And so we come to the last days of the year: Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” was written on 31st December 1900, also the turn of the Century: I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like […]
Hardy
December 4 Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, with characteristic nostalgia for the simple faith of bygone days, recalls a more homely rustic legend of this season in: THE OXEN Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees,” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease.We pictured the […]
May 6 Thomas Hardy
It is fitting at this jolly season of the year to redress gloomy stereotypes such as that of Milton: April’s poems showed us Thomas Hardy in his familiar image as the pessimist, seeing mankind in the power of an Immanent Will unconcerned with his sufferings; but there is also Hardy the Dorset countrymen, who, although […]
March 10 Thomas Hardy
WEATHERS And finally for this month of many weathers a poem in which Hardy contrasts summer sunshine and winter rain: 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, […]
March 9 Thomas Hardy
BEENY CLIFF In March 1913, over forty years after his adventure in “Lyonesse”, the ageing poet, now a widower, looked back with nostalgic regret, sharpened by a subsequent estrangement, to those happy days of early love. O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, And the woman riding high above with bright […]
March 8 Hardy
In March 1870 Thomas Hardy, then an architect, was commissioned to go to the church of St Juliot in Cornwall to take particulars for a proposed re-building. There he met the Rector’s sister-in- law, Emma Gifford, who later became his wife. The excitement of this venture, and its happy outcome are expressed in the poem […]
January 6 Thomas Hardy
SNOW IN THE SUBURBS Thomas Hardy’s “Snow in the Suburbs”, a similar, but much shorter poem, adds the emotion of pity, so characteristic of this author, which he here renders with a rueful humour, at the plight of birds and animals in the wintry season. Every branch big with it, Bent every twig with it; […]