Satires of Circumstance – Thomas Hardy (1914)

In November 1912 Hardy’s first wife, Emma, died; they had been married for 38 years. By the end of 1912 Hardy had realised that, to recall Emma with the warmth he desperately wanted, he would have to revisit the scenes where they had been happiest, in Cornwall, where she had grown up and they had met. There he retraced the steps he had trodden beside Emma’s pony on their walks and excursions to Beeny Cliff, down the Vallency valley to Boscastle and inland to Launceston. He found the area neither wistful nor changed and returned to Dorset with the ghost of Emma unexorcised.

However, Emma’s death prompted a series of poems, published in Satires of Circumstance that have no match in English as articulations of bereavement. They are defiantly unconventional. Hardy had realised, much earlier than T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, that something drastic had to be done to drag English poetry into the 20th century. Everything pretty and decorous was jettisoned in favour of an ugly mixture of dialect and lexical coinage. It is replaced in poems such as The Going or At Castle Boterel, by intricate metrical variations that control your reading. The effect is to make Hardy’s mourning seem different and authentic, personalised by oddity.

The attitudes are odd, too. There is reproach in the poems. There is sardonic humour too, but most of all he remembers Emma as she was when he first loved her. Also, there are poems not about Emma but about the lives of others; many of these read like plot-summaries of unwritten Hardy novels and they deliver a narrative thrill missing from most modern poetry. This short poem The Walk, just two stanzas, exemplifies these characteristics: the poet goes out for a walk on his own but then says, well, she never came recently anyway so what’s the difference? That comes in the last two lines.

The Walk

You did not walk with me

Of late to the hill-top tree

By the gated ways,

As in earlier days;

You were weak and lame,

So you never came,

And I went alone, and I did not mind,

Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day

Just in the former way;

Surveyed around

The familiar ground

By myself again:

What difference, then?

Only that underlying sense

Of the look of a room on returning thence.

Thomas Hardy

Boscastle