When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
“He was a man who used to notice such things”?
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
“To him this must have been a familiar sight.”
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, “He strove that such innocent creatures should
come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.”
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at
the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
“He was one who had an eye for such mysteries”?
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,
“He hears it not now, but used to notice such things?”
In this poem the poet Thomas Hardy contemplates the world without him. It is both an elegy and eulogy combined. Perhaps the fame of the poet made such a poem necessary and perhaps we are all concerned, sometimes and somewhere about what our lives will signify, when we are no longer here. I find that the poem feels self regarding and definitely assembles together ‘fragments’ to ‘shore’ against the poet’s ‘ruins’ to borrow from Eliot’s Wasteland.
Yet this may be because there is no expression of an afterlife in Hardy’s poem, so the reductiveness I feel, may originate in its gently defiant anchorage to this world rather than a heavenly next! Perhaps I feel disappointed by his clinging to posterity. This makes him human of course, but rather fearful and dare i say small? So as I type that, I recognise I am judging a great writer, with very little time left, hoping he was less concerned with his legacy! But where are the people in his poem? We get to see only a hedgehog!
The irony is that he notices things because he is Thomas Hardy; he is an observant poet of nature and of mankind. Nobody could write his farewell but himself !
He is looking back ‘Afterwards’ over his shoulder, rather Orpheus like, giving permanence to his own transience. Hardy’s poetry and novels show a marked predilection for spectatorship, for individuals watching others, watching others. So I suppose this poem is the natural outcome of all those moments of tension between the watchers and the watched.
Yet I still don’t like it and I often love Hardy even though I don’t accept his bleakness and lack of belief. Maybe it is that concern, however much a device for the creation of the poem, with ‘neighbours’ with designated ‘interested’ others. It reads too much as a conceit, in every sense of that word. I find the poem forced in its conception and delivery.
I think I will read Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush again and remember how I love him too! And then throw in Larkin’s I remember so I do not get too happy!
Janet Lewison