The Frost’s Decree

Abstract

Although Hardy was inconsistent in various points of view or ‘seemings’, and became less confidently rationalistic in his later years, in one respect at least he seems to have remained constant: he felt that too much in life is ruled by chance. His heart went out to those to whom chance had offered little choice; and it is with the misfortunes of such — deprivation, hardship, suffering, and tragedy — that Hardy’s poetical imagination often associated the severities of winter. Although he used the phrase ‘the Frost’s decree’ only once, there can be no doubt that it epitomizes every kind of misfortune for which chance is responsible, and that it is one expression of more generalized imagery which acquired a symbolical significance for Hardy very early in his writing career, and assumed a variety of wintry overtones in novels and poems over a period of more than sixty years.