The Cogency of Direct Vision

Abstract

That natural processes are blind, chaotic and unjust is an attitude which underlies most of Hardy’s poems. Sometimes he expresses it directly and when he does so the result is usually unsatisfactory. This is true of The Lacking Sense’, where Time explains suffering, disease, life’s imperfections, in terms of a blind nature which ‘plods dead-reckoning on’ through miserable darkness:

—Ah! knowest thou not her secret yet, her vainly veiled deficience, Whence it comes that all unwittingly she wounds the lives she loves?

That sightless are those orbs of hers? — which bar to her omniscience

Brings those fearful unfulfilments, that red ravage through her zones

Whereat all creation groans.