Thomas Hardy

A few weeks ago in Dublin, on a misty August dawn, a great poet died. He was acclaimed by Robert Lowell as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats." But for Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney, it had been, from early boyhood, Thomas Hardy who first filled his heart and mind. Heaney's aunt had owned every single copy of Hardy's novels and from the moment of reading

the opening chapters of Return of the Native, I was at home with him—something about the vestigial ballad atmosphere, the intimacy, the oldness behind and inside the words, the peering and puzzlement and solitude. He was there like a familiar spirit from school days. I remember hearing the poem "Weathers" read on the BBC radio when I was eleven or twelve and never forgetting it. "The Oxen" I learned by heart around that time also. I loved the oddity and previousness of the English in it. "The lonely barton by yonder coomb"—that can still make me feel sad and taken care of all at once, le cor au fond du bois with a local accent.

(The Paris Review, "The Art of Poetry," p. 75)

Hardy and Heaney are paired together, on the GCSE (2012) English Literature course for high school students in Britain and the resulting span not only gives measure to Heaney's "familiar spirit" but also reflects an unusual mirroring of minds. Both poets share an indelible Celtic heritage, a deep sense of communion with the earth—with the natural world—a profound respect for dialect and folklore, and a readiness to take "a full look at the worst," to borrow Hardy's famous phrase.

The GCSE curriculum asks for a comparison of Heaney's "Blackberry Picking" with Hardy's "Wagtail and Baby"—poems that share, thematically, a rural setting, a child's encounter with nature and the discoveries that can be made by quietly attending, with close watchfulness, the minute activities of the natural world as it yields up its mysteries and marvels. Young GCSE scholars must also discern how structure, rhythm, point of view, and tone distinguish each poem, one from the other. Additionally, Hardy's "Overlooking the River Stour" is suggested as a mirror to the darker aspects in Heaney's "Blackberry Picking," where a sudden underlying violence takes the shape of a "A rat-grey fungus" which turns "the sweet flesh sour," and where, in Hardy, the swallows, flying in figures of eight, take on the look of menacing weapons:

The swallows flew in the curves of an eight   Above the river-gleam   In the wet June's last beam:Like little crossbows animate.

Aside from these three poems the complete selection for GSCE comprises Heaney's "Thatcher," "At A Potato Digging," "Last Look," "Trout" and "An Advancement of Learning." In Hardy's case the chosen poems for comparison are "The Old Workman," "A Sheep Fair," "An August Midnight," and "At Castle Boterel"—a poem which poignantly evokes the loss of selfhood, loss of the past youthful self which is now no more than "a phantom figure," rapidly receding, "shrinking, shrinking . . . for my sand is sinking"—in stark contrast to the surrounding rugged landscape, the primaeval rocks and their seeming permanence.

"At Castle Boterel," also featured recently on The Thomas Hardy Association's Poem of the Month. Phillip Mallett opened the discussion with the observation that in one of the best-known discussions of Hardy's verse,

Donald Davie's essay on 'Hardy's Virgilian Purples' (Agenda 10, 1972), Davie asks whether the poem claims 'only that he will remember Emma, and the quality of this moment he shared with her, until the day he dies. Which is touching, but hardly worth saying at such length.' What justifies the poem, Davie insists, is that its claim is not psychological, about 'one mind,' but metaphysical: that the poem's 'time of such quality' is 'truly indestructible,' and its 'quality' will survive the poet's death.

(http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ttha/poetry/potm/?p=242)

Of the dialogues that followed Mallett's introduction the main points of interest fell upon Hardy's...