Hardy considered himself a finer poet than novelist, and there is perhaps no other poet of the twentieth century who has such a command of rhythm and metre: his versification is more varied than that of any other English poet, and he continually experimented with stanza form and metre. The effect can sometimes sound forced with awkward inversions and neologisms – Max Beerbohm’s gentle satire in ‘A Luncheon (Thomas Hardy entertains the Prince of Wales)’ is hilarious, but Hardy defended himself in a well-known passage in Chapter XXV of The Life of Thomas Hardy:
Years earlier he had decided that too regular a beat was bad art. He had fortified himself in his opinion by thinking of the analogy of architecture, between which art and that of poetry he had discovered, to use his own words, that there existed a close and curious parallel, both arts, unlike some others, having to carry a rational content inside their artistic form. He knew that in architecture cunning irregularity is of enormous worth, and it is obvious that he carried on into his verse, perhaps in part unconsciously, the Gothic art-principle in which he had been trained – the principle of spontaneity, found in mouldings, tracery, and such like – resulting in the ‘unforeseen’ (as it has been called) character of his metres and stanzas, that of stress rather than syllable, poetic texture rather than poetic veneer; the latter kind of thing, under the name of ‘constructed ornament’, being what he, in common with every Gothic student, had been taught to avoid as the plague. He shaped his poetry accordingly, introducing metrical pauses, and reversed beats; and found for his trouble that some particular line of a poem exemplifying this principle was greeted with a would-be jocular remark that such a line ‘did not make for immortality’. The same critic might have gone to one of our cathedrals (to follow up the analogy of architecture), and on discovering that the carved leafage of some capital or spandrel in the best period of Gothic art strayed freakishly out of its bounds over the moulding, where by rule it had no business to be, or that the enrichments of a string-course were not accurately spaced; or that there was a sudden blank in a wall where a window was to be expected from formal measurement, have declared with equally merry conviction, ‘This does not make for immortality’.
In 1887 Hardy and Emma moved into Max Gate, a rather forbidding house just outside Dorchester that Hardy designed. As his fame grew, he was visited by many celebrities, including the Prince of Wales and writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves and Walter de la Mare. After Hardy’s death, it was Florence Emily Hardy who published The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891 (1928) and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928 (1930), for which Hardy had compiled the material in his last years; these two volumes were published as The Life of Thomas Hardy in 1962. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1910, received honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, and also the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature. There were two funerals: his heart was buried at Stinsford Church, his ashes in Westminster Abbey (Poets’ Corner). The ten pallbearers were the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, the leader of the Opposition, Ramsay MacDonald, the heads of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Queen’s College, Oxford, and six writers: Housman, Kipling, Shaw, Barrie, Galsworthy and Gosse.
JOHN IRELAND
Great things (1925/1935)
Sweet cyder is a great thing,
A great thing to me,
Spinning down to Weymouth town1
By Ridgway thirstily,
And maid and mistress summoning
Who tend the hostelry:
O cyder is a great thing,
A great thing to me!
The dance it is a great thing,
A great thing to me,
With candles lit and partners fit
For night-long revelry;
And going home when day-dawning
Peeps pale upon the lea:
O dancing is a great thing,
A great thing to me!
Love is, yea, a great thing,
A great thing to me,
When, having drawn across the lawn
In darkness silently,
A figure flits like one a-wing
Out from the nearest tree:
O love is, yes, a great thing,
A great thing to me!
Will these be always great things,
Great things to me? …
Let it befall that One will call,
‘Soul, I have need of thee:’2
What then? Joy-jaunts, impassioned flings,
Love, and its ecstasy,
Will always have been great things,
Great things to me!
(Finzi – sketch)
JOHN IRELAND: Songs to Poems by Thomas Hardy (1925/1925)
Summer schemes
When friendly summer calls again,
Calls again
Her little fifers1 to these hills,
We’ll go – we two – to that arched fane2
Of leafage where they prime their bills
Before they start to flood the plain
With quavers, minims, shakes and trills.
– ‘We’ll go,’ I sing; but who shall say
What may not chance before that day!
And we shall see the waters spring,
Waters spring
From chinks the scrubby copses crown;
And we shall trace their oncreeping
To where the cascade tumbles down
And sends the bobbing growths aswing,
And ferns not quite but almost drown.
– ‘We shall’, I say; but who may sing
Of what another moon will bring!
(Finzi)
Her song1
I sang that song on Sunday,
To witch an idle while,
I sang that song on Monday,
As fittest to beguile;
I sang it as the year outwore,
And the new slid in;
I thought not what might shape before
Another would begin.
I sang that song in summer,
All unforeknowingly,
To him as a new-comer
From regions strange to me:
I sang it when in afteryears
The shades stretched out,
And paths were faint; and flocking fears
Brought cup-eyed2 care and doubt.
Sings he that song on Sundays
In some dim land afar,
On Saturdays, or Mondays,
As when the evening star
Glimpsed in upon his bending face,
And my hanging hair,
And time untouched3 me with a trace
Of soul-smart or despair?
Weathers
I
This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly:
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at ‘The Travellers’ Rest’,
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
And so do I.
II
This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I;
When beeches drip in browns and duns,
And thresh, and ply;
And hill-hid tides1 throb, throe on throe,
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate-bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.
(Finzi – sketch, Head)
JOHN IRELAND: Five Poems by Thomas Hardy (1926/1927)
Lover to mistress
[Beckon to me to come]
(Song)
Beckon to me to come
With handkerchief or hand,
Or finger mere or thumb;
Let forecasts be but rough,
Parents more bleak than bland,
’Twill be enough,
Maid mine,
>
’Twill be enough!
Two fields, a wood, a tree,
Nothing now more malign
Lies between you and me;
But were they bysm1, or bluff,
Or snarling sea, one sign
Would be enough,
Maid mine,
Would be enough!
from an old copy.
Come not; Yet come!
[In my sage moments]1
In my sage moments I can say,
Come not near,
But far in foreign regions stay,
So that here
A mind may grow again serene and clear.
But the thought withers. Why should I
Have fear to earn me
Fame from your nearness, though thereby
Old fires new burn me,
And lastly, maybe, tear and overturn me!
So I say, Come: deign again shine
Upon this place2,
Even if unslackened smart be mine
From that sweet face,
And I faint to a phantom past all trace.
Without, not within her
[It was what you bore with you, Woman]1
It was what you bore with you, Woman,
Not inly were,
That throned you from all else human,
However fair!
It was that strange freshness you carried
Into a soul
Whereon no thought of yours tarried
Two moments at all.
And out from his spirit flew death,
And bale, and ban,2
Like the corn-chaff under the breath
Of the winnowing-fan.3
That moment
[The tragedy of that moment]1
The tragedy of that moment
Was deeper than the sea,
When I came in that moment
And heard you speak to me!
What I could not help seeing
Covered life as a blot;
Yes, that which I was seeing,
And knew that you were not!
Her temple
[Dear, think not that they will forget you]
Dear, think not that they will forget you:
– If craftsmanly art should be mine
I will build up a temple, and set you
Therein as its shrine.
They may say: ‘Why a woman such honour?’
– Be told, ‘O, so sweet was her fame,
That a man heaped this splendour upon her;
None now knows his name.’
(Finzi)
GERALD FINZI
Finzi’s earliest Hardy songs, if we discount The Mound for string quartet (1921), which exists only as a fragment, are the six settings of By Footpath and Stile (1925) for baritone and string quartet. He also published three sets of ten songs for voice and piano to words by Hardy: A Young Man’s Exhortation (1933), Earth and Air and Rain (1936) and Before and after Summer (1949). On Finzi’s death in September 1956 about two dozen songs – all completed – were found among his papers, some dating from the twenties, some from the forties, and some which he had just written. Many of the songs were settings of Hardy, and almost all of these were now arranged in two new sets to join the three that he had published during his lifetime: Till Earth Outwears for high voice, and I Said to Love for low, both of which were published in 1958. The other poems by various authors were grouped into yet two more sets: To a Poet and Oh Fair to See.
Like Hardy, Finzi was haunted by the idea of transience, and each of the ten songs of A Young Man’s Exhortation explores an aspect of passing time. Finzi himself never enjoyed the best of health: his tuberculosis (a disease with much more serious consequences then than now) was diagnosed in 1928, he suffered from leukaemia, and eventually he died, aged fifty-five, from the chicken pox virus. His awareness of ephemerality began at an early age. His father died when he was eight; his teacher, Ernest Farrar, was killed in France during the First World War; his eldest brother, Felix, committed suicide at the age of twenty; another brother, Douglas, died of pneumonia while still at school at Bradfield College; and his youngest brother, Edgar, perished in action with the Fleet Air Arm, shot down over the Aegean in September 1918.
GERALD FINZI: By Footpath and Stile, for baritone and string quartet, Op. 2 (1921–2/1925)
Paying calls
I went by footpath and by stile
Beyond where bustle ends,
Strayed here a mile and there a mile
And called upon some friends.
On certain ones I had not seen
For years past did I call,
And then on others who had been
The oldest friends of all.
It was the time of midsummer
When they had used to roam;
But now, though tempting was the air,
I found them all at home.
I spoke to one and other of them
By mound and stone and tree
Of things we had done ere days were dim,
But they spoke not to me.
Where the picnic was1
Where we made the fire
In the summer time
Of branch and briar
On the hill to the sea,
I slowly climb
Through winter mire,
And scan and trace
The forsaken place
Quite readily.
Now a cold wind blows,
And the grass is gray,
But the spot still shows
As a burnt circle – aye,
And stick-ends, charred,
Still strew the sward
Whereon I stand,
Last relic of the band
Who came that day!
Yes, I am here
Just as last year,
And the sea breathes brine
From its strange straight line
Up hither, the same
As when we four came.
– But two have wandered far
From this grassy rise
Into urban roar2
Where no picnics are,
And one – has shut her eyes
For evermore.3
The oxen
See below, under Vaughan Williams.
The master and the leaves
I
We are budding, Master, budding,
We of your favourite tree;
March drought and April flooding
Arouse us merrily,
Our stemlets newly studding;
And yet you do not see!
II
We are fully woven for summer
In stuff of limpest green,
The twitterer and the hummer
Here rest of nights, unseen,
While like a long-roll drummer
The nightjar thrills the treen1.
III
We are turning yellow, Master,
And next we are turning red,
And faster then and faster
Shall seek our rooty bed,
All wasted in disaster!
But you lift not your head.
IV
– ‘I mark your early going,
And that you’ll soon be clay,
I have seen your summer showing
As in my youthful day;
But why I seem unknowing
Is too sunk in to say!’
Voices from things growing in a churchyard1
These flowers are I, poor Fanny Hurd2,
Sir or Madam,
A little girl here sepultured.
Once I flit-fluttered like a bird
Above the grass, as now I wave
In daisy shapes above my grave,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
– I am one Bachelor Bowring, ‘Gent’3,
Sir or Madam;
In shingled4 oak my bones were pent;
Hence more than a hundred years I spent
In my feat of change5 from a coffin-th
rall
To a dancer in green as leaves on a wall,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
– I, these berries of juice and gloss,
Sir or Madam,
Am clean forgotten as Thomas Voss6;
Thin-urned, I have burrowed away from the moss
That covers my sod, and have entered this yew,
And turned to clusters ruddy of view,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
– The Lady Gertrude, proud, high-bred,
Sir or Madam,
Am I – this laurel that shades your head;
Into its veins I have stilly sped,
And made them of me; and my leaves now shine,
As did my satins superfine,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!
– I, who as innocent withwind7 climb,
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 46