|
The Going
Why did you give no hint that night That quickly after the morrow’s dawn, And calmly, as if indifferent quite, You would close your term here, up and be gone Where I could not follow With wing of swallow To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!
Never to bid good-bye, Or lip me the softest call, Or utter a wish for a word, while I Saw morning harden upon the wall, Unmoved, unknowing That your great going Had place that moment, and altered all.
Why do you make me leave the house And think for a breath it is you I see At the end of the alley of bending boughs Where so often at dusk you used to be; Till in darkening dankness The yawning blankness Of the perspective sickens me!
You were she who abode By those red-veined rocks far West, You were the swan-necked one who rode Along the beetling Beeny Crest, And, reining nigh me, Would muse and eye me, While Life unrolled us its very best.
Why, then, latterly did we not speak, Did we not think of those days long dead, And ere your vanishing strive to seek That time’s renewal? We might have said, “In this bright spring weather We’ll visit together Those places that once we visited.”
Well, well! All’s past amend, Unchangeable. It must go. I seem but a dead man held on end To sink down soon. . . . O you could not know That such swift fleeing No soul foreseeing— Not even I—would undo me so! |
Hardy’s novels rarely offer his protagonists second chances and here Hardy’s poem explores the impossibility of communing with the dead. Dialogue is illusory and the departed wife’s memory taunts the poet with her false spectral appearances which are perceptually bewildering and psychologically damaging to the speaker.
The poem is delivered through a series of exploratory stanzas representing moments of remembrance which revisit the past from slightly modified or adjusted perspectives. The tension in the poem emanates from the conflict between the guilty desire for reconciliation and the necessary acceptance of the inconvertible passing of time. Or even resignation and loss of control?
The final stanza highlights the confessional aspects of the poem and emulates the fragility of the poet’s voice as he vocalises his despairing acceptance of death. Self becomes other, becomes ironically estranged like the dead wife, as he detaches from himself in a gesture of maturity only to change his tone again as he fights such bleakness with a desperate cry of inutterable despair.
Perhaps it is true to say that the beloved is as far from appearing in this act of remembrance as the nightingale in Keats’ famous Ode. I am not sure how far the beloved merely serves as a muse for artistic expression and that the catharsis enjoyed through the self-expression is an achieved objective in itself. The death of Emma may have produced some of the finest poetry in English but how far we find ‘Emma’ at all in the poems I am not sure.
Art uses experience for its own ends being voracious and self-serving. The difficulties of the marraige may have ironically encourages a poetry that is riveting due to the ‘complex mourning’ under scrutiny in the writing.
Hiatus is briliantly utilised in this last stanza and we hear the faltering, stumbling voice of the poet as he acknowledges the finality of the finite world. The hyphens serve to communicate the process of realisation and perhaps even the declarative pride of the poet has to admit frailty and wrong doing?