Six Poets Read Free Page B

So, not to distress you,
    I left you to your adorning.’

    Now a happier poem, though like so many of Hardy’s, it ends with a grave. It’s a poem to his cat. Samuel Butler said that the true test of the imagination is the ability to name a cat, but T. S. Eliot said that cats have several names, including the name they’re given and the name that they eventually acquire. The name that Hardy’s cat eventually acquired was Kiddleywinkempoops Trot.

Last Words to a Dumb Friend
    Pet was never mourned as you,
    Purrer of the spotless hue,
    Plumy tail, and wistful gaze
    While you humoured our queer ways,
    Or outshrilled your morning call
    Up the stairs and through the hall –
    Foot suspended in its fall –
    While, expectant, you would stand
    Arched, to meet the stroking hand;
    Till your way you chose to wend
    Yonder, to your tragic end.
    Never another pet for me!
    Let your place all vacant be;
    Better blankness day by day
    Than companion torn away.
    Better bid his memory fade,
    Better blot each mark he made,
    Selfishly escape distress
    By contrived forgetfulness,
    Than preserve his prints to make
    Every morn and eve an ache.
    From the chair whereon he sat
    Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;
    Rake his little pathways out
    Mid the bushes roundabout;
    Smooth away his talons’ mark
    From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
    Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
    Waiting us who loitered round.
    Strange it is this speechless thing,
    Subject to our mastering,
    Subject for his life and food
    To our gift, and time, and mood;
    Timid pensioner of us Powers,
    His existence ruled by ours,
    Should – by crossing at a breath
    Into safe and shielded death,
    By the merely taking hence
    Of his insignificance –
    Loom as largened to the sense,
    Shape as part, above man’s will,
    Of the Imperturbable.
    As a prisoner, flight debarred,
    Exercising in a yard,
    Still retain I, troubled, shaken,
    Mean estate, by him forsaken;
    And this home, which scarcely took
    Impress from his little look,
    By his faring to the Dim
    Grows all eloquent of him.
    Housemate, I can think you still
    Bounding to the window-sill,
    Over which I vaguely see
    Your small mound beneath the tree,
    Showing in the autumn shade
    That you moulder where you played.
    2 October 1904

    Hardy never said much about writing or the difficulties of it, or the moral difficulties of it. Kafka said that a writer was doing the devil’s work, writing a wholly inadequate response to the brutishness of the world, and Hardy increasingly felt this. It’s not that it’s an immoral activity or an amoral one; it’s just that the act of creation is something to which the ordinary standards of human behaviour do not apply.
    Hardy never liked to be touched. He always walked in the road to avoid brushing against people, and servants were told never to help him on with his coat and just to drop the shawl around his shoulders and not tuck him in. The pen had been his weapon in his struggle for life – and it had been a struggle.
    The next poem is a dialogue with the moon.

I Looked Up from My Writing
    I looked up from my writing,
    And gave a start to see,
    As if rapt in my inditing,
    The moon’s full gaze on me.
    Her meditative misty head
    Was spectral in its air,
    And I involuntarily said,
    â€˜What are you doing there?’
    â€˜Oh, I’ve been scanning pond and hole
    And waterway hereabout
    For the body of one with a sunken soul
    Who has put his life-light out.
    â€˜Did you hear his frenzied tattle?
    It was sorrow for his son
    Who is slain in brutish battle,
    Though he has injured none.
    â€˜And now I am curious to look
    Into the blinkered mind
    Of one who wants to write a book
    In a world of such a kind.’
    Her temper overwrought me,
    And I edged to shun her view,
    For I felt assured she thought me
    One who should drown him too.

    Now one of Hardy’s greatest poems.

The Convergence of the Twain
    (
Lines on the loss of