"And if my vision range beyond..."
O my soul, keep the rest unknown!
It is too like a sound of moan
When the charnel-eyed
Pale Horse has nighed:
Yea, none shall gather what I hide!
Why load men's minds with more to bear
That bear already ails to spare?
From now alway
Till my last day
What I discern I will not say.
Let time roll backward if it will;
(Magians who drive the midnight quill
With brain aglow
Can see it so,)
What I have learnt no man shall know.
And if my vision range beyond
The blinkered sight of souls in bond,
- By truth made free -
I'll let all be,
And show to no man what I see.
Thomas Hardy, "He Resolves To Say No More"
Yesterday I quickly borrowed a set of Everyman editions of Selected Poems from Thomas
Hardy, as well as Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the Brampton Public Library at the Civic Centre before heading off to work. As much as I enjoyed reading out-loud the intertwined sprung rhythm and sacred religious zeal of Hopkins, I rather preferred meditating on Thomas Hardy's elegiac poetry. I can't help but identify personally - as predicted by a friend - with Thomas Hardy's sense of arduous struggle reflected in his words, composition and poesis against the stubborn and proud-worn intractability of things broken, of things falling apart, of dysfunctional mutability, of crumbling words, and downward spirituality in the "real modern world." He picks up his small, down-trodden words with such proud, hard-lived, unreal truth--that wrestling angel of experience--and builds them up to a new-found glory.
Hardy, as well as Gerard Manley Hopkins, from the Brampton Public Library at the Civic Centre before heading off to work. As much as I enjoyed reading out-loud the intertwined sprung rhythm and sacred religious zeal of Hopkins, I rather preferred meditating on Thomas Hardy's elegiac poetry. I can't help but identify personally - as predicted by a friend - with Thomas Hardy's sense of arduous struggle reflected in his words, composition and poesis against the stubborn and proud-worn intractability of things broken, of things falling apart, of dysfunctional mutability, of crumbling words, and downward spirituality in the "real modern world." He picks up his small, down-trodden words with such proud, hard-lived, unreal truth--that wrestling angel of experience--and builds them up to a new-found glory.posted by Davyth | 4:15 AM
2 Comments:
Glad you found so much in Hardy, whose poetry is slowly finding the appreciation it deserves. In many ways, he stands as one of the forerunners of the Modern poetic movement (Ezra Pound called Poems 1912-13 the greatest elegy in the English language), because there's a stoical anguish to some of those poems that's clean and flinty and yet remarkably traditional.
Hopkins was good, but I found his writing a little too ecstatic and mystical in words and subject, and a lot less personal than Hardy's. There's a bit too much of the holy streak in Hopkins, the kind that divides people more than it brings them together. Feeling anguish, suffering and broken is something I understand better as a human being than religious piety. Plus, I didn't get carried away by the rhythmic marching of Hardy's poems, unlike Hopkins's.
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