A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.
The particularities of the human world, bounded closely by time and mortality are clearly presented in the opening chapter of Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Perhaps the careful delineation of time and setting, stand as ironic reminders of our human need to attempt control of the natural world.
In the passage the human social world is attempting to guard itself against the untamed wildness Egdon Heath;’ the unenclosed wild.’
The independence and latent threat of Egdon heath is communicated powerfully through the verb ’embrowned’ giving expression to the natural, irreversible cycle of natural life, a cycle that the stain of human time cannot contain. ‘Moment by moment’ gives fierce representation to nature’s activity. Nature will not be tamed because it is innately dynamic, ‘ wild’ and uncivilized.
Even the simile ‘as a tent’ with again its human reference point, fails to diminish our sense of the savage grandeur and separateness of the heath.’Tent’ seems bathetic in the sense that its metaphorical effect is weakened by the sheer expansiveness of the image itself.