High things

I. A. Richards

The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy Edited by James Gibson (Macmillan £6.50)

After Hardy's 'earliest known production in verse, Domicilium'—descriptive rather than representative, and written before 1860—this massive volume opens with 'The Temporary the All'. It is in Sapphics, a measure which puts much strain on English verse. A new-comer to Hardy might suppose that the metre accounts for the strangeness of many sorts with which it is tight-packed. If he makes his way through more than a few of the near a thousand poems that follow, he will find that such strangenesses are both the sources and the means of Hardy's poetic power. This technically triumphant poem, though to some it may be for a while dismaying, makes therefore an excellent introduction. When in twenty-four lines, we meet 'chancefulness,"youthtime,"wrought us fellowlike,"forthcome,"so self-communed

'forefelt,"breath-while,"outshow,' 'sole the showrance those,' onward earthtrack,' together with equal audacities in assonance arrangements: 'sun by sun near to one unchosen,' inversions and on up to thematic confrontations: 'Thus I . . . . But lo, me!', we are warned that these poems— the best of them, those with the most remedial force—will ask for no little openmindedness and cooperative responsiveness. The outlandish language is usually how he does it. Inevitably, such lexical, phonologic, syntactic, metrical and semantic ventures do not always succeed. High things are hard. No one, perhaps, can see how high things can be who does not realise how easily and through what obscure causes the devices invented may not come off.

Those who, as Hardy so clearly did, write verses as their best means of sustaining, varying and enriching their imaginings, will know how readily the technical interest and invitation of the chosen form can supplant, elbow out, the poem's creative aim. In Hardy's case the aim is creative in a two-fold sense: that whereby the poem finds and constructs itself, and that which can make it a shaping component of the lives into which it comes. The Complete Poems is indeed a somewhat daunting challenge, to distinguish between poems which do and do not entirely and perfectly become themselves. On the one hand there are the poems—far more than a few of them—which have deepened, clarified and steadied men's and women's concern with and control of their positions for living. On the other there are the verse exercises, the try-outs many showing signs of more labour, and often aimed at the very same major themes. And in this it may be sadly true that the best must be the enemy of the good. The truly perfected poem shows up its rivals.

So huge and exhaustive a display of all that a long-lived and constantly active poet wrote naturally suggests a comparison with the retrospective assemblages gathered, of late, to celebrate Picasso, Turner or Constable. Some of the same doubts may stir likewise. Whether, specialists apart, the people addressed are really much helped thereby towards finer and fuller comprehension is a question leading into yet thornier problems. What should be the function of scholarship: its contribution to what the arts should be doing? The matter is almost as little discussed as the role of the Sacred Cow. There is, we well know, no prospect of any such queues pushing into libraries to enlarge their knowledge of Hardy. Some old Adam in one might murmur, 'Would there were!' Mr Gibson, sagacious and tactful editor, mentions however, 'a noticeable acceleration in the frequencies of reprints during the past decades.' That Hardy continues to be more and more read is indeed welcome news.

Needless, perhaps, to say, when there is no cause for linguistic extravagances Hardy does not use them. In 'Budmouth Dears', for example, the Hussar's Song from The Dynasts, one of the uncollected poems here added, there is no trace of them. It is as exactly right as anything he wrote and it is his through and through: With a smart Clink! Clink! up the Esplanade and down. . .

yet clear from all style marks we might expect—save, possibly, `swept us sunder.'

What most comes home as we turn and turn these pages is the variety of then' themes and treatments—though admittedlY there are repetitions. Those doubting this variety might look, among the less familiar poems, at pages 682-703. Among the more familiar, how could poems manifestly from the same hand be more different, though. equally consummate, than 'Neutral Tones (9), 'Friends Beyond' (36), 'I look into illY glass' (52), 'Mute Opinion' (90), 'I need not go' (102), 'The Ruined Maid' (128), and 'The Respectable Burgher on "The Higher Criticism" ' (129), that ultimate in riming? And of how many more will a curious searcher find that each is distinct both in devices and end, and yet equally Pure Hardy, not really like any poem by anyone else? Among such findings will be manY unprecedented formal contrivances. To instance two only : terza rima, it is agreed, 15 one of the patterns least lending itself t° smooth, inevitable handling in English. Consider what happens in 'Friends Beyond 'We've no wish to hear the tidings, how

the people's fortunes shift : What your daily doings are;

Who are wedded, born, divided, if your lives beat slow or swift.

'Curious not the least are we if our intents you make or mar, If you quire to our old tune,

If the City stage still passes, if the weirs still roar afar.'

Note how the short lines setting the coming rimes balance against the long lines and steep the poem in contemplation of ale, passage of time. Again, in 'He Abjures Love (192), consider how the variation of the rime-sequence in the second and the final stanzas (though veiled by the line-length indentation plan) gives such poignancY tO the contrast between what was and what is to be.

Here are two patterns: At last I put off love, For twice ten years The daysman of my thought, And hope, and doing; Being ashamed thereof, And faint of fears And desolations wrought In his pursuing, Since first in youthtime those Disquietings That heart enslavement brings To hale and hoary, Became my housefellows, And, fool and blind, turned from kith and kind To give him glory.

Hardy's stature as a poet stems frail 3 craftsman's inventiveness matching the originality and courage of his themes. Ra,rei: ly has a good poet been more penetrate?" recognisant of the past or better able to Pvc his awarenesses utterance.