonnets in the Victorian period, so it. And. And I think they reflect the influence of George Meredith as well, particularly the modern love sequence.
- [07:57]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
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?
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Jane Thomas
Because he knew he would make more money. Writing poetry was not the best way to make money. And between 1970, sorry, 1871 and 1878, he was writing roughly a novel a year, which is phenomenal when you think about it. But around about the 1880s, he lost his way. The novels he produced, Aleo de Sea and Hand of Ethelberta, 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 Maxgate. 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 Woodlanders, Tess of the d', Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure and well Beloved. He'd always claimed that he'd aimed at making his novels as close to poetry, but he felt hampered by the constraints of realism. And I think if you read the well Beloved, you can see that working there, he's moving against realism and towards something more poetic.
- [09:16]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Can you tell us about Emma, his first wife, and what she meant to him? At first? She opened the door.
- [09:21]
Jane Thomas
She opened the door. Indeed. Mock's already mentioned that his mother was a great influence in helping him to concentrate on being a writer rather than an architect. And so did Emma. They both were responsible for encouraging. He met Emma on the 7th of March in 1870 in St Juliet, where he'd been sent by Crick May, 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 horse woman. 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 1870. 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.
- [10:55]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Thank you very much, Tim Armstrong. For the purposes of this program, we're concentrating much more on poetry. So, extraordinary, after the great success he had with his novels, particularly with Tessa the d', Urbervilles, he quit novels and this strange reception for Jude the Obscure. And for the next 38 years, Rainbow went back to and wrote poetry, wrote over 900 poems. Can you discuss that switch?
- [11:18]
Mark Ford
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.
- [11:32]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
So you're saying that the reception of Jude the Obscure was one of the big things that made him stop writing novels?
- [11:38]
Mark Ford
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 Dinas, 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 Dynast. 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 1919, 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.
- [13:04]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
He was a man, we're told, that he fell in love very easily.
- [13:08]
Mark Ford
He began to become interested in women other than his wife, in the period around 1890, and had a liaisons with women in that period, and that included people like Florence Henniker, who remained a friend for the rest of his life. He also began to have a relationship with Florence Dugdale 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.
- [13:42]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
I think we can move back to Mark. Maybe we could discuss a poem called Neutral Tones, and so where that came or what it meant.
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Mark Ford
Yeah.
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Melvyn Bragg
Hardy wrote a lot of poems in the 1860s when he was living in Hard 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 Nicholls, who was a lady's maid who lived quite close to him in Westbourne Park Villa. She lived in Orsett Terrace. And this poem is a terrifically BLE 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 Hardy 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 skepticism 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.
- [15:46]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
There's a sense that romance in him is connected with loss and death.
- [15:50]
Melvyn Bragg
It is that's.
- [15:51]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Obviously, death prompts great love.
- [15:54]
Melvyn Bragg
Yes. I mean, some go as far as to think of Hardy as 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 were. 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.
- [16:21]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Jane, how do you react?
- [16:22]
Jane Thomas
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 their. 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.
- [16:54]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
The fame as a novelist.
- [16:55]
Jane Thomas
Yeah, the fame as a 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 Maxgate and Emma became.
- [17:09]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Maxgate is the house that.
- [17:10]
Jane Thomas
The house Hardy designed and his father and brother built for him. Yeah. 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, wrote 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 she. 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 Dugdale, Emma confided to Florence.
- [17:50]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
28 years younger than him.
- [17:51]
Jane Thomas
Yes, ostensibly. Quite cleverly, if you like, as Emma's companion. Emma confided to Florence that she thought Thomas was resembling Crippin, who'd been on trial at that point for the murder of his wife. They were very estranged and Hardy and.
- [18:06]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
She was quite complicated. Her father had been in an asylum.
- [18:12]
Jane Thomas
I think a lot of that is speculation.
- [18:14]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Well, he was certainly an alcoholic. Is that not speculation?
- [18:16]
Jane Thomas
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, you know, male critics who very much take Hardy's side.
- [18:26]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
You don't need an excuse, I'm sure.
- [18:29]
Jane Thomas
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 27th 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 courtship.
- [19:50]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
What I thought of My husband.
- [19:52]
Jane Thomas
Why 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.
- [20:20]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Early romance and those extraordinary poems. Can we turn to you, Tim? Can you unpick those poems? The collection 1912, those few years where more than a score of poems around Emma, which I think some of the best loved poems in their language.
- [20:40]
Mark Ford
Yes. Hardy takes the traditional elegy 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 refinds 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. He recognizes his own culpability in their relationship, but he nevertheless, as Jane says, seeks to refind 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.
- [21:47]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
She's, in effect, a ghost, though she is.
- [21:49]
Mark Ford
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 a voiceless ghost. So he shifts the poem from interviewing her, talking the idea of interchange, to looking at her, finding an image for her.
- [22:11]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
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 taken on a young woman who is supposed to be her secretary. He's flirting with society ladies all over the place, and he brings this great outpouring of largely positive regret. How do you account for that?
- [22:32]
Mark Ford
Hardy always said that he had a faculty for burying 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 refind 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 that everything. 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.
- [23:06]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Thank you very much.
- [23:10]
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- [23:42]
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Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Mark these poems take Senator 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?
- [24:54]
Melvyn Bragg
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 Lyonesse. And she actually lived quite near Tintagel. So the fact that she was Isolde 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 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 onto the Cornish landscape and the unpredictable Cornish weather of 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 loci, 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. She spent only seven years in Cornwall, and she was rather harsh in some recollections about the Cornish people. And Plymouth was always her favorite city and she believed in 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.
- [26:27]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
He does have the generosity to say that she unlocked something in him which enabled him to write a lot better.
- [26:31]
Melvyn Bragg
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 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 bit from his autobiography, about being able to disinter 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 greenhouse slates, and that becomes the daun for a poem. So these little incidents from that, that magical week that he spent with her are all transformed into this.
- [27:38]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
The magical first week.
- [27:39]
Melvyn Bragg
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 say to her in these poems which he wrote after she died.
- [27:55]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Would you like to take that up, Jane?
- [27:57]
Jane Thomas
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, its fabrication. You mentioned, I think, Ditti 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 loci, the creation of the Landscapes of the Mind.
- [28:46]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Does the poem, the Voice have any bearing on this?
- [28:48]
Jane Thomas
The poem, the Voice has a lot of bearing on this poem.
- [28:50]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Could you tell us something about it?
- [28:52]
Jane Thomas
Yes, it's. It's, I think, one of the greatest elegies again in the English language. 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 called to me, called 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 mead to me here you being ever dissolved to one wistlessness 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.
- [30:14]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Getting ready by heart.
- [30:17]
Jane Thomas
You get that catch in that last stanza, and we. 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, dactylic, you know, strong, weak, weak all the way through. It lures you in, and at the end you get that break. Thus I gap faltering forward. And it's a wonderful poem about the en. 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. It's. It's. Ah. 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 favorite poems.
- [31:42]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
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 muddle to some people, but not to people who write, and I'm sure not to you. So could you explain it?
- [32:02]
Mark Ford
It's a very difficult question because Hardy himself insisted that his poems were Personas, projections. Walter de la Mer put it very nicely when he wrote in an 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 is 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 person somehow behind it, but abstracted and often decontextualized. He writes a number of poems, like, for example, the Wound or the something that saved him, which. In which we get an emotion in the wound. He says he sees a 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.
- [33:06]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Mark, can we talk about. Hardy was keen on philosophy.
- [33:11]
Melvyn Bragg
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 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 Kahn 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 graveyards in Hardy's oeuvre. 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.
- [34:29]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Was he going against the grain of his audience of the time when he was saying that so emphatically?
- [34:34]
Melvyn Bragg
Yes. I mean, the mid Victorian period was the period in which belief in 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.
- [35:40]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Jane. He wanted to pay attention to the world as it was, and the world as it was then has 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.
- [35:51]
Jane Thomas
No, he's not often collected because he wasn't 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 in the two Boer wars, but also in World War I. You know, he rubbed shoulders with people who had lost brothers and sons and husbands. So he, 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. 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.
- [36:36]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
It's interesting to compare his drummer with Rupert Brooke, isn't it?
- [36:40]
Jane Thomas
Oh, indeed, yes.
- [36:41]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
How would you do that?
- [36:42]
Jane Thomas
Well, Hardy is anti nationalism. He's anti patriotism. 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 Drummer Hodge 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 Ramahaji's unhomed by being on the South African plain. The stars are foreign. The constellations are foreign. He doesn't understand them. He doesn't recognize 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 Uncoffin, 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 all together. As Hodge 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.
- [38:28]
Mark Ford
And if you read his account of the Napoleonic wars and the dinosaurs, 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 Walcheren or the retreating French soldiers dying on the return from Moscow. 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.
- [38:56]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
In this body of work, Jim, is there much experimentation?
- [39:01]
Mark Ford
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 plane. So he mixes old and new words, coinages like wistlessness, dialect, jagged syntactic edges. He's also quite surreal sometimes in his imagery. One of my favourite images is that of the moon, described like a drifting dolphin's eye 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. In their subject matter.
- [39:58]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Mark, can you talk a little about the way he compared himself to the.
- [40:02]
Melvyn Bragg
Great writers he hero worshiped Shelley and Keats also.
- [40:06]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Was someone Hardy to do with Shelley being a baronet.
- [40:09]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, Shelley had a pretty lively life and Hardy rather envied his kind of sexual irresponsibility very different from Hardy's own.
- [40:17]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
I think we can't escape the fact that Hardy really like the idea of social mobility being him.
- [40:22]
Melvyn Bragg
Hardy's 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.
- [40:47]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Why was he so sure that that.
- [40:48]
Melvyn Bragg
Was the case, that poetry granted immortality? Because in 1861 he got Paul Graves Golden Anthology, and that was made by a friend of Tennyson's, Palgrave, and he thought this was the book that he wanted to write, a poem that would go in a book as good as Palgrave. He said that was one of his last. One of his last thoughts, was in a notebook, was I just wanted all my life to write a poem that could get into an anthology as good as Palgrave's. 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 Mare, enormous admirer. So was Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Robert Frost in America. Takes a lot of his concept of the speechless voice.
- [41:31]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Takes a lot from him, doesn't it?
- [41:32]
Melvyn Bragg
From Hardy. Yes, indeed. And then he had a huge influence on subsequent generations of poets. But the ones I think he aimed at, 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.
- [42:01]
Jane Thomas
Joan well, he had a great, great influence on the modernist poets, and one doesn't always think about that, really. I mean, Eliot couldn't stand him, but Pound was a massive fan. Auden thought that he would never have got through from the Tennysonian idea of the Victorianism through to Eliot of the modernism if it hadn't been for Hardy. Hardy carried him through. Orton 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, an hour there. Have you a better test of poetry?
- [42:37]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Can we, just as we come towards the end of the program, go towards one of the things that people reach to him for his observations of nature? What about the Darkling Thrush?
- [42:48]
Jane Thomas
Hardy was the great poet of occasion, and he liked to write a poem on New Year's Eve. There are lots of poems.
- [42:54]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
So he would set out New Year's Eve with his notebook and his pencil, looking for a subject. That's great.
- [42:59]
Jane Thomas
New Year's Eve always used to inspire him, of course, the Darkling Thrushes, 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.
- [43:24]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
A very aged thrush.
- [43:25]
Jane Thomas
A very aged thrush, frail, gaunt and 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.
- [43:47]
Mark Ford
I think what's particularly interesting is a late sequence of poems he wrote in the twenties and 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 about caged 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.
- [44:18]
Melvyn Bragg
It's very much a Darwinian vision of nature, though, isn't it, 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 idealized 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 romanticizing nature in the way in which someone like Wordsworth addresses nature as somehow educating him. He sees nature in some ways as in that 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.
- [45:10]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Jane Thomas, Mark Ford and Tim Armstrong, and to our studio engineers, engineer John Boland. Next week, it's the gold standard which spread from London, around the world from the 1870s, and, it's claimed, helped trade flourish. Thanks for listening.
- [45:26]
Jane Thomas
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [45:33]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Does anybody want to read a poem? Do you like to read something?
- [45:37]
Jane Thomas
Shadow on the Stone. Can I read that one?
- [45:38]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Yeah, sure.
- [45:39]
Mark Ford
Which is sort of Orphic, isn't it?
- [45:41]
Jane Thomas
Yes. Yeah.
- [45:42]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Can you say a little about it before you. If you want.
- [45:45]
Jane Thomas
It's part of the. Is it part. Well, no, it's not. This is what's interesting about poems 1912-13, because they are magnificently structured. They're not just outpourings of grief.
- [45:56]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
And.
- [45:56]
Jane Thomas
And he adds three poems to them. He takes some away, doesn't he?
- [46:01]
Mark Ford
And then he pulls out their logic in later poems. Yeah, so. So the kind of. The Orphic quest comes out.
- [46:06]
Jane Thomas
That's right. This. This is very much. 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 lonely, 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 threw 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 do 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 unvision 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 an 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.
- [47:42]
Melvyn Bragg
I read a short one called the Self Unseeing, which is about returning to the cottage where he was born in Higher Bockhampton. Here is the ancient floor, foot worn 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. 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 really hypnotic little poem.
- [48:46]
Mark Ford
We mentioned that Larkin was a great follower of Hardy, but the poet who quotes that poem is in fact Heaney, 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 Heaney's 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 couch 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.
- [50:11]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah, 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.
- [50:26]
Mark Ford
Yes, and he's probably also remembered remembering the volcano like smoke of couch grass in his own knoll. Desperate remedies and other traces. I mean, that's the interesting thing also about his trip to Cornwall. 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'd written about Emma effectively in those landscapes, though he'd given it a tragic ending within his death rehearses.
- [50:52]
Jane Thomas
It all in the well beloved. Yes, you know, it's all there in the worbula way before Hermer dies. But we mentioned.
- [50:57]
Mark Ford
So his own texts are coming back to haunt him.
- [51:00]
Jane Thomas
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, you know, 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 Sidney Cockerell in 1920. It's about the mummers that Christmas time had just been and Hardy had enjoyed the mummers 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.
- [51:52]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
It can be very funny. I mean, we'll end on this now. The Ruined Maid is very funny. You ain't been ruined, said she. This challenge, this girl who'd left the town and. 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 too, 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.
- [52:14]
Jane Thomas
Some polishes gained with one's ruin, says she. I mean, he's there for the pragmatist, isn't he? Hardly. I mean, 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 just sold up his traps, he'd taken 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.
- [52:38]
Melvyn Bragg
I think it comes out of his going to the music hall. It's got a musical poem. In some ways they were. The Ruined Maid was a feature in Victorian music. It was actually done by Elsa Lanchester and 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. As a ruined maid, as a courtesan. And, you know, angel is completely. And then. And Hardy himself is completely, completely aghast at the tragedy of Tess. But here's the other side of it, turning it into a comic tone.
- [53:08]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Yeah, well, thank you all very much indeed. That was terrific.
- [53:12]
Melvyn Bragg
In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg is produced by me, Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios production.
- [53:19]
Mark Ford
Can you speak for 60 seconds on the time I went to Sue Perkins birthday party starting now.
- [53:24]
Jane Thomas
I wasn't invited.
- [53:27]
Asma Khalid
Sue Perkins returns with the One minute speaking challenge.
- [53:30]
Melvyn Bragg
That was the start of my secret.
- [53:33]
Mark Ford
Journey into the chasm of. What is he talking about?
- [53:39]
Asma Khalid
Panelists including Stephen Mangan Patterson Joseph and Zoe Lyons.
- [53:43]
Melvyn Bragg
I was only once invited to Sue Perkins.
- [53:46]
Mark Ford
Oh, aren't you lucky?
- [53:49]
Asma Khalid
The new series of Just a minute from BBC Radio 4.
- [53:52]
Melvyn Bragg
It's all quite bitter, isn't it?
- [53:54]
Jane Thomas
Welcome to the game.
- [53:54]
Melvyn Bragg (Host/Interviewer)
Oh, yeah.
- [53:55]
Asma Khalid
So listen now on BBC Sounds. America is changing and so is the world.
- [54:05]
Tristan Redman
But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval, it's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [54:13]
Asma Khalid
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington D.C. i'm.
- [54:16]
Tristan Redman
Tristan Redman in London and this is the global story.
- [54:20]
Asma Khalid
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [54:25]
Tristan Redman
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.