Selected Poems by Thomas Hardy

In Modern Poetry our professor taught poems by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), including Channel Firing  In The Time of 'The Breaking of Nations," and Neutral Tones. They were not poems I forgot, and I have forgot most of what we read that semester.

Many know Hardy's novels because of the films based on them. Hardy was unable to publish his poems until his novels brought fame and financial security. He wrote 900 poems over his lifetime and 14 novels.

The poems in the Dover Thrift edition include selections from Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Time's Laughingstock and other Verses (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1919), and Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917.)

You don't turn to Hardy for happy love poems. He recalls the losses and divisions, not the lyric joys and bliss of love.

The Voice is one of my favorites. "Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me/Saying that now you are not as you were/When you had changed from the one who was all to me/But as at first, when our day was fair." Hardy wrote this after the death of his estranged first wife in amends for his later treatment of her.

Neutral Tones was taught in my Modern Poetry class. It is atmospheric and concise, with sympathetic nature reflecting the inner desolation of a man who reads betrayal in the smile of his beloved.

There are poems which tell a story.

The Burghers (17--) concerns a man discovering his wife with her lover. He raises a knife but seeing his wife's love for the other man he stays his hand, considering his choice of righteous vengeance or mercy.

In Her Death and After   a man is called to the death bed of the woman he loves but who married another. She has given birth to a lame child and wishes it had been theirs. Time passes and the husband remarries and has more children. The narrator watches helplessly as the lame child is pushed aside, unloved.  He spins a lie and claims the child is his own.

Most memorable and disturbing are Hardy's war poems. We meet the the war dead in throngs and as individuals. The Boer War and WWI were waged during his lifetime. You won't find war glorified in these poems.

In Drummer Hodge a young lad dies in the Boer War and is buried under "strange stars."

The Souls of the Slain come home to England's coast to "feast on our fame", only to be told that their loved ones do not think of their sacrifice but hold dear to memories of 'old homely acts'.

In The Man He Killed  a soldier muses over the irony that the foe he killed in battle he would have treated to a a drink had they met in a bar.

The poem that has haunted me is San Sebastian  (August 1813) With Thoughts of Sergeant M-- (Pensioner), Who died 186- . Two men met on the Ivel Way. One remarks on seeing the other's daughter. The father responds by telling about the girl he "wronged in Peninsular days," when out of the trenches the soldiers stormed San Sebastian for five hours. Victorious, the men ransacked the city where he came upon a girl and raped her.

She raised her beseeching eyes to meAnd I heard the words of prayer she sentIn her own soft language...Fatefully I copied those eyes for my punishmentIn begetting the girl you see! 

The father finishes by saying,

So, to-day I stand with a God-set brandLike Cain's, when he wandered from kindred's ken...I served through the war that made Europe free;I wived me in peach-year. But, hid from men,I bear that mark on me.

Researching and reading about San Sebastian brought understanding of  the horror behind Hardy's poem. The British siege of San Sebastian took place during the Napoleonic war when Spain was ruled by Napoleon's brother Joseph. The town was well defended and the British and Portuguese suffered heavy losses before finally breaching the wall and taking the town. After weeks of war and carnage the soldiers, victory finally won, they found wine and became a drunk mob. They burned the town, killed up to 1,000 citizens, and raped the women.

According to one first hand account, "From every quarter we heard the cries of distress of women who were being raped, without regard either to their tender you or to their respective age; wives outraged under the eyes of their husbands, girls dishonored in the presence of their parents...Other crimes more horrible yet were committed on this day, and it's only a sense of 'modesty' which prevents us naming them."

And of this dehumanizing massacre Hardy explores how men live with what they have done. It is a powerful poem, relevant to all eras.

These are not poems you read in great gulps. I spent several weeks reading this volume and have not read all the poems yet.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Selected Poems by Thomas Hardy
Dover Publications
$2.50 paperback
ISBN:9780486287539

Love Poems by Emily Dickinson

Further Poems of Emily Dickinson Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavina, Edited by Her Niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, was published by Little, Brown, and Company in 1929. Many years ago I came into possession of a copy of this book.

A good history of the publication of Dickinson's poems can be found at https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/book/export/html/108 where Martha Dickinson Bianchi's role in bringing Emily's poetry to publication is mentioned:

When Mabel Loomis Todd ceased her work on Dickinson’s poems, a period of quiet ensued in the publication story. Lavinia Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Susan Dickinson all died, and Martha Dickinson Bianchi began to assume a larger role in shaping her aunt's legacy. Having inherited Dickinson’s manuscripts from both Lavinia and Susan, Martha edited at least six volumes of Dickinson’s poetry. With a lighter editorial hand than her predecessors, Bianchi did not title the poems and kept their rhyme schemes intact. Incensed by publications about her aunt that she judged inaccurate, Bianchi wrote several memoirs to assert her unique perspective as “the one person now living who saw [Emily Dickinson] face to face” (Bianchi, p. xxii).

Most of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems appear in this book. Such as,

To fill a gap--
Insert the thing that caused it.
Block it up
With other and 't will yawn
The more;
You cannot solder an abyss
With Air.

Amherst by William Nicholson suggests that Emily heard her brother Austin's lovemaking with his mistress in her family's home parlor. Some have written that Emily was in love with Austin's wife--her "Sister Sue"-- or that she loved Austin's lover Mable Loomis Todd. There is supposition that Emily loved Thomas Wentworth Higginson to whom she shared her poems, or her father's friend Judge Otis Phillips Lord, or family friend Samuel Bowles, or any number of people.

Read more at
https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/love_life
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/10/emily_dickinsons_secret_lover.html
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/master-narrative-who-did-emily-dickinson-write-her-love-letters-to
http://www.sappho.com/letters/e_dickinsn.html
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/13/emily-dickinson-lyndall-gordon

The question of Emily's love interest remains conjecture. Emily tells of her great love in these poems from the book. It is obvious why they were withheld from publication by her sister Lavinia. They are so personal, telling a story unbefitting to the Victorian image of womankind.

+++++

Why do I love thee, Sir?
Because--
Require the grass
To answer wherefore, when
He pass,
She cannot keep her place.

The lightning never asked
An eye
Wherefore she shut when
he was by--
Because he knows
She cannot speak,
And reasons not contained
Of talk
There be--preferred by daintier folk.

+++++

Renunciation is a piercing virtue,
The letting go
A presence for an expectation--
Not now.

So well that I can live without--
I love Thee; then how well
Is that?
As well as Jesus?
Prove it me
That He loved men
As I love Thee.

+++++

If he were living--dare I ask?
And how if her were dead?
And so around the words I went
Of meeting them afraid.

I hinted changes, lapse of time,
The surfaces of years
I touched with caution, lest they slit
And show me to my fears.

Reverted to adjoining lives
Adroitly turning out
Wherever I suspected graces--
'T'was prudenter, I though.

And He--I rushed with sudden force
In face of the suspense--
"Was buried"--Buried!"
"He!"
My life just holds the trench.

+++++

After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?
And yesterday--or centuries before?

The feet mechanical go round
A wooden way
Of ground or air or Ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived
As freezing persons recollect
The snow--
First chill, then stupor, then
The letting go.

+++++

There is a pain so utter
It swallows Being up
Then covers the abyss with trance
So memory can step
Around, across, upon it,
As One within a swoon
Goes steady, when an open eye
Would drop him bone by bone.

+++++

I tie my hat, I crease my shawl,
Life's little duties do precisely
As the very least
Were infinite to me.

I put new blossoms in the glass,
And throw the old away,
I push a petal from my gown
That anchored there--I weigh

The time 't will be till six o'clock,
I have so much to do--
And get [sic; should be yet] existence some way back,
Stopped, struck, my ticking through.

We cannot put ourselves away
As a completed man
Or woman--when the errand's done
We came to flesh upon.

There may be miles on miles of nought
Of action,--sicker far,
To simulate is stinging work
To cover what we are

From Science and from surgery,
Too telescopic eyes
To bear on us unshaded,
For their sake, not for ours.

+++++

I got so I could hear his name
Without--
Tremendous gain!--
That stop-sensation in my soul,
And thunder in the room.

I got so I could walk across
That angle in the floor
Where he turned--so--and I
Turned--how--
And all our sinew tore.

I got so I could stir the box
In which
His letters grew,
Without that forcing in my breath
As staples driven through.

Could dimly recollect a Grace--
I think
They called it "God",
Renowned to ease extremity
When formula had failed--

And shape my hands
Petition's way--
Too ignorant of word
That Ordination utters--
My business with the cloud.

+++++

Staples driven through! Our sinews torn! We tie our hats and go about daily business, dead inside. After great pain Emily wrote the most exquisite verses resounds through the centuries to pierce our hearts with sympathy. She understood all we have experienced.

What did Lavinia know, what caused her to keep back these poems? It is the untold stories that most capture our imaginations.