National Poetry Month: Thomas Hardy

I know I have posted this poem before, but here it is again. I love it. It scares me. It’s so omniscent. Thomas Hardy’s scary poem about the Titanic.

The Convergence of the Twain

I

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”. . .

VI

Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate
For her — so gaily great —
A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.

X

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one August event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

“For more than a year I read no one else.” — WH Auden – on Thomas Hardy

“[He was] a pale, gentle, frightened little man, that one felt an instinctive tenderness for, with a wife – ugly is no word for it! – who said ‘Whatever shall we do?’ I had never heard a human being say it before.” — Robert Louis Stevenson, after visiting Hardy in 1885

No matter what the subject, Hardy devoted his poetry to laying out his magnificently sombre, completely disillusioned view of the world. The central fact of that world was the disappearance of God, and with it any reason for believing in providence or justice. — Adam Hirsch

He was always musing about poetry, defining and redefining, thinking in terms of poems, developing his craft in the spirit of a joiner or stonemason perfecting skills in preparation for the big work – a rood screen, a spire, The Dynasts. Some of the early poems Hardy turned into prose and used in descriptive passages in his fiction. Later he translated them back into verse. It is possible to see the impact of his poetic concerns throughout the fiction, in the shaping of scenes, the obliquity and economy of satirical and tragic payoffs, and most of all in the highly organized rhythms of the prose at points of lyrical or dramatic heightening. The imact of the fiction on the verse is also clear: he is a storyteller. — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”

“A certain provincialism of feeling is invaluable. It is the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done.” — Thomas Hardy

For the rest of his life, then, Hardy set to writing poetry with the grateful fervor of an escaped prisoner; his “Collected Poems” fill more than eight hundred pages. — Adam Kirsch

The poems were written by a novelist, but they are different in kind from fiction, whatever they learn from its forms; the impulse, structure and effect are insistently lyric, the style original without being particularly idiosyncratic. He uses (and discovers) a wider range of rhymed and metrical forms than any other modern English poet, including Auden. His oeuvre amounts to almost a thousand poems. Whereas the novels bring background into focus – landscape, community, the intrusions of history – the poems generally take setting for granted. Unlike Kipling, who has to establish a setting before the poem can get going, Hardy takes location as implicit and plunges in medias res, thriftily giving only necessary information in a phrase, a tone of voice suggested by metrical pause or variation. We’re seldom engaged by the character of the speaker; it’s a situation that arrests us, its moral or psychological typicality. His “voice”, unlike the individuating and unique “voice” of the modern poet, is Wordsworth’s common voice, “a man speaking to men” in a common language of experience. — Michael Schmidt

“Write a history of human automatism, or impulsion – viz., an account of human action in spite of human knowledge, showing how very far conduct lags behind the knowledge that should really guide it.” — Thomas Hardy jotting down notes for “The Dynasts”

“Hardy has the effect of locking any poet whom he influences into a world of historical contingency, a world of specific places at specific times.” — Donald Davie

“Now there is clarity. There is the harvest of having written twenty novels first.” — Ezra Pound, on reading Hardy’s poetry

“[I admire his] hawk’s vision. his way of looking at life from a very great height … To see the individual life related not only to the local social life of its time, but to the whole of human history … gives one both humility and self-confidence.” — W.H. Auden

“All we can do is write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do it a little better than those who came before us.” — Thomas Hardy to Robert Graves

More information on Thomas Hardy here.