Late Victorian Experimentation

Abstract

I must admit my dislike of THOMAS HARDY (1840–1928) as novelist; I could dislike any writer who ended so cruel a book (you may call it compassionate if you wish) as Tess with a snidely intruded character called The President of the Immortals. But his lyrics, which happily took over when Jude shrivelled up the last of his fictional impulse in 1896, not only convince me but may contain something to our more pedantic purpose; his interest in true Dorset speech, and peasant directness or evasiveness, must often be in tension with the formal stanzaic verse which he practised. I have found the collection Human Shows: Far Phantasies (London: Macmillan, 1925) of some interest here, though Hardy does not habitually take a theme and ‘make it strange’ for poetry. But ‘Last Week in October’ (p. 19) has just two stanzas, the first light and simple, with a dependence on the one idea of the increasing nakedness of the trees, the other archaic and contrived, as if by a different writer:

The trees are undressing, and fling in many places —

On the gray road, the roof, the window-sill

Their radiant robes and ribbons and yellow laces;

A leaf each second so is flung at will,

Here, there, another and another, still and still.

A spider’s web has caught one while downcoming,

That stays there dangling when the rest pass on;

Like a suspended criminal hangs he, mumming,

In golden garb, while one yet green, high yon,

Trembles, as fearing such a fate for himself anon.