‘A Singer Asleep’: Hardy’s Envoi to Decadence

Abstract

This elegy was prompted by a visit Hardy and Florence Dugdale paid to Swinburne’s grave at Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, in March 1910. Hardy was ‘much offended by the cross which had been placed over the tomb’,² and his poem emphasises the ‘decadent’ or disruptive effects of Swinburne’s ‘fulth of numbers’ upon the proprieties of ‘Victoria’s formal middle time’. The act of memorialisation and celebration, in terms of the sensational impact of Poems and Ballads, may also be marked, as Darrel Mansell suggests a propos Hallam and Tennyson, by ‘the contention of poetic rivalry between the elegist and his now dead friend’, a contention which culminates in the poet ‘obliterating’ his rival, ‘honouring him by surpassing him’.³ At the end of the poem Hardy issues a gesture of farewell, noting with glum satisfaction of Swinburne how ‘dull subterrene reverberations/Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains’, and closing with a striking yet dismissive image as ‘the daylight gleam declines/Upon the capes and chines’. This beautiful act of closure performs the Benjaminian fading out of the aura of the work of art in modernity, that fading process to which the fin de siècle sought irresolutely to respond. The Decadent movement, and Swinburne specifically for Hardy, proclaimed what Adorno defines as ‘the dream of a world in which things would be different’.⁴