Love Poems II: Poems about Emma

Abstract

Thomas Hardy wrote about a hundred poems about Emma Lavinia, his first wife; over a tenth of his entire lyric oeuvre. At least 80 of these are avowedly about their courtship and marriage; 20 or so more may, with reasonable certitude, be ascribed to the same creative origin. Of all this passionate outpouring Emma herself — and it is a truly terrible irony — can have seen scarcely a trace. Only four poems, two certainly and two very probably about her, were published in her lifetime, and it is most unlikely that she saw more than a few others in manuscript. In fact, almost every line Hardy traced upon his tremendous map of love was posthumous, and though several great poets, Donne and Milton among them, have left individual tributes to their dead wives, there is nothing in all literature to compare with Hardy’s elegiac commemoration of Emma, of which what is now the most celebrated part appeared, as Poems of 1912–13, not long after her death; to be supplemented by a steady stream of others until Hardy’s own death in 1928.