A Brief Probe into Thomas Hardy’s Poems

A Brief Probe into Thomas Hardy’s Poems 托马斯.哈代的诗歌简析 A Brief Probe into Thomas Hardy’s Poems Contents Abstract…….…………………………………………..….………………..1 Keywords………………….…………..........................................................1 I. Introduction……………………………………………………………..2 II. Hardy and poetic creation…….……...............….................................2 III. Finding Poetry in Reality-the Presence of the Novels in Hardy’s Poetry.........................................................................................................5 1. The narrative function of Hardy’s poetry is very prominent…………......…6 2. Hardy’s poems widely use the dialogue creative form…..….………..…..….7 3. Hardy’s realism style of poetry is against the naturalism with emphasis on realistic imagination……………………………………………..……..9 IV. Hardy in the transition from romanticism to modernism……..…....10 V. Conclusion...……………………………….........................................…11 References…………………………………………………………………11 A Brief Probe into Thomas Hardy’s Poems thAbstract: In the late 19 Century, England came into the period of Queen Victoria. After a long-term social stability and development, the national contradictions had emerged. The social reforms made a notable impact on the Britain literature: novel creation showed prosperous sight. By contrast, poetry has entered a more difficult phase in development after creative romanticism peak. England critical realism novelist and poet---Thomas Hardy made an outstanding contribution to the development of English novels, and also created a lot of poetry and later he won the deserved reputation in the history of literature. This article will discuss the realism style of Hardy’s poetry and the influence in the history of literature development by Hardy’s poetry and novels. Keywords: Hardy; romanticism; realism; short poetry; modernism 摘 要: 19世纪后期，英国进入维多利亚女王统治时期。社会持续了长期稳定的发展后，国家 各种矛盾相继出现。英国文学受社会改革等影响，小说的创作呈现出繁荣的景象。相比 之下，诗歌在经历了浪漫主义的创作颠峰之后，进入了一个发展较为困难的阶段。英国 伟大的批判现实主义小说家和诗人托马斯?哈代在为英国小说的发展做出卓越贡献的同 时，也创作了大量的诗歌，并在后来赢得了文学史上应得的声誉。本文将通过哈代的诗 歌和小说来讨论哈代诗歌的现实主义风格及其文学发展史上的作用。 关键词:哈代，浪漫主义;现时主义;短篇诗歌;现代主义 第 1 页 共 12 页 I. Introduction In the Victorian period, the poetry was still the important genre of literature. Hardy was, so remarkably, a nineteen-century novelist as well as a twentieth-century poet, the date of his birth is now nearly one hundred and sixty years distant, the date of his death already seventy. His immense fame in his own lifetime aroused a inquisitiveness as to his personal life that he seek strenuously to resist, and since his death, his continuing increasing reputation and popularity naturally attracted the attention of biographers. As a great novelist, Thomas Hardy’ fiction has had a remarkably strong appeal for general readers for decades, and drew increasingly provocative attention from academic readers. And his poetry more recently has come to acclaim as among the most influential of the twentieth century. As a poet, Thomas Hardy created many poems with modern style and made great contribution to the literature of Britain, especially in the transition from romanticism to modernism. So he was considered one of the pioneers of modernism. Hardy presented the extraordinary master in two genres and his career spanned major parts of two literary eras. II. Hardy and Poetic Creation In the history of English literature, Thomas Hardy is outstanding in the areas of both novels and poetry, which is not very common. Hardy’s novels are recognized the immortal feats, such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. And his poetry is also assessed after nearly a century years of testing. For a long time, because of the tremendous impact of Hardy on behalf of the novelist, the brightness of his poetry is covered. However, after generations reread and study his works, people widely recognize the value of his poetry finally. Hardy’s achievements of poetry are not the second if it compares with the novel. As a poet, Hardy is as great as a novelist. As a writer，no matter how objective and fair the assessment that the critics gave him was, the close relationship between Hardy and poem was not doubted. In the late Victoria era, perhaps it was not difficult to imagine that people adored and worshiped the novelist Thomas Hardy not only because he began writing as his own creative career, but also followed the path of poetry all the time. Speaking of his early twenties, Hardy said: ―A sense of the truth of poetry, of it’s supreme place in literature, had awakened itself in me‖(The life and Work of Thomas Hardy,1985:415) His life’s greatest desire was to become a distinguished poet, to write and to be selected by Palgrave ―The Golden 第 2 页 共 12 页 Treasury of the Best Song and Lyrical Poems in the English‖, a kind of outstanding poetry anthology. In fact, Hardy wrote poetry for nearly sixty years, his earliest known poem was finished in 1860 and his last poem dated in early 1928. Twenty-five of these years of course were mostly devoted to novel-writing, though we have seen he kept his hand in as a poet. His full- time poetic career lasted longer than that of any other Victorian, indeed any other English poet. He composed over a thousand poems. He wrote poems in more metrical forms than any other major English poet. He invented over 600stanza forms. Hardy’s Home mainly described the natural scenery and beautiful home with the style that imitated the lake poet William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Hardy formally began to create poetry in 1865, and then he sent his poetry to the British major publications successively. Unfortunately, these works have not been recognized for a long time by editors’ recognition. Hardy had to engage in creating of novels using his main energy and he postponed the time of creation poetry though he wanted to devote himself to the poetry creating. As Edinburgh Comments published in the April 1918 said that it will be very interesting to find that the huge success of Far from the Modding Crowd (1874) made him get into one of the most outstanding readers circles, but the later impact disrupted his ambitions again at that time. Hardy tempted to change the types of literature works again. He hoped that he can return to poetry. However, when well-known British novelist Virginia Woolf’s father, an English critic and editor, Leslie Stephen exhorted Hardy to continue to maintain his creation in novels. He got to work and tried to write Return Home. Meanwhile, a British poet Patemoer wrote Hardy a letter, expressing his regret. The letter remarked on the performance in Hardy on behalf of the novelist: ―that the beauty and the almost unparalleled charm not necessarily enduring, if used poetry forms, and will remain fresh forever good.‖(Thomas Hardy:A Biography,1982) In such contradictions, on the one hand, Hardy accepted Stephen’s proposal, on the other hand he created poetry too. His narrative poems and short Wessex Songs were the most fascinating poetry. And his creative thideas began with his famous song Dynasts. Therefore, in the 19 century Hardy became one of the poetry-arts masters, and his poetry style was also stereotypes during this period. By the end of 1895, the novel Jude the Obscure was finally published. From 1896, Hardy can finally return to his poetry love and began to devote his energies to poetry writing, and he published the poems regularly as a resolute poet. William. W. Morgan, a renowned scholar who researched Hardy and the literature in Victoria era, pointed out in his paper: ―In the years after 1898, Thomas Hardy spent a good deal of his intellectual and emotional energy making the case that he replaced himself to be a poet all along even 第 3 页 共 12 页 during the years when he was writing novels. Sometimes he tried to make this case by denigrating his fiction and doing all he could to turn his readers’ attention away from his novels and towards his poetry.‖(Thomas Hardy: A Biography, 1982, 79) When Hardy entered his twilight years he demonstrated over the years for his own poetry creative attitude in the diary and autobiography. As Morgan in the article said ―It was for his poetry, he said, that he wished to be remembered, and he usually added. As if giving evidence of his long time seriousness about poetry, that he had after all begun his literary life as a poet and had written novels almost by accident because he happened to be able to make a living by doing so.‖(Thomas Hardy: A Biography, 1982, 94) It’s not important to Hardy to rely on writing novels, but that he created for the serious and careful poetry was obvious. Besides that, in the process of creating the poetry, Hardy read a lot of poetry and learned hard in poetry phase. This was not merely because he would like to compose poems for career, but it can stem from his personal affection for the poetry. Hardy would become one of the most learned poets. In 1866-67, he read only books of poetry, believing ―that, as in verse was concentrated the essence of all imaginative and emotional literature, to read verse and nothing else was the shortest way to the fountain-head of such‖. (Dale Kramer，The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy，2000:186) This just may be a small part of the creative activities of learning and studying poetry for Thomas Hardy. And another example of commentators was we know from his autobiographical literature life that Thomas Hardy’s first remarks was to be a poet and the energy with which he set about teaching himself the trade is evident both in the poems of the period and in the Revenue notebook entries that tell us he was reading the poetry of Spenser, Burns, Byron, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and especially Swinburne. ―Swinburne’ effect on Hardy was like Hemingway’s effect on young American fiction writers‖ (Dale Kramer，The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy，2000:183) Swinburne became Hardy’s earliest poetic idol, both for metrical skill and for those ideas which helped deconvert Hardy from his Anglicanism. As Michael Millgate said that Hardy was deliberately setting himself up as a poet, he bought a new rhyming dictionary and started an ambitious notebook he called studies specimen which he used for self conscious development of his vocabulary, for ideas, for poems and for metrical experiments, which arised out of a wide range of artistic motives. Hardy achieved success ultimately in the field of poetry writing related to his note taking. However, when Hardy restarted poetry writing, and in 1898 published the Wessex Poems, his poetry has not caused too much attention to the commentators. Some people even believe that Hardy does not write novel but writing poems is a great loss for the entire 第 4 页 共 12 页 world literature. Until the Poems of the Past and the Present was published in 1901,critics began to recognized that he was a poet, but people were not interested in his poems that were like prose form and full of pessimism, and the prevailing view was that his poetry skills were crude. But Hardy’s epic Dynasts made people change their views on his poems, nevertheless that is a close link with theatre productions, and he should differentiate the epic from the creation of narrative poetry and lyrics poetry. However, Hardy as an important English poet, has already begun to be concerned by people in the second half of ththe 19 century. III. Finding Poetry in Reality-the Presence of the Novels in Hardy’s Poetry After the industrial revolution in the second half of the 18th century, English social structure and economic form has undergone profound changes, which exacerbated the contradictions between capitalists and proletariat. Because British Empire unceasingly enlarged its possession and there were full of problems in the British literacy circles, in critical realism to the banner of reality and in critical thinking. Several ―character an environmental novels‖ of Hardy’s, such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Jude the Obscure(1896) and Tess of D’Urbervilles (1891) have multiply reflected the acute contradictions of English rural society and suffered a malicious attack by bourgeois commentators at that time, which made him angry on poetry writing. In addition, many poets, in the same period with Hardy, wrote poetry with distinct characteristics of that time, which focused on the function of the poetry. By the complex external factors, Hardy’s poetry and his novels complemented each other in a sense, and it embodied the creative principles of realism. However, such realism style of Hardy’s poetry was different from the ways of other individuals such as expressing its rich combat sexual impulses. His poems have a calm and profound style, but not anti-self-pity, sorrow. The style of writing appeared a more real and serious attitude in the face of the world. The significant reality and universality was that Hardy showed concern deeply for people’s destiny. The poetry of Hardy praised the soul of people, and observed the life patterns using the natural fashion to record, to convey some profound ideological connotations. Whether his narrative poems or lyrics poem rarely made a fuss, but the vague superficial always fell on the thinking for the real life, which was quite rational. This reflected a realistic style. Specifically, books published in deferent periods have his own characteristic, Earliest Wessex Poems reproduced his early love poetry with the sons 第 5 页 共 12 页 ―Wessex features.‖ And Poems of the Past and Present reflects Britain waged against South Africa after the war of aggression in 1899. The intrinsic link creation of Hardy's poetry and novels was showed by a peerless magic metaphor ,that is, Hardy's poetry like columns in the novel to stoup,and his poetry reflects his full creative spirit. Satires of Circumstance is the best expression of his poetry collection of realism style works, the poet described the trivial matters that were easily neglected by people in daily life with the strong poetry style, and he emphasized more tragic irony. Hardy’s poetry Afterwards(王佐 良，1995) used the delicate brushwork to record the past events of this small world, even a very small plot into poetry territory, such as ―And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings‖, ―Delicate-filmed as new –spum silk‖, ―When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn‖ and so on. Subsequently published books, such as Later Lyrics and Earlier (1922) and Human shows (1925) also were focused on by the people. If I use one sentence to summarize the natural feature of above all, it might be the poetry and almost all of them belong to the realistic work. Generally speaking, this poetry of reality is mainly in the following aspects. 1. The narrative function of Hardy’s poetry is very prominent The narrative function of Hardy’s poetry is very prominent. Most of his poems or stories use the persons and events in real life for the prototype, or with the specific circumstances of creative fiction for background and good use of the highly enriched theatre scene performance theme. The introduction of Hardy’s Wessex Poems clearly pointes out that many of his poems are dramatic, although sometimes not evident. This Dramatic makes Hardy’s poems reflect strong romanticism poetry. It is easy to identify the scene that is similar to novels and drama from a series of creative works by Hardy. One poem The Going included in Poem of the Past and Present describes an actual historical event that British launched a war of aggression against South Africa and the scenes United Kingdom ship left port in 1899. In addition, this also involves the collection of other works of Queen Victoria and the poet saw through the two European trips in 1887 and in 1889. Such as the description in On the Departure platform (Zhang Manyi,1994:4)comes from the Satires of Circumstance which is similar as the scenes in novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Maybe these sentences can make you have a lot of images. ―Then show again, till I ceased to see/ That flexible form, that nebulous white;/ And she who was more than my life to me/ Had vanished quite…//‖ (2004) It is easily to make his poetry and fiction to the creative link by the creative ways of Hardy’s poetry, it is even regarded his poetry are like his novels, but this view is unscientific. 第 6 页 共 12 页 Hardy’s poem about love and his dramatic poem reflect the need of the real life and the personal emotion, and his poetry has the performance of the integrity independence. Just as the Edinburgh Comments (Chen Taoyu,1992)has pointed out, even if he has not made any fiction work, he should also contribute to his poetry and enjoy a high status in the country. 2. The poems of Hardy widely use the creative dialogue form The poems of Hardy widely use the creative dialogue form. As a major figure of English romanticism poet, critic poet and lake poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772-1834) was famous for writing ―dialogue poetry‖, perhaps Hardy’s creation was influenced by Coleridge more or less. However, it is certain that the form of Hardy’s poetry, dialogue, not only inherited the former generations, but also showed his distinctive style of his contemporary poets. Many of his works showed his creative themes through the dialogue. At the same time the simple and profound significance has strong ideological content and artistry. In addition, it is not a small test for a poet to reflect the poetry’s characteristics in the form of dialogue poetry, and grasp the rhythm and beat well, but Hardy tried his best in this direction. In several of his major books, Satires of Circumstance concentrated the form of a dialogue body. In addition, The Going (Zhang Manyi，1994)which is included in Poems of the past and present is a very exciting dialogue poem. There are two sections in the middle of this poem. The Going Why did you give no hint that night, That quickly after the morrow’s dawn, And calmly, as if indifferent quiet, You would close your term here, up and be gone Where I could not follow With wing of swallow To gain one glimpse of you ever anon! Never to bid good-bye Or lip me the softest call, Or utter a wish for a word, while I Saw morning harden upon the wall, Unmoved, unknowing That your great going 第 7 页 共 12 页 Had place that moment, and altered all. Why do you make me leave the house And think for a breathe it is you I see And the alley of bending boughs Where so often at dusk you used to be; Till in darkening dankness Of the perspective sickens me! You were she who abode Bu those red-veined rocks far West, You were the swan-necked one who rode Along the beetling Beeny Crest, And, reining night me, Would muse and eye me, While Life unrolled us its very best. Why, then, latterly did we not speak, Did we not think of those days long dead, And ere your vanishing strive to seek That time’s renewal? We might have said, ―In this bright spring weather We’ll visit together Those places that once we visited.‖ Well, well! All’s past amend, Unchangeable. It must go. I seem but a dead man held on end To sink down soon. ……O you could not know That such swift fleeing No soul foreseeing---- Not even I ---would undo me so! Hardy wrote this poem for his dead wife Emma. In this poem, he used a kind of rhetoric—apostrophe: the poet talked to his wife as if his wife was standing in front of him. ―you‖,‖ your‖ ―we‖ or ―us‖ in each line made the readers feel genial in reading and see a 第 8 页 共 12 页 scene that a couple were talking in their house. He showed the readers some pictures with ―their talking‖, such as ―At the end of the alley of bending boughs/ Where so often at dusk you used to be; You were the swan-necked one who rode /Along the beetling Beeny Crest‖. The language of the poem was simple and unadorned but the diction was exquisite, like ―going‖, ―darkening, dankness‖, and ―red-veined rocks‖. This dialogue form is more vivid than soliloquy. Satires of Circumstance concentrated the form of a dialogue body. At the same time, this question-and-answer format also subjects to certain works, which is easy to understand and appreciate for the readers. 3. Hardy’s realism style of poetry is against the naturalism with emphasis on realistic imagination. Hardy’s realism style of poetry is against the naturalism, with emphasis on realistic imagination. As already mentioned, his poetry stems from real life and self-feelings, but Hardy believed that the poet should face the grim reality life through rational imagination revealing the theme of his works. Hardy’s poetry describes the natural things and it is established in the basis of its thorough understanding, and this realism must be achieved by means of imagination. At the same time, the poet’s imagination must be reasonable and it’s different from the ―realization of fictions imagination‖. Hardy strongly opposed to the simple description of naturalism style. He has said that in the time of writing,“don’t want to see the original reality- that is ,as visual effects reality, but would like to see the background below the deeper reality, sometimes brown as abstract see that the performance of the imagination”.(2000) This is more profound in the theory of Hardy on behalf of the poems. Hardy believes that the deeper reality is abstract imaginative performance. In his many poems, Thomas Hardy was used to describing our daily scenes, such as ―Close up the casement, draw the blind/ dew-dashed lawn‖. (Shut Out That Moon, 2006) ―You were the swan-necked one who rode /Along the beetling Beeny Crest‖. (The Going, 2006) And the things in his poems were from our lives like ―wings of swallow‖, ―swan necked‖ and ―dewfall hawk‖. Some poems, such as On the Departure platform, To life and Afterwards have the main figure in the daily life. He expressed his thoughts by these common scenes and natural things, which made the readers feel real and was easy to understand. But he didn’t describe the things simply. He described the reality with imagination to show real pictures to express his feeling. All the themes were from the reality, from the nature, but not the reality, nor nature. Whether viewed as a whole or seen from other aspects, the simplicity and natural 第 9 页 共 12 页 beauty of his poems could never be overshadowed when being appreciated. So hardy became the one of the pioneers of exploring modernism. IV. Hardy in the Transition from Romanticism to Modernism From the beginning of Victoria domination to the eve of the First World War, British poetry developed relatively slowly. The phenomenon might be romanticism suffered the shocks by the tradition of English poetry. And many poets looked helpless when they thfaced the romanticism literature rapidly ending in the 19 century. In this situation, Hardy was much more sensible than his peers and seemed to be calm. He insisted on the way of looking natural creative so that his poetry consciously followed the romanticism literary tradition, while providing the modernist poet of the subsequent creative inspiration. This was very important for Hardy as an English poet of native speaker in the history of poetry. Hardy’s poetry was rooted in the romanticism by Shelley and Keats, but the final result was loyalty realism. As we know, all romantic poets love nature and freedom to express their inner feelings, and imagination is more important than ration(Although Wordsworth(2002) in the Lyrical Balads mentioned in the preamble: the poet should win true inner feelings touching the hearts of readers, and it seemed Hardy was a successor. However, the creative practice of Hardy’s poetry has proved that he was under the influence of romantic creative style which blazed a new path. Hardy wrote his poetry replicating romanticism in the past, but in subsequent decade poetry writing, he summed up the experience gained in his own, that ―poetry is the record of mission impression, and not conviction records‖(Orel Critical essay on Thomas Hardy，1995:127)(We can see Hardy understood the Romantic poetry using his critical sight. About the different style between Hardy and Romantic creation, Rosenthal, M.L has used a very apt metaphor: compared with Wordsworth’s poems, ―His starting point is more closely than his predecessors to the subject plane. Wordsworth sitting on a pony carriage, or in meditation, the philosopher said through the wilderness. Hardy is the close neighbor, adjacent to the graves who participate in funeral ceremony‖(Rosenthal, M.L.2004:28-29). This is a sense of realism and kindness poetry dedicated to the greatest happiness to the people. Because in the impact of environment, coupled with the life course of individuals swallowed, the small numbers of Hardy’s poetry were just as his novels with the pessimism colors. Satires of Circumstance and Poems of the past and present reflected a very emotional depression of the poet. However, Hardy’s pessimism was unlike Byron’s. Sometimes his poems tended to display some sense of cynicism and decadent tendencies, 第 10 页 共 12 页 and they were interspersed with a lot of evil things. When the poet was old, he consciously rejected the faith in God, and learned a philosophy that there was a supernatural power in the universe, also called ―inherent power‖, and it was this feature of the historical forces that dominated the process, the change of fate, the good life and so on. This might be the main reason that there was modern characteristic in his late poetry( V. Conclusion Thus, different scholars have the different views about Hardy’s poetry. They influenced the development of English poetry in the history from the second half of the thth19 century to the early 20 century. But one view was basically the same that Hardy’s works could neither be simply classified as the traditional camp nor post modernism field, and some scholars pointed out that he was the only one in the same generation with Pound, Moore, T?S Eliot and so on. It can be said that Hardy as a British poet is the product of literary realism in the modern poetry. He carried a strong sense of realism to his poetry, which play a positive role in transition from romanticism to modernism. Of course, because of the universal conservative tendencies by the creation of British poets in Victoria Period, the poetry innovation of Hardy on behalf of the traditional style remained fulfilled comprehensive breakthrough. The English poetry entered into another new era-Modernist until T?S Eliot and Pound came across the oceans. References: 1. Dale Kramer Thomas Hardy [M]. 上海:上海外语教研出版社,2000 2. Rosenthal,M.L.The Modern Poets:A Critical Introduction [M].北京:外语教学与研究出版 社,2004 3. Warren,R.P. 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