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Hardy and WordsworthAuthor(s): Dennis TaylorSource: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 24, No. 4, Wordsworth among the Victorian Poets (Winter,1986), pp. 441-454Published by: West Virginia University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002132 .

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Hardy and Wordsworth DENNIS TAYLOR

was thoroughly immersed in Wordsworth and the Words- worthian tradition. Peter Casagrande has listed over 60 explicit

allusions to Wordsworth in Hardy's novels and other prose writings.1 Casagrande has also noted that in two collected editions of Wordsworth's works, Hardy marks over thirty poems (including 31 marked sometime between 1864 and 1873), along with Wordsworth's "Preface." Casagrande misses little, but to his list should be added the following items. Hardy's early poetical notebook, "Studies, Specimens, &c," contains quotations from Wordsworth's The Excursion.2 In his copy of Palgrave's Golden Treasury, probably the first vehicle through which Hardy came to know Wordsworth well, Hardy marked the "Intimations" Ode and "Ruth"; where Palgrave wrote in his Preface, "narrative, descriptive, and didactic poems . . . have been excluded," Hardy penciled in the margin: "not so: vide the Wordsworth poems." In 1920-21, Hardy reportedly said: "Words- worth, you know, tried to arrange his poems into classes, but it was not successful"; also, "Blake is a poet who benefits by selections - like Wordsworth."3

I

A comprehensive list of Hardy's poetic debts to Wordsworth has never been compiled. The following connections, all taken from Palgrave and poems marked by Hardy in his collected editions, are specific enough to constitute plausible debts. One must caution, however, that Wordsworth is so pervasive an influence that he cannot be confined to specific parallels and

^'Hardy's Wordsworth: A Record and a Commentary," ELT, 20 (1977), 210-237. 2Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 87. 3Vere Collins, Talks with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, 1920-22 (London, 1928), pp. 20, 67. In

his copy of the Golden Treasury, Hardy underlines in the "Intimations" Ode: "Which" in line 151 ("Which, be they what they may") and "Uphold us, cherish" in line 154. In the margin, he then writes: "i.e. - 'and which uphold' etc." In "Ruth," Hardy puts double lines in the margin next to lines 238-239: "And there she begs at one steep place / Where up and down with easy pace."

441



442 / VICTORIAN POETR Y

contrasts; by the time Wordsworthianism had reached Hardy, it had blended with a thousand poetic notes which complement most of the parallels cited below.

Hardy's basic sense of what the poet does, his notion of himself as an observer and recorder of his "unadjusted impressions"4 is fundamentally Wordsworthian. "He was a man who used to notice such things," he writes in "Afterwards" (511), a poem which draws upon Wordsworth's "A Poet's Epitaph," and also the two lines Hardy marked in Wordsworth's "To the Daisy": "The homely sympathy that heeds / The common life, our nature breeds." Even where Hardy disagreed with Wordsworth, he did so in Wordsworthian terms: "The mission of poetry is to record impressions, not convictions. Wordsworth in his later writings fell into the error of recording the latter."5 Wordsworth's conception of Lucy in a poem like "Three years she grew" is like Hardy's conception of Emma in "Rain on a Grave" (280) and "I Found Her Out There" (281). "A slumber did my spirit seal" is reflected in Hardy's "While Drawing in a Churchyard" (491) and "Proud Songsters" (816) with its conclusion: "And earth, and air, and rain." Words- worth's "She was a Phantom of delight," "To a Highland Girl," and "The Solitary Reaper" can also be connected with Hardy's "The Phantom Horse- woman" (294), "On Stinsford Hill at Midnight" (550), and "The Singing Woman" (605). Wordsworth's "There is a Flower, the lesser Celandine" lies behind Hardy's "The Last Chrysanthemum" (118) and other creature (birds, flowers, animals) poems. Wordsworth's "The Reverie of Poor Susan" may be heard in Hardy's "Dream of the City Shopwoman" (565).

The Wordsworthian sonnet form, with its octave abba acca, is used by Hardy in ten sonnets: "At a Bridal" (6), "The Schreckhorn" (264), "In the Old Theatre, Fiesole" (67), and those mentioned below. Hardy's earliest sonnets are mostly Shakespearean and Petrarchan; when in the 1890s he returned to poetry (and soon to The Dynasts), he wrote the balance of his Wordsworthian sonnets. Indeed, the description of George Somerset in A Laodicean is prophetic self-description: "For two whole years he did nothing but write verse in every conceivable metre, and on every conceivable subject, from Wordsworthian sonnets on the singing of his tea-kettle to epic frag- ments on the Fall of Empires" (I, i). Hardy's war sonnets, especially "Embarcation" (54), "On the Belgian Expatriation" (496), "In Time of Wars and Tumults" (499), "A Call to National Service" (505), all in Wordsworthian schemes, may have been influenced in particular by the political sonnets, "It is not to be thought of that the Flood," "One might

4Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London, 1976), p. 84. All references to Hardy's poems are to this edition, by poem number.

5Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 (London, 1962), pp. 377-378.



DENNIS TAYLOR / 443

believe," "Subjugation of Switzerland," and "On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic." The specific rhyme scheme of Wordsworth's "These times strike monied worldlings" is used in Hardy's "Departure" (55); the rhyme scheme of Wordsworth's sonnet on the sonnet, "Though narrow be," is used in Hardy's "Zermatt: To the Matterhorn" (73); the rhyme scheme of Wordsworth's "It is a beauteous evening" and "Mutability" is used in Hardy's "To a Lady" (41).

Several Hardy poems seem to parody and reverse Wordsworth's poems. Wordsworth's "Lines written in Early Spring" is reversed by Hardy's "In a Wood" (40): "Since, then, no grace I find / Taught me of trees, / Turn I back to my kind." "Most sweet it is with unuplifted Eyes" is reversed by Hardy's "The Rambler" (221): "I do not see the hills around, / Nor mark the tints the copses wear." "Lucy Gray," which ends, "Yet some maintain that to this day / She is a living child," is reversed by Hardy's "The Bird-Catcher's Boy" (809), which ends: "And the tide washed ashore / One sailor boy." Hardy's "From Her in the Country" (187) and "The Milkmaid" are specifically anti-Wordsworthian parodies: "Nay! Phyllis does not dwell / On visual and familiar things like these" (126). Words- worth's pious ending of "Ruth" ("For thee a funeral bell shall ring, / And all the congregation sing / A Christian psalm for thee") is mocked by Hardy's "The Rash Bride" (212), with its obtuse ending: "We sang the Ninetieth Psalm to her- set to Saint Stephen's tune." "The Impercipient" (44) parodies Wordworth's "Intimations" Ode:

I am like a gazer who should mark An inland company

Standing upfmgered, with, 'Hark,! hark! The glorious distant sea!'

And feel, 'Alas, 'tis but yon dark And wind-swept pine to me!'

Images from Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode, which Hardy quoted again and again in novel and essay, abound also in "Nature's Questioning" (43):

When I look forth at dawning, pool, Field, flock, and lonely tree, All seem to gaze at me

Like chastened children sitting silent in a school.

The Wordsworthian children have by now become "cowed" by "the master's ways" and can barely speak, except "in lippings mere." The "Immortality" which broods over Wordsworth's child like "a Master o'er a Slave" has become in Hardy an obscure constraining force.

What is difficult to determine precisely is how Hardy complements or refutes Wordsworth. Hardy's negative images themselves find parallels in Wordsworth's poems. The shades of the "prison-house" closing upon the children in the "Intimations" Ode forecast Hardy's children "cowed . . . till their early zest was overborne." "The Impercipient" follows Wordsworth's



444 / VICTORIAN POETRY

own darker intimation: " - But there's a Tree, of many, one, / A single Field which I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone." Hardy thought of his poems as Wordsworthian "questionings" ("Apology" to Late Lyrics and Earlier). Wordsworth's "Mutability" sonnet accords with Hardy's vision; he marked the last four lines which compare the "outward forms" of truth to a "tower sublime" unable to sustain "the unimaginable touch of Time."

To sort out the meaning of Hardy's relation to Wordsworth, we must turn to the larger tradition of the romantic lyric and romantic sensibility, as they developed out of earlier traditions. "It bridges over the years," Hardy said, "to think that Gray might have seen Wordsworth in his cradle, and Wordsworth might have seen me in mine" (Life, p. 386).

II

In his classic account of the "Greater Romantic Lyric," M. H. Abrams describes what happened to the traditional nature-meditation poem as it came under romantic influences.6 The traditional structure, as described by Louis Martz, was roughly: a) composition of place or posing of a theme, b) analysis and application, c) resolution and colloquy with God. The "greater romantic lyric," typified in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and Cole- ridge's "Frost at Midnight," took this three-part structure and changed it to: a) the location of the speaker in a particularized physical scene, b) personal memory and reflection , c) deepened understanding or colloquy, often with a return to the physical scene. Hardy alludes to the tradition in a comment he made to his friend, Sir George Douglas, when he said that Douglas' poems reminded him "of a meditative man walking about his fields & hills, & writing down what is suggested by the natural objects before his eyes - their relations to mankind & the like: a sort of Thomson's Seasons with the added force of all the modern spirit we have acquired since Thomson's day."7 What the romantic spirit has done with Thomson's

6M. H. Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," inFrom Sensibility to Romanticism, eds. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 550.

7 The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, eds. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford, 1978-85), 1, 182-183. Hardy's mention of Gray and Turner loosely parallels the way Abrams places these figures. For Abrams, a kind of transition between the Seventeenth- Century and romantic lyric is Thomson's Seasons (p. 534). A more immediate forerunner of the romantic lyric is Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" (p. 538), a poem which Hardy loved and annotated in Palgrave. In his copy of Thomson's Poetical Works, now in the Dorchester County Museum, Hardy makes the following connections between Thomson and Gray. In Thomson's "Autumn," Hardy marks line 15 ("While listening senates hang upon thy tongue") and writes a note: "written about 1727 - imitated by Gray 1751." He also marks line 212 ("And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild") and writes: " 'And waste its sweetness on the desert air'. Gray"



DENNIS TAYLOR / 445

"omnibus of unlocalized description, episodic narration, and general reflection" (in Abrams' account) is integrate them more organically with the specific nature of the present scene.

Hardy responded wholeheartedly to this meditative structure, and brought the Thomson-Gray- Wordsworth tradition to a lyric completion consistent with "the modern spirit we have acquired since Thomson's day." His poetry can represent a third great stage of the English meditative lyric, a Victorian resolution. At the same time, it is so consistent with Wordsworth's premises that it seems their natural development. For Hardy, as for Words- worth, the mind is intimately dependent on the workings of the natural world, and the structure of the poem reflects that dependency. But for Wordsworth, the lyric meditative process results in a harmony and integration of mind and setting. Its ideal is, in Coleridge's terms, "a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world" (Abrams, p. 544). For Hardy that same process results in a jarring discord of mind and world. Hardy's world, like Wordsworth's, conditions and molds the mind, but also prepares in secret for the shock of dissolution.

Such discord and shock is already potentially present in much of Wordsworth's poetry. A dramatic example is "Strange fits of passion," the subject of a famous analysis by Geoffrey Hartman. The poem influences Hardy's many lover's-journey poems, including "My Cicely" (31), "The Well-Beloved" (96), "The Dream-Follower" (108), "The Revisitation" (152), and thereafter Poems of 1912-13; also "The Widow Betrothed" (106), about which Hardy wrote: "It must have been written after I had read Wordsworth's famous preface to Lyrical Ballads, which influenced me much, & influences the style of the poem" (Collected Letters, V, 253). Wordsworth's lover's reverie takes shape under the gentle influence of the natural setting: "And all the while my eyes I kept / On the descending moon." But the result, in this poem at least, is an odd turn, a sudden thought suggesting some hidden disharmony:

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof He raised, and never stopped: When down behind the cottage roof, At once, the bright moon dropped. What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a Lover's head! "O mercy!" to myself I cried, "If Lucy should be dead!" (11. 19-28)

The poem shows that the Wordsworthian mind follows a momentum which can as easily put it out of touch with the setting as in tune with it. The waywardness of this divergence suggests a more fatal divergence of the human and the natural, as though the smaller interruption portended a more




serious one. This suggestion is made explicit in Wordsworth's original conclusion to the poem:

I told her this: her laughter light Is ringing in my ears; And when I think upon that night My eyes are dim with tears.

This is the conclusion which Hardy would have written, but which Words- worth cancelled - a dramatic example of Wordsworth's fighting off his influential descendent, and of Hardy occupying his lyric source. One might even vary Harold Bloom's comment, inserting "Wordsworth" for "Shelley" that Hardy's poetry "makes us read much of [Wordsworth] as though Hardy were [Wordsworth's] ancestor, the dark father whom the revolutionary idealist failed to cast out."8 In cancelling the conclusion, Wordsworth leaves us with only an intimation of a mind/nature split, which Hardy will make

explicit. The great Wordsworthian hope, of course, is to make the mind's stream of consciousness somehow open and adequate to a world in flux, so that consciousness is not subject to some fatal interruption, but is at once inside and outside the world, determined but free. Hardy takes the romantic

paradox and develops it into a linear contradiction: where we are inside and determined is not where we are outside and free. The ultimate Words- worthian conclusion for Hardy is inevitably "Self-Unconscious" (270): "Watching shapes that reveries limn . . . seldom he / Had eyes to see / The moment that encompassed him." The intimation of truly free awareness, the "obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things, / Fallings from us, vanishings" come only for Hardy in the shock of an interruption of the stream of consciousness.

What Hardy remains fascinated by is the lyric plot, the way it evolves into spell-binding vision, and where the return to the scene does not suggest a final harmony of mind and nature, but a jarring collision. The meditation follows its own momentum, while nature diverges from it, until the two collide like the Titanic and the iceberg. "During Wind and Rain" (441) develops inexorably out of the Wordsworthian tradition. Many of Hardy's most moving poems evolve toward a final vision, unearthed out of the

surrounding scene, like Wordsworth's "voiceless form" (see below), and then juxtaposed with a changing world. "The Voice" (285) ends with the

image of "the woman calling," while the speaker is left "faltering forward, / Leaves around me falling." The "unity of being," which the seventeenth-

century lyric and the Wordsworthian lyric suggest in different ways, is fractured by Hardy's development of their structure.

*A Map of Misreading (Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 23.



DENNIS TAYLOR / 447

One oddity in Abrams' definition of the "greater" romantic structure, setting/memory/setting, is that many romantic lyrics do not return to the setting; their structure is only: setting/memory. Presumably such lyrics are only subsets of the greater lyric; in them, the circle, symbolized in the "ouroboros" (Abrams, p. 532), is not completed. This incomplete circle was the element of the Wordsworthian structure that Hardy most responded to. He loved in particular "The Two April Mornings" with its final vision of Matthew standing "with a bough / Of wilding in his hand"; he loved even more what he saw as Frederick Locker's adaptation of this Wordsworthian poem (Life, p. 133) in "The Old Stone-Mason," especially its last verse:

We had sought shelter from the storm, And saw this lowly Pair, -

But none could see a Shining Form That watched beside them there.

The Wordsworthian hope, conventionalized in Locker, is that these memorial conclusions refind the past in the present, and achieve an eternal spot of time in the here and now. There is a single-mindedness about Hardy refusing this finessing of the past into the present. For Hardy, memory remains a dissociating phenomenon, a sign of the mind torn between what it once was and what it has become. Hardy's many ballads, narrative, lyrical, and personal, articulate the strains of the Wordsworthian ballad; in these we can trace a process whereby Hardy identifies more closely with his memory- obsessed speakers until he enters into his own ballads and lives out their memorial reveries:

Yet at midnight if here walking, When the moon sheets wall and tree,

I see forms of old time talking, Who smile on me. (156)9

This ambiguity of the romantic ending, which can return to the initial setting or remain within a memory, can be seen in "Domicilium" (1), which Hardy's Life describes as "Wordsworthian lines - the earliest discoverable of young Hardy's attempts in verse" (p. 4).10 The poem is remarkable in

9Also see Taylor, Hardy's Poetry, 1860-1928 (London, 1981), pp. 93-97 on Hardy's ballads, and passim, on Hardy's meditative structure. To Casagrande's admittedly partial account of critics who discuss Wordsworth and Hardy should at least be added David Perkins' "Hardy and the Poetry of Isolation," ELH, 26 (1959), 253-270. Perkins has good remarks on the disabling power of memory, separated in Hardy from romantic visionary supports. Perkins also emphasizes how Hardy's "obsessive attention to the whole context of experience" separates him from the romantic imagination; but we can now see, post-Abrams and Hartman, how the romantic meditative structure itelf leads Hardy into his distinctive version.

10Casagrande suggests that "Domicilium" may be, at least in part, a late Hardy poem. It is indeed true that Hardy returned to a sort of Wordsworthian pastoral poetry in his late years: see "Indian Summer: Hardy's Pastoral Poetry," in Taylor, Hardy ys Poetry, 1860-1928, 139-155. However, in the Life Hardy labels "Domicilium" as "written between 1857 and 1860"; such dating by Hardy is rarely misleading, as I hope to show in a study of his dating practices.




showing how thoroughly Hardy incorporated Wordworth's descriptive meditative language. The poem draws on the descriptive blank verse of "Tintern Abbey" and The Excursion, Book I. The blank verse meter twines itself through the syntax, so that the mind speaking to itself seems to travel with the sweep of the beech trees:

It faces west, and round the back and sides High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs, And sweep against the roof.

The viewer's eye goes round and up and over and down upon the house, as though the mind could be equal to the physical scene, making "the external internal, the internal external" (Abrams, p. 550). Next, the view moves outward from the house, and on to the "distant hills and sky," then round behind the house and out to the heath. Then the view moves back in historical time:

An oak uprises, springing from a seed Dropped by some bird a hundred years ago.

"In days bygone," the poem continues, leading us into the speaker's personal memory of his deceased grandmother, and finally into a memory within a memory: the grandmother's recollection of a wilder less cultivated world where the passer-by was obscured by trees and bats flew through the bedrooms. She speaks:

Heathcroppers Lived on the hills, and were our only friends; So wild it was when first we settled here.

For such a young poet, "Domicilium" is an accomplished exercise. But the poem seems to stop, rather than end. There is no concluding return to the opening scene or to the present reality of the speaker. The last word, "here," is strangely jarring, because the "here" of the grandmother has long ceased to exist. The next poem in The Collected Poems, "The Temporary the All," is so entirely different in tone, language, and meter, that we might assume Hardy's Wordsworthianism had been destroyed, perhaps by his experience in London in the 1860s. Was "Domicilium" unfinished or interrupted? Whatever the answer, the uncertainty of the ending reflects an ambiguity in the Words worthian structure: we are kept waiting for some resolution of past and present selves which never occurs.

"The Darkling Thrush" (119) reflects the ambiguity of the Words- worthian ending in a more deliberate way. Hardy specifically connects the poem with some Words worthian sources. "And I can listen to thee yet" from Wordsworth's "To the Cuckoo" becomes in Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" the past conditional of his conclusion: "I could think." In a place



DENNIS TAYLOR / 449

where "every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I," Hardy hears an aged thrush sing "a full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited":

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.

Compare Wordsworth's conclusion: O blessed Bird! the earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial, faery place; That is fit home for Thee!

In Hardy's poem as in Wordsworth's, there is the same surprising advent of the bird, the same orchestra of nature, though Hardy adverts to a changing scene going its own way ("Upon the growing gloom"). In "The Green Linnet," another source of "The Darkling Thrush," Wordsworth plays with the separation of the visionary form from its earthly embodiment, as though the separation were a natural result of perception. The linnet:

Pours forth his song in gushes; As if by that exulting strain He mocked and treated with disdain The voiceless Form he chose to feign,

While fluttering in the bushes.

Wordsworth's "To a Sky-Lark" ("Ethereal Minstrel") formalizes the vision even more:

A privacy of glorious light is thine; Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood Of harmony, with instinct more divine; Type of the wise who soar, but never roam; True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

And in Wordsworth's "To a Sky-Lark" ("Up with me!"), the conclusion is even more markedly Christian:

But hearing thee, or others of thy kind, As full of gladness and as free of heaven, I, with my fate contented, will plod on, And hope for higher raptures, when life's day is done.

Here Wordsworth straddles the seventeenth-century and romantic forms of lyric meditation, relying on the former for a weight of moral and allegorical reflection while holding on to the scenic structure of the latter. Indeed, Wordsworth in his later career increasingly tends toward a traditional structure and theology which will support the harmony he seeks. The



450 / VICTORIAN POETR Y

romantic meditative moment may not be "blind," but it is extremely precarious: the poem, which claims to model a present interaction of mind and world, is a past event. Thus, there is enormous pressure placed on the romantic verb tense, which is often an ambiguous amalgam of present tense, past tense, and timeless present tense: "Behold her, single in the field. / . . . the Maiden sang, / As if her song could have no ending." The poet's experience is ambiguously something that took place in the past, and something that takes place now: "A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company."

The ending of "The Darkling Thrush," "I could think," is extraordi- narily rich because it deconstructs the Words worthian "poet could not but be gay" into its various competing parts. (There is nothing for Hardy that holds them together.) Hardy's "could" means a number of competing things:

a) I could think then, and have continued to. I could think then, and have not continued to. I could think then, and may or may not have continued to.

b) I could have thought then, and I did. I could have thought then, but I didn't really. I could have thought then, but it was only a temporary fancy.

c) I could think now, but did not then. I could think now, but did not then, and don't really now.

Whenever the speaker "could think," what he could think is also extremely unclear. The entity "blessed Hope," deduced as seen only by a bird, is about as rarefied a possibility as one can imagine, the last frail attenuated hope of the romantic meditation. "The Darkling Thrush," Hardy said, was a "poem on the Century's End" (Life, p. 307).

Ill

Thus, Hardy was extremely responsive to Wordsworth and extremely critical of him. He also brings the Wordsworthian lyric to remarkably un-Wordsworthian conclusions in language and meter. If Wordsworth seeks a real language of men responsive to the present setting, Hardy often renders an obsolete language of men that has long ago grown out of touch with the present setting. The speaker of Hardy's "My Cicely" says: "And I

leapt in my wonder, / Was faint of my joyance." The poem illustrates, almost defiantly, Hardy's correcting of Wordsworth's notion that "the

language of common speech" applies to all forms of poetry. Hardy insisted

against Wordsworth that as "passionate" poetry becomes "sentimental"



DENNIS TAYLOR / 451

and then "meditative" and finally "fanciful," common speech gradually gives way to "poetic diction" (Lifey p. 306). The New Critics associated Hardy's toughened speech with a return to seventeenth-century meta- physical poetry. Again, we must see Hardy as following a post-Words- worthian model. The Wordsworthian language of common speech evolves into an artificial and obsolete diction which time inexorably leaves behind:

There once complained a goosequill pen To the scribe of the Infinite Of the words it had to write Because they were past its ken. (473)

The meditative mind cannot turn back on itself; what it has written keeps receding. Like the torn parts of a letter, the time-bound poet's harmony of language and world cannot be reassembled:

But some, alas, of those I threw Were past my search, destroyed for ever: They were your name and place; and never

Did I regain those clues to you. (256)

In another poem on his grandmother, Hardy says of her, that "She seemed one left behind of a band gone distant / So far that no tongue could hail" (227). It is not only past experience that can never be recaptured. Even a present experience is potentially forestalled by the forms through which the experience is channelled:

But there was a new afflation - An aura zephyring round That care infected not:

It came as a salutation, And, in my sweet astound, I scarcely witted what

Might pend, I scarcely witted what. (571)

The language thrusts its difference into the sameness, and the stanza form continues as a monument to a Wordsworthian experience undergone an astonishing transmutation.

One of the assumptions behind Wordsworthian prosody is a mimetic one, that through meter and rhythm the poem can model the interaction of mind and world. Interestingly, Hardy after "Domicilium" refuses, except in "Panthera" (234), to use Wordsworthian blank verse in his short poems. Where Wordsworth writes a blank verse mirroring a present flexible movement of mind, Hardy writes a formal meter representing the last stage of a mental movement that has long ceased to exist. He is committed to the stanza form whose complexity is needed for him to develop his version of Wordsworthian mimesis. He insisted, in notes he made on Wordsworth's "Preface," that "poetry is also artistry" (Casagrande, p. 221); but the artistries "of rhyme & rhythm," which Hardy emphasized, are develop- ments, not overturnings, of Wordsworth's notion. In poem after poem




Hardy creates elaborate, pointedly artificial stanza forms that imitate the interaction of the mind with the physical scene. For example, the stanza form of "At Castle Boterel" (292), another version of "Tintern Abbey," suggests the intertwining of the speaker's reflections first with the rhythms of his journey and then with the shape of his vision. That vision is affected by the rain, and the stanza form suggests a brief watery outline which quickly evaporates:

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking, I look back at it amid the rain

For the very last time; for my sand is sinking, And I shall traverse old love's domain

Never again.

The stanza form must be artificial, for it outlines a fading phantom figure imprinted on a mind seeing it "too late." The final vision of Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper" ("I saw her singing at her work, / And o'er the sickle

bending") evolves into the artful complex stanza form of "The Figure in the Scene" (416), a figuring of what is no more. The stanza shape itself is like an outline of rain:

And thus I drew her there alone, Seated amid the gauze

Of moisture, hooded, only her outline shown, With rainfall marked across.

- Soon passed our stay; Yet her rainy form is the Genius still of the spot,

Immutable, yea, Though the place now knows her no more, and has known her not

Ever since that day.

Similarly, the final aural memory of "The Solitary Reaper" ("The music in

my heart I bore, / Long after it was heard no more") evolves into the stanza form of "To My Father's Violin" (381), here a mimesis of a musical rhythm which is imaged in the visual complexity of the stanza, a last relic of a faded music:

He must do without you now, Stir you no more anyhow

To yearning concords taught you in your glory; While, your strings a tangled wreck,

Once smart drawn, Ten worm-wounds in your neck,

Purflings wan With dust-hoar, here alone I sadly con Your present dumbness, shape your olden story.

The interpenetration of mind with world, mind with rain, mind with music, mind with firelight (as in "Logs on the Hearth" [433]), is rendered in the movement of the voice and eye over the stanza form. "In the Seventies"

(389) evokes Wordsworth's "Stepping Westward," about the poet in pursuit



DENNIS TAYLOR / 453

of a vision, and makes the journey rhythms evolve into a final lockstep form, in which the mind is enclosed:

In the seventies nought could darken or destroy it, Locked in me,

Though as delicate as lamp-worm's lucency; Neither mist nor murk could weaken or alloy it In the seventies! - could not darken or destroy it,

Locked in me.

The word, "could," is a stiff and fading relic of the Wordsworthian surmise, as in "I could think" from "The Darkling Thrush."

Hardy's modified Words worthianism influences his rendering of small perceptions, where even here we see the drama of reverie, interruption, and belated vision:

The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though But half an hour ago

The road was brown, and now is starkly white, A watcher would have failed defining quite

When it transformed it so. (702)

What needs to be emphasized is how Hardy's peculiarities of syntax and word choice evolve naturally out of Wordsworth's influence. The last line is a not untypical Hardy tangle. What transforms what? The snow transforms the road? But "snow-feathers" is plural. Does the "road," the impersonal noun most proximate, transform itself? Or is the last line an impersonal construction: a transformation took place in the watcher's perception? The syntax perplexes the relation of mind and world, rather than blending them in the Wordsworthian manner. "It transformed it so" may recall the slight obscurity of "Domicilium" in its first line: "It faces west."

The conflicting relation of mind and world in Hardy becomes in "An August Midnight" (1 13) a literal collision. The Wordsworthian meditator is at his desk, pen in hand, while the summer bugs come through the window:

- 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.

The meditation has been reduced to writing, but a writing which can be interrupted by a real world: bugs banging against the reading lamp and smearing the poet's ink. The momentum of this late Wordsworthian meditation puts us in another syntactic tangle: they know Earth-secrets that I do not know, they know Earth-secrets that know not me. Either way his language leaves him outside while, as a living creature, he is blindly inside. Hardy thus makes naturalistic comedy of a passage he copied from Arnold's




essay on Wordsworth: "It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him."11

Hardy quoted from an article on Turner: "An artist must be able to persuade himself either that he is carrying to completion something begun by his forerunner, or that it is his to denounce the fraud of his predecessors, & to discover afresh the secret of art" {Literary Notebooks, II, 71). Hardy carried Wordsworth to a unique completion, a Victorian conclusion of the greater romantic lyric.

11 Hardy, Literary Notebooks, ed. Lennart Bjork, 2 vols. (New York Univ. Press, 1985) 1, 1 19.



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