Books: Poet in Self Defense

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On the face of it, Hardy was poorly endowed for poetry. He has none of Tennyson's elegance, little of Browning's knack for the whiplash phrase. His music creaks, his language limps. One critic compared his rhythms to the rattling of a milk cart, and Author Blunden, with more justice, writes that Hardy the poet "is ever on the road . . . tackling the stony hill rises."

What overcame Hardy's faults was his deep knowledge of human weakness, his brooding kinship with suffering. Some of his poems are short stories in rhyme, gravely undulating narratives about the dangers of irresponsible passion and the ironies that level men to despair. A good many turn on the theme of unhappy marriage, a subject on which he could speak with authority.

Hoping in the Gloom. Hardy's poems are limited in emotion; says Critic Blunden: his muse "lives too much in the frown." But the range of Hardy's subject matter is as wide as the range of his sympathies. In Reminiscences of a Dancing Man, a gay country dance turns into the dance of death; in The Respectable Burgher, an English gentleman who has been reading "higher criticism" of the Bible decides to turn to "that moderate man Voltaire"; in A Tramp-woman's Tragedy, the heroine teases her "fancy-man" into committing a pointless murder; and in Channel Firing, the dead, stirred by great noises, rise from their graves only to be reassured by. God: "It's gunnery practise out at sea / Just as before you went below; / The world is as it used to be."

Some of Hardy's ideas, shaped and misshaped by igth century science, now seem dated and more than dubious; but his struggle with faith—his inability to believe in Christianity and his lingering wish to return to it—is all too contemporary. One of his finest poems, The Oxen, recalls the legend that on Christmas Eve the oxen, too, kneel before God. Writes Hardy:

So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve ''Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used, to know," I should go with him in the gloom Hoping it might be so.