Thomas Hardy’s Poems, and the Religious Difficulties of a Naturalist

By the end of the second decade of our century we had become agitated over the beginnings of several fresh kinds of American verse; we had the feeling that some spectacular advance was about to be made in our native literature. But in one way or another we came upon certain short poems by Thomas Hardy, and we responded with exhilaration in that shock of recognition by which we assent to some bold new verse as being nevertheless within the canon of poetry; they moved many of us more deeply and longer than the pieces of our own nationals. Fresh as these little poems were, they were in an ancient grand manner which betokened a largeness of mind. We knew that the old Victorian novelist had turned to poetry, or perhaps we even knew that he had only returned to his first and favored Muse. But we could not have foreseen the valor or the ingenuity of his imagination. It was a metaphysical imagination, in the service of a theological passion. In verse he could indulge frankly in speculations which he could only intimate darkly in the Wessex novels, and we could see why he had been obliged to change Muses again. Perhaps in that stirring and revolutionary period of ours the elaborate but uniform stanzas, descending Hardy’s pages so primly, looked slightly forbidding, and when we were reading them we may have been put off sometimes by an old-fashioned quaintness in the diction. But once the reader had engaged with them, the chances were that he would have to go on and adopt them.

Probably ten or a dozen of these small poems will have their regular place within the choice anthologies of modern verse; as compositions secured in some unusual form of condensation which suited perfectly the peculiar verbal talent of this poet in our hospitable language. They are like terse but sure little dramas; or sometimes in their folkways they make us think of epics in miniature. But if we look for the genre most likely to describe them, we may call them fables. They offer natural images of the gods in action, unless, as sometimes the case unfortunately is, in inaction. The sharp and homely detail of the country naturalist in Hardy is not comprised by the presence of deity and his ministers; these are made to answer in his own language to the naturalist or his spokesmen in the poem. The tone of the composition may be altogether grave and earnest. But fable is a self-confessed fiction by an independent and unofficial thinker; it can afford to be very free in its imagination. As if to allow in advance for the failure of most human speculations, including his own, Hardy often gives his fables a sporting or rowdy turn which makes them comic in their irony. There was a good deal of constitutional resilience in that old head.