2. Newbolt and Yeats.
3. Emma Hardy.
1. trees.
1. The Life of Thomas Hardy, p. 413, sets the scene: ‘On June 16 [1921] Mr. de la Mare arrived for a visit of two nights. The following day he walked to Stinsford with Hardy and was much interested in hearing about the various graves, and in reading a poem that Hardy had just lately written, “Voices from Things growing in a Country Churchyard” [sic].’
2. ‘Fanny Hurd’s real name was Fanny Hurden, and Hardy remembered her as a delicate child who went to school with him. She died when she was about eighteen [sic], and her grave and a head-stone with her name are to be seen in Stinsford Churchyard’ (ibid.). Hardy misremembered the title of the poem, and Fanny was in fact twenty when she died in October 1861.
3. Benjamin Bowring (d.1837), who lived at Kingston Maurward House.
4. boarded.
5. He means that his body was slow to rot because of the durable oak coffin.
6. a character who appears in Under the Greenwood Tree.
7. bindweed; also applied to other climbing plants.
8. ‘It was said her real name was Eve Trevillian or Trevelyan; and that she was the handsome mother of two or three illegitimate children, circa 1784–95’ (Hardy’s note at the end of the poem).
9. His memorial is in the north aisle of Stinsford church.
1. The poem was written on 2 June 1913, Hardy’s seventy-third birthday.
2. gutters.
1. surpassing or ephemeral? Perhaps a play on words is intended.
1. Emma Lavinia Gifford. The poet reflects on the possibility that, had he not met Emma Gifford, chance might have caused him to fall just as passionately in love with another woman. The poem was written in May 1870, as Hardy was visiting St Juliot for the first time since he had met Emma the previous March. See The Life of Thomas Hardy, p. 76.
2. hillock.
1. The song is sung by Sergeant Young in Hardy’s The Dynasts, the epic drama about the Napoleonic Wars, published in three parts in 1904, 1906 and 1908. Budmouth is Hardy’s fictional name for Weymouth.
1. Encke’s Comet, which appeared in October 1858 – see Hardy’s letter to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University thanking him for mentioning the poem during his Sheldonian address in 1908.
2. Yellowham Height was less than a mile from Higher Bockhampton via the heath and woodland paths that existed then.
3. The reference is perhaps to his sister, Mary.
1. The River Frome (Hardy preferred Froom) runs through Egdon Heath from west to east. Hardy describes its waters in Tess of the d’Urbervilles as ‘clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long’.
1. Hardy identified the scene of this poem as Stinsford churchyard, and the girl as Louisa Harding, a farmer’s daughter. See The Life of Thomas Hardy, p. 26: ‘He believed that his attachment to this damsel was reciprocated, for on one occasion when he was walking home from Dorchester he beheld her sauntering down the lane as if to meet him. He longed to speak to her, but bashfulness overcame him, and he passed on with a murmured “Good evening”, while poor Louisa had no word to say.’
1. A favourite poem of A. E. Housman.
2. farm labourers.
3. picknicking.
1. the name given to a mythical land between Land’s End and the Scilly Isles; cf. ‘that sweet land of Lyonesse’ in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s ‘Lyones’ in Paradise Regained. Hardy, who knew Swinburne’s poetic drama Tristram of Lyonesse, uses the word to mean Cornwall, where he met Emma Gifford, who inspired the poem and later became his wife. In a letter to Florence Henniker (4 March 1917), Hardy refers to ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’ as ‘my favourite lyric’.
1. Cf. Job xiv. 14, and The Life of Thomas Hardy, pp. 390–91.
1. Hardy describes himself and the rediscovery of his love for Emma Gifford after her death. The poem appears in the original sequence of ‘Poems of 1912–13’.
2. fit of madness.
3. A reference to Emma Gifford’s hair. After her death, having heard that some of the parishioners remembered Emma, Hardy wrote to the rector of St Juliot in August 1913: ‘They may recall her golden curls and rosy colour as she rode about, for she was very attractive at that time.’
1. ‘Because Thou didst it’ (Psalm xxxix. 9).
2. ‘Thou hast led me’ (Psalms xxvii. 11, lxxxvi. 11, cxix. 37).
3. A mountain of Boeotia, sacred to the Muses. Hardy refers to the time when he began to write poetry.
4. ‘Thou hast upheld me’ (Psalm xli. 12).
5. ‘Thou hast made my days’ (Psalm xxxix. 5).
6. ‘O Lord, Thou knowest’ (Psalm xl. 9).
7. ‘Whom hast Thou chosen?’ (Psalm lxv. 4).
1. The first two verses appear in The Trumpet-Major.
2. Bonaparte. The Trumpet-Major is set in approx. 1803, the year of the expected Napoleonic invasion near Weymouth (‘Budmouth’).
1. Inspired by Elizabeth Bishop, one of Hardy’s early loves. The Life of Thomas Hardy (pp. 25–6, 206) describes her as ‘a gamekeeper’s pretty daughter, who won Hardy’s boyish admiration because of her beautiful bay-red hair. But she despised him, as being two or three years his junior, and married early.’
1. The epigraph is from Job iv. 15, and the subject of the poem is Emma Hardy.
2. claw.
1. The scene is ‘Mellstock’ churchyard with its ancient yew tree.
2. Cf. Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (‘No motion has she now, no force;/She neither hears nor sees;/Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course/With rocks and stones and trees’).
1. The poem echoes a passage from Tess of the d’Urbervilles, written more than three decades before: ‘The season developed and matured. Another year’s instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.’
1. Cf. The Life of Thomas Hardy, pp. 15–16: ‘He was lying on his back in the sun, thinking how useless he was, and covered his face with his straw hat. The sun’s rays streamed through the interstices of the straw, the lining having disappeared. Reflecting on his experiences of the world so far as he had got, he came to the conclusion that he did not wish to grow up […] he did not want at all to be a man, or to possess things, but to remain as he was, in the same spot, and to know no more people than he already knew […]’
2. studied.
3. Cf. Jude the Obscure, I.ii: ‘If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.’
1. The poem is set in the Hardy family’s cottage in Higher Bockhampton.
2. Hardy’s parents moved the position of the front door and replaced it with a window.
3. A reference to Hardy’s father playing the violin as his son danced. Cf. The Life of Thomas Hardy, p. 15.
1. Written after Hardy’s visit to Riverside Villa, where he and Emma lived from 1876 to 1878. In the final verse he regrets that he had neglected his wife through preoccupation with his own writing.
1. Written in April 1914, when British ships were practising gunnery off the south coast of England. First published in the Fortnightly Review, 1 May 1914 – which meant that Hardy could justifiably call the poem ‘prophetic’ in its sense of impending catastrophe. See The Life of Thomas Hardy, p. 365.
2. Refers to the sounding of the Last Trump. See 1 Corinthians xv, 52.
3. A cow pastured on church land.
4. The possessive form in old English of most singular nouns ended in ‘es’ rather than the modern ‘’s’. The old form continued in use right up to the eighteenth century, especially in rural areas.
5. Cf. Far from the Madding Crowd, Chapters XXXIII and XLII – Thirdly is the name of the ineffectual parson, whom we never meet in the novel. His name derives, perhaps, from the importa
nce he attached to the third part of his sermon. We read in A Pair of Blue Eyes, Chapter IV, for example, how Elfride wrote her father’s sermons: ‘You take the text. You think, why is it? what is it? and so on. You put that down under “Generally”. Then you proceed to the First, Secondly, and Thirdly. Papa won’t have Fourthlys – says they are all my eye.’
6. King Alfred’s Tower on Kingsettle Hill near Stourton, where a Saxon king erected his standard against the Danes.
7. A hill-fort, known as Cadbury Castle, south of Castle Cary, associated with King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
1. episodes.
2. pasture, meadow-land, common.
3. hurried.
4. stiff grass.
1. The poem, written according to Hardy in 1865, almost certainly refers to his infatuation with Julia Martin. She was the 38-year-old patron of the school that Hardy attended when he was eight. When Hardy went to London in 1862, he called on her in Bruton Street. The passage from The Life of Thomas Hardy reads: ‘During the first few months of Hardy’s life in London he had not forgotten to pay a call on the lady of his earliest passion as a child, who had been so tender towards him in those days, and had used to take him in her arms. […] But the lady of his dreams – alas! To her, too, the meeting must have been no less painful than pleasant: she was plainly embarrassed at having in her presence a young man of over twenty-one, who was very much of a handful in comparison with the rosy-cheeked, innocent little boy she had almost expected “Tommy” to remain’ (p. 41). They never met again, but she wrote to him after the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy’s reaction can be read in The Life of Thomas Hardy: ‘She was now quite an elderly lady, but by signing her letter “Julia Augusta” she revived throbs of tender feeling in him, and brought back to his memory the thrilling “frou-frou” of her four grey silk flounces when she had used to bend over him, and when they brushed against the font as she entered church on Sundays’ (p. 102).
2. hamlet, village.
1. arbitrator (Job ix. 33).
1. will.
2. fair person.
1. withered with misgivings.
2. towards old age.
1. paved road.
1. The poem probably reflects the tensions of his marriage with Emma, his affection for Mrs Henniker and his reactions to the negative reviews of Jude the Obscure. There is a passage in The Well-Beloved, which Hardy revised for book publication in March 1897, that is startlingly similar in language and mood: ‘When was it to end – this curse of his heart not ageing while his frame moved naturally onward?’ (Part 2, Chapter 12).
2. midlife.
1. Written at Boscastle on 8 March 1913, three months after Emma’s death.
2. Beeny Cliff, near Boscastle. It was there, on the third day of Hardy’s visit to St Juliot in 1870, that he and Emma went out together unchaperoned, she riding her horse along the cliffs. It is Emma who speaks the opening lines of the poem, which, like ‘Beeny Cliff’, spans the period between Hardy’s first visit in 1870 and his pilgrimage in 1913 after Emma’s death.
1. Mediterranean.
2. turmoil.
1. Refers to Emma’s grave at Stinsford.
2. Daisies were Emma’s favourite flower.
3. ‘In the same month of June he paid a visit with his wife [Florence] and remaining sister to a house he had never entered for forty years. This was Riverside Villa, Sturminster Newton – the first he had furnished after his first marriage, and in which he had written The Return of the Native. He found it much as it had been in the former years; and it was possibly this visit which suggested the poems about Sturminster that were published in Moments of Vision’ (The Life of Thomas Hardy, p. 373).
1. Emma was buried in Stinsford graveyard. Hardy imagines what the reaction of his dead wife might be to the feelings expressed in the poem. According to the Dorset County Chronicle of 5 December 1912, Hardy had laid a wreath on her grave with the inscription ‘From her Lonely Husband, with the Old Affection’.
1. According to the local records, the ‘Middle-Field’ is the second of three fields that lie to the eastern side of the road between Lower Bockhampton and Bockhampton Cross.
2. Page 223 of The Life of Thomas Hardy ends: ‘Among other poems written about this time [c.1889] was the one called “At Middle-Field Gate in February”, describing the field-women of the author’s childhood. On the present writer’s [Florence Hardy’s] once asking Hardy the names of those he calls the “bevy now underground”, he said they were Unity Sargent, Susan Chamberlain, Esther Oliver, Emma Shipton, Anna Barrett, Ann West, Elizabeth Hurden, Eliza Trevis, and others, who had been young women about twenty when he was a child.’
1. Yet another poem to the memory of Emma Hardy.
1. chance happenings.
1. Cupid.
2. attributes of Cupid and his mother Venus.
1. ‘Some two or three thousand small trees, mostly Austrian pines, were planted around the house [Max Gate] by Hardy himself, and in later years these grew so thickly that the house was almost entirely screened from the road, and finally appeared, in summer, as if at the bottom of a dark green well of trees’ (The Life of Thomas Hardy, p. 173).
1. measure.
1. preening.
1. A similar table can be seen in the Hardy Room at the Dorset County Museum.
1. Passages from The Life of Thomas Hardy (pp. 12, 13) suggest that the burial is that of Hardy’s grandfather, ‘Thomas Hardy the First’: ‘The parish being a large and scattered one, it was the custom of Thomas Hardy the First to assemble the rather perfunctory rank-and-file of the choir at his house; and this necessitated suppers, and suppers demanded (in those days) plenty of liquor. This was especially the case on Christmas Eve itself, when the rule was to go to the northern part of the parish and play at every house before supper; then to return to Bockhampton and sit over the meal till twelve o’clock, during which interval a good deal was consumed at the Hardys’ expense, the choir being mainly poor men and hungry. They then started for the other parts of the parish, and did not get home till all was finished at about six in the morning, the performers themselves feeling “no more than malkins” [damp rags for swabbing out an oven] in church next day, as they used to declare. The practice was kept up by Thomas Hardy the Second [Hardy’s father], much as described in Under the Greenwood Tree or The Mellstock Quire, though its author, Thomas Hardy the Third, invented the personages, incidents, manners, etc., never having seen or heard the choir as such, they ending their office when he was about a year old. […] The First Thomas’s death having been quite unexpected, inasmuch as he was playing in the church one Sunday, and brought in for burial on the next, there could be no such quiring over his grave as he had performed over the graves of so many, owing to the remaining players being chief mourners. And thus ended his devoted musical services to Stinsford Church, in which he had occupied the middle seat of the gallery with his bass-viol on Sundays for a period of thirty-five years – to no worldly profit; far the reverse, indeed.’
2. Metrical version of Psalm xcvii, actually a hymn tune by B. Milgrove (1731–1810), which Britten uses in the accompaniment.
3. i.e. the man who played the tenor-viol: Michael Mail in the poem ‘The Paphian Ball’.
1. Upway is to the north of Weymouth.
1. On 17 November 1974 Britten, convalescing from heart surgery, wrote Peter Pears (who was performing Death in Venice in New York) a letter that reveals much about his love for the great tenor and his art: My darling heart (perhaps an unfortunate phrase – but I can’t use any other), I feel I must write a squiggle which I couldn’t say on the telephone without bursting into those silly tears – I do love you so terribly, not only glorious you, but your singing. I’ve just listened to a re-broadcast of Winter Words […] and honestly you are the greatest artist that ever was – every nuance, subtle & never over-done – those great words, so sad & wise, painted for one, that heavenly sound you make, full but always coloured for words
& music. What have I done to deserve such an artist and man to write for? I had to switch off before the folk songs because I couldn’t [take] anything after ‘how long, how long’. How long? – only till Dec. 20 – I think I can just bear it.
But I love you,
I love you
I love you –––
B.
1. The legend is referred to in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Chapter 17. William Dewy, chased by a bull, saves his own life by playing a hymn on his violin: ‘Well, then he called to mind how he’d seed the cattle kneel o’ Christmas Eves in the dead o’ the night. It was not Christmas Eve then, but it came into his head to play a trick upon the bull. So he broke into the ’Tivity Hymn [probably Watts’s ‘Nativity Hymn], just as at Christmas carol-singing; when, lo and behold, down went the bull on his bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if ’twere the true ’Tivity night and hour.’
The Penguin Book of English Song Page 83