The Woodlanders: A Metaphor of Character

Abstract

‘In truth,’ wrote Proust, ‘the events of a life present no interest when they are shorn of all the feeling which makes of them a poem.’ If we consider Hardy’ s novels from this perspective, it appears that he has written for the purpose of recreating ‘the feeling’ which is the poetic side of experience. Since Hardy was first and foremost a poet he trusted that poetry could best match the language of the mind. How and by what means could poetry achieve this quality? Cynthia Ozick¹ claims that poetry achieves this through metaphor, because metaphor is the poetry-making faculty itself. So what we find in a poem is metaphoric truth. Evidently, for Hardy, the important truth he wished to communicate was metaphoric truth. In other words, he used his creative faculty to transform experience into metaphor with which he could recompose ‘the feeling’. Hence the depth and richness of his texts.

Metaphor alone can give a sort of eternity to style.

M. Proust