Six Poets Read Free Page A

listless form and face,
    Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,
    Or whence he came.
    In the band of his hat the journeying boy
    Had a ticket stuck; and a string
    Around his neck bore the key of his box,
    That twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams
    Like a living thing.
    What past can be yours, O journeying boy
    Towards a world unknown,
    Who calmly, as if incurious quite
    On all at stake, can undertake
    This plunge alone?
    Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy,
    Our rude realms far above,
    Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete
    This region of sin that you find you in,
    But are not of?

    Hardy was the son of a jobbing builder, but many of his relations were farm labourers and some had been born in the workhouse. At Hardy’s funeral service in Westminster Abbey, an old tramp had somehow got himself into the reserved seats. A clergyman neighbour of the Hardys got into conversation with him, thinking he’d just come in from the cold, but he found to his surprise that the tramp knew a great deal about Hardy and indeed was probably one of his relatives.
    Quite early in his life, Hardy began to cut himself off socially from his lowly background, while artistically he drew on it more and more. He even tried to bump up his social origins, making a great deal of even the vaguest of well-to-do connections (exactly the opposite of what a writer would do today). When he was an old man and a celebrity, he was visited by the Prince of Wales (later the Duke of Windsor), to whom he gave lunch. The gardener, who was as much a social climber as Hardy, but on a lower slope, appropriated the chicken bone that the Prince had gnawed, as a souvenir.
    Hardy’s poems are sometimes like entries in a writer’s (or a film-maker’s) notebook. Complete in itself, this poem is also a note for a scene that could become a longer story.

The Whitewashed Wall
    Why does she turn in that shy soft way
    Whenever she stirs the fire,
    And kiss to the chimney-corner wall,
    As if entranced to admire
    Its whitewashed bareness more than the sight
    Of a rose in richest green?
    I have known her long, but this raptured rite
    I never before have seen.
    â€“ Well, once when her son cast his shadow there,
    A friend took a pencil and drew him
    Upon that flame-lit wall. And the lines
    Had a lifelike semblance to him.
    And there long stayed his familiar look;
    But one day, ere she knew,
    The whitener came to cleanse the nook,
    And covered the face from view.
    â€˜Yes,’ he said: ‘My brush goes on with a rush,
    And the draught is buried under;
    When you have to whiten old cots and brighten,
    What else can you do, I wonder?’
    But she knows he’s there. And when she yearns
    For him, deep in the labouring night,
    She sees him as close at hand, and turns
    To him under his sheet of white.

    Hardy’s verse is often a bit ungainly; it doesn’t always run smooth. One of the reasons for this is that he melds ordinary conversation with the verse, and even, as in this next poem, bits of advertising copy. It’s this casual style that has made him a greater influence on later poets than, say, Eliot or Yeats, who have had more acclaim. Auden, Betjeman and Larkin – all owe a good deal to Hardy.

At the Draper’s
    â€˜I stood at the back of the shop, my dear,
    But you did not perceive me.
    Well, when they deliver what you were shown
    I
shall know nothing of it, believe me!’
    And he coughed and coughed as she paled and said,
    â€˜O, I didn’t see you come in there –
    Why couldn’t you speak?’ – ‘Well, I didn’t. I left
    That you should not notice I’d been there.
    â€˜You were viewing some lovely things. “
Soon required
    For a widow, of latest fashion
”;
    And I knew ’twould upset you to meet the man
    Who had to be cold and ashen
    â€˜And screwed in a box before they could dress you
    â€œ
In the last new note in mourning
”,
    As they defined it.