I’ve decided to write something once a day, and post it here, on every day of February. Having allowed myself to become entirely too accustomed to the silence inherent in both the spectating and the ruminating posture, a little verbal decalcomania seems healthy. It’s said that one of the oldest texts in any written language contains a scribe’s lament that nothing can possibly be said that has not already been said better elsewhere by others. While I might not unearth much that’s new, the act of attention is what enters from the broken ground to the dowsing rod, and strange new courses are forever seeking flow.
Poetry is about sound. Words composed have three dimensions: the page, the source, and the air. This third, spoken dimension is where stress, rhythm, and volume take form. To complete what it is, poetry requires a voice.
Thomas Hardy hated the poetic habit of “saying nothing with mellifluous precocity.”1 Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is a genius. He both read and knew personally Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning. He is one of the greatest poets to write in English. His parents did not send him to college, apprenticing him to an architect instead. Whatever received notions of Victorian class-stricture, -structure, -society spring to mind for this era, are apt: yet, architecture afforded Hardy access to much more of society than he would otherwise have had, either through his own social station (low) or through a collegiate education of the era (narrowly-lensed on convention and a subset of ruling-class interests). He worked as an architect in London before quitting to write novels. He first published novels, many written in the serialized form of the day, and after the opprobrium won by Jude the Obscure he returned to writing poetry.
An architect turned poet, Hardy perfects the professions of his father: stonemasonry and playing the fiddle. His earliest introduction to rhythm and sound was through folk music. Throughout his entire life, he read eclectically, voraciously, extensively, unguided by college or convention, from secondhand shops rather than syllabi. “Autodidact” is an anachronism and an insult to someone who taught himself Greek, Latin, Dante’s Italo-Latin, German, and French; who knew Shakespeare and the Bible, who read through and beyond the canon of the day’s convention. With the exception of ardor for Donne and Herbert, his style owes more to folk music and sung rhythms than to his contemporaries or predecessors.
Hardy married Emma Gifford, the niece of an archdeacon who felt she married down, and by many accounts tormented Hardy for it. They became estranged, and she died in 1912. Allegedly, after her death Hardy found and read her diary. Poems 1912-1913 is an elegy sequence written in response to her death. It contains fifteen of the finest poems in English. One of them is “The Voice.” Please read it to yourself, aloud:
The Voice
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are 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 view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
(Thomas Hardy, December 1912)
The Aristotelian three is a crutch of corporate convention but it’s good enough for me. Of the many beauties, there are three that one might savor:
“When you had changed from the one who was all to me” Emma is dead. Yet (yet! Achingly! Oh pity, oh grief) the poet can’t bring himself to even say the word, flinches away from it into 1 Corinthians 15:51-52. She is not that, she is changed.
“Even to the original air-blue gown” Air is not blue, air has no color; air has every color of the sky, and indeed, “of a luminous blue suggesting sky color” is a definition EtymOnline puts at 1738, though the synonym “cerulean” is from 1756, and the original form in English (“ceruleous”) dates to the 1660’s. “Ceruleous” derives from a the Latin caelulum, which is a diminutive of caelum: “heaven, sky.” Consider that “sky blue” is a synonym for “celestial,” a word which only takes on connotations of “delightful” in the 15c.— prior, it connoted the visible heavens. The poet’s desire is for a vision of visible heaven.
“And the woman calling.” The last line’s rhythm is missing a beat. It ends on two trochees (`˘ `˘). The same falling sound, repeated. Between “the woman” and “calling” there is a hesitation, a space. One hesitates or even trips upon finishing the line. The lump in Hardy’s throat is evoked. I can’t recite it without becoming emotional.
Edited at least once for formatting and an etymological digression.
This zinger is from a letter to Edmund Gosse, in Hardy’s Collected Letters.
I've never seen so much turn, in meaning and in music, on the simple word "Or."