Time and mutability in the poetry of Thomas Hardy

ABSTRACT

Hardy's preoccupation in his poetry with time and change is a critical commonplace but has never been examined in detail as a stand-alone subject. Hardy was well aware that it placed him in a tradition whose roots lay in Classical and Renaissance literature and involves the ancient and enduring philosophical debate about permanence and change. But like the great poets before and after him who shared his preoccupation with mutability, he imposed upon it his own distinctive imprint, a melancholy recording of lamentable change in the personal domain: from youth to age, innocence to experience, illusion to disillusion, bliss to bitterness. However, although convinced, like Shelley, that “Nought may endure but Mutability”, he seeks in the natural world signs of permanence that defy as well as characterize it, and, on a few occasions, finds in the experience of love ecstatic moments whose perfection is a taste of eternity and unassailable by Time.

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Corrigendum

Notes

¹Spenser, Two Cantos of Mutabilitie. The Faerie Queene, 7.7.47.

²See, for example, Southworth, 79–81; Pinion, 170–2; Marsden, 72–80; Gibson and Johnson, eds., 16 (“No criticism that ignores Hardy's engagement with Time can hope to be adequate”); Green, 26–9.

³An exception is Patricia Ingham, 119–36. In her essay she argues that Hardy the poet characteristically sees time as stasis and life in time as a form of claustrophobic entrapment. Although it contains some finely perceptive commentary on individual poems, this approach offers a very narrow view of the subject: it ignores Hardy's sense of time as relentless and treacherous change, his interest in the dialectic of time and the timeless, change and permanence and, in general, the range and variety of his responses to the old enemy.

⁴From his early lyrics to the late “Lapis Lazuli” and “Meru,” W. B. Yeats's work constitutes a profound engagement with time and the timeless, a conflicted relationship illustrating the Blakean axiom that eternity is in love with the productions of time. In Time in the Poetry of T.S. Eliot, Nancy Gish shows how in his early poems and The Wasteland Eliot depicts the world as a place of meaningless flux and decay, and in Four Quartets as a place where it is possible to experience, through ecstatic moments that transcend time and flux, an order of changeless reality (theologically conceived). See also Paulin, “Time and Sense Experience.” On Philip Larkin, see my “Cathedral Musings.”

⁵Tomalin, 369.

⁶Shakespeare, Complete Works, Hamlet, 5.1.233–5.

⁷References throughout are to the poems as numbered in Thomas Hardy, Complete Poems.

⁸Thomas Hardy, Literary Notebooks, 211. Yeats too found stimulus and precedent for his brooding on time and change in his reading of Edmund Spenser. See my article, “Yeats and the English Renaissance.”

⁹Panofsky, 92 (ch.3, “Father Time”). Erwin Panofsky includes five of the many Renaissance pictorial illustrations of “The Triumph of Time,” title of one of Petrarch's famous Trionfi poems.

¹⁰Tomalin, 73.

¹¹The first line of the first of these sonnets, “She, to Him I” (14), “When you shall see me in the toils of Time,” recalls a series of Shakespeare's sonnets beginning in exactly the same way: “When I do count the clock that tells the time,” “When in the chronicle of wasted time,” “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,” “When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced,” “When I consider everything that grows.”

¹²Florence Emily Hardy, 164.

¹³Marsden, 50, citing A. P. Elliott. As noted below, in “She, to Him, I” the enemy of love is referred to as “That Sportsman Time.”

¹⁴Bakewell, 15–18, 30–1.

¹⁵It has been suggested, however, that the star signifies Fate; but that interpretation is surely invalidated by the reference to “degree,” placing the speaker and the star as entities on the same scale of impermanent being—which, as Hardy would have pointed out, is cosmologically correct.

¹⁶On Xenophanes and Parmenides, see Bakewell, 21.

¹⁷Hardy's cryptic reference to Einstein's tenseless time at the end of chapter 28 of the Life has been interpreted by Claire Tomalin (345) as signalling agreement with the physicist. She ignores the two poems which ostentatiously register dissent.

¹⁸Henri Bergson's two lectures (La Perception du changement) were delivered at Oxford in 1911 and published there in the same year—shortly after Pogson's English translation of his Time and Free Will.

¹⁹The refrain in this two-stanza poem echoes the refrain in one of A. C. Swinburne's longer and more memorable early lyrics: “These were things she sought for years and sorrowed after,” etc., etc. (“Stage Love”).

²⁰Hynes, 50.

²¹Shakespeare, Complete Works, Romeo and Juliet, 3.1.136.

²²See, for example, Lucrece's lengthy declamation on Opportunity and Time in The Rape of Lucrece (Shakespeare, Complete Works, ll. 876–1024).

²³Ageing, “bodily decrepitude,” is much more thoroughly embedded in Yeats's ruminations on time and change (“After Long Silence”, l.7. See also “Sailing to Byzantium”, “The Tower”, “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, “Among School Children”, “Quarrel in Old Age”). It is integral to Eliot's reflections in Four Quartets on the illusionary notion of time as progress (“East Coker” [II, V] “The Dry Salvages”, [II]). Middle age and the mirror remind Larkin that he has learned to live too late, has missed his opportunities, is always asynchronous (“Annus Mirabilis,” “Skin,” “Money”, See my “Cathedral Musings”, p.128. [where these poems are discussed]).

²⁴See also “To Outer Nature” (37), “Former Beauties” (195), “The Faded Face” (377), “The Beauty” (572).

²⁵Shakespeare, Complete Works, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.118–19.

²⁶See also “Before and after Summer” (273), “The Musical Box” (425).

²⁷Some Swinburne examples from Poems and Ballads: “What the years mean, how time dies and is not slain” (“Stage Love”); “The years with soundless feet and sounding wings” (“Victor Hugo”); “in the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years” (“Hymn to Proserpine”).

²⁸Florence Emily Hardy, 287.

²⁹Larkin.

³⁰Thomas Hardy, Collected Poems, “The Voice,” 326; Thomas Hardy, Complete Poems, no. 285.

³¹Thomas Hardy, Complete Poems, nos. 557, 84. Cf. 190.

³²Last line of Shelley's sonnet “Mutability.” Stet. Every collection of Shelley’s poems has this sonnet and its last line would of course be line 14.

³³Kenneth Marsden (72) observes that “a desire to abolish, ignore, or at least halt time is the main motivation of a number of his poems. The common factor seems to be the wish to arrest the flux of Time and Change,” showing in “his conviction that there is a basic permanence in simple things.”

³⁴Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, 7. Cf. 123–4.

³⁵On these two poems, Tom Paulin (Thomas Hardy, 104) remarks that “underneath the robust social comedy of the graveyard there is also a mysteriousness and an ecstatic energy.” What I refer to as Ovidian metamorphosis Paulin nicely terms “naturalised immortality” (Thomas Hardy, 103).

³⁶Shakespeare, Complete Works, The Winter's Tale, 3.3.108–10.

³⁷See my Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos, 57–60, and “What is a Shakespearean tragedy?” 5.

³⁸Tomalin, 165–6.

³⁹Shakespeare, Complete Works, A Midsummer Night's Dream, 3.1.55–60.

⁴⁰Ibid., 5.1.16–17.

⁴¹Ibid., 4.1.109–10, 113–17.

⁴²Only once elsewhere—in his classical imitation, “Sapphic Fragment” (143)—does Hardy refer to the old assurance that poetry can rescue the individual from oblivion; and there the promise is denied. Illuminatingly, he adds this epigraph:

“Thou shalt be—Nothing.”—OMAR KHAYYÁM“Tombless, with no remembrance.”—W.SHAKESPEARE

⁴³Shakespeare, Complete Works, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.9–10.

⁴⁴In “The Proudest Songster of Them All,” 488, Paulin resists an unambiguously affirmative reading of this poem: “Any optimism we may draw from the apparently timeless image [of the ploughman] carries its denial” (488).

⁴⁵“Night in the Old Home” (222), “Regret Not Me” (318), “Life Laughs Onward” (394). Cf. Marsden, 73: “An obvious pendant to his awareness to the passage of Time is his awareness of, and wish to grasp, the Moment.”

⁴⁶Florence Emily Hardy, 15.

⁴⁷Thomas Hardy, Tess, 156, 160.

⁴⁸Gibson and Johnson, 236.

⁴⁹Cf. Johnson, 81: “This is a new idea, a defiance of Time—the quality of the moment is immortal.”

⁵⁰See musician Roy Buckle's authoritative discussion of the issue. Colin Boone, however, argues that the poem employs rhythmic patterns derived from Symphony no. 19.

⁵¹Yeats, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” ll. 42–3; “Meditations in Time of Civil War: My Table,” ll. 14–15.