Going and Staying: Traditional Music in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy

Abstract

Thomas Hardy makes abundant use of the rhythms, lyrics, language, and forms of the traditional music of his native Wessex throughout the body of his poetry. By writing within the patterns taken from folk music and traditional sacred songs, Hardy speaks in accordance with the format accepted by the community to which he belongs, and his use of religious and secular music also indicates a distrust of history associated with the sense of ‘belatedness’ seen in Modernist writers. The ambivalence felt by Hardy over the loss of an older way of life is expressed in his use of folksongs and hymns as well, combining his sense of coming late to a tradition with the view of the vastness of time espoused by Charles Darwin.