lemsip max, and Hardy's collected poems
Actually, I don't have flu - neither the bogstandard nor the swineish variety. I hope I'm not tempting fate either - I had flu for the first and only time in my life a couple of years ago and it was dreadful - weeks off work during the teaching term, and only the strongest antibiotics (which aren't supposed to do you any good with flu) worked.
However, I do feel tired and wound up at the same time, so thought I'd follow in the footsteps of the ex poet laureate, Andrew Motion, who swears by lemsip for poetic inspiration. Mind you I'm more in search of a good night's sleep. Not been much of a weekend really, as I have so much work to do. Not sure how I'm going to manage when all the marking comes in as well, but somehow one always does manage, more or less.
But Thomas Hardy has taken up the bulk of the weekend hours. Poor Hardy, with his massive oeuvre of fiction, short stories, and then poetry. It's the poetry I'm prepping at the moment for class this week. In October 1896, after a particularly vicious reception of Jude the Obscure, he noted in his diary, 'the end of prose'. And so it was. 900 poems, one verse epic, and one verse drama later, his life finally drew to an end at Max Gate. A pessimist to the last, I am amazed at how bleak - repetitively bleak, it seemed to me - his poetry actually is. As though he returns repeatedly to the forms and facets of Christian belief only to spurn them, sometimes in unusual ways - 'God's Funeral', for instance couldn't have been very well received by his devout first wife, Emma Gifford, who was so bitterly locked into a marriage of conflict and resentment until her sudden death in 1912.
It might have been the end of a life, and of a marriage, but it broke something open in Hardy, and his hard, brittle, architecturally constructed verses were transformed into elegies – of deep regret, while not denying the pain of the longstanding relationship. ‘You are past love, pain, indifference, hope’ he says of her – and indeed Emma is by this time a ‘past love’, and, in Hardy’s world of painful agnosticism, past the benefits or consolation of any love from a compassionate creator or from Hardy himself.
If I think broadly about lyrical poetry there seems to be three areas of distinct tone and perspective. See if you agree with me. First, the more contemporary one of slightly cynical irony – the ‘sliver of ice’ in the heart of every writer, as Graham Greene would say. This works nicely in postmodern thinking, though one can see the beginning of it with Auden and perhaps even earlier. It is part brash, part defensive. It engenders a quick cleverness that I have seen in a lot of writing, both student and published.
The second sort of poetry is that which seems to have really brought Hardy’s voice into focus – his loss. Such poetry is of sadness and often bitter personal regret. Thus Hardy’s ‘poems of 1912-1913’ all of which attempt to come to terms with his bereavement, but cannot really come to terms. It gives sorrow words. You don’t know what you’ve got til its gone.
The third sort is more difficult to come by. Perhaps because there is still an adherence to the saying that ‘happiness writes white’. But it is a sort of poetry of beholding, of trying to acknowledge that the world is both wonderful and inexplicable. Love poetry of the simpler sort would fit in here, together with some of Raymond Carver’s short verses. ‘That I have been beloved on this earth’. A poetry of gratefulness and wonder and content. It is not completely defunct – in fact Todd Swift ends his latest collection ‘Mainstream Love Hotel’ with a poem of this ilk. But studying Hardy I feel the lack of it, and a sort of sadness myself (misplaced and patronising no doubt) that for all he lived a full literary life, he did not seem to experience much joy.
However, I do feel tired and wound up at the same time, so thought I'd follow in the footsteps of the ex poet laureate, Andrew Motion, who swears by lemsip for poetic inspiration. Mind you I'm more in search of a good night's sleep. Not been much of a weekend really, as I have so much work to do. Not sure how I'm going to manage when all the marking comes in as well, but somehow one always does manage, more or less.
But Thomas Hardy has taken up the bulk of the weekend hours. Poor Hardy, with his massive oeuvre of fiction, short stories, and then poetry. It's the poetry I'm prepping at the moment for class this week. In October 1896, after a particularly vicious reception of Jude the Obscure, he noted in his diary, 'the end of prose'. And so it was. 900 poems, one verse epic, and one verse drama later, his life finally drew to an end at Max Gate. A pessimist to the last, I am amazed at how bleak - repetitively bleak, it seemed to me - his poetry actually is. As though he returns repeatedly to the forms and facets of Christian belief only to spurn them, sometimes in unusual ways - 'God's Funeral', for instance couldn't have been very well received by his devout first wife, Emma Gifford, who was so bitterly locked into a marriage of conflict and resentment until her sudden death in 1912.
It might have been the end of a life, and of a marriage, but it broke something open in Hardy, and his hard, brittle, architecturally constructed verses were transformed into elegies – of deep regret, while not denying the pain of the longstanding relationship. ‘You are past love, pain, indifference, hope’ he says of her – and indeed Emma is by this time a ‘past love’, and, in Hardy’s world of painful agnosticism, past the benefits or consolation of any love from a compassionate creator or from Hardy himself.
If I think broadly about lyrical poetry there seems to be three areas of distinct tone and perspective. See if you agree with me. First, the more contemporary one of slightly cynical irony – the ‘sliver of ice’ in the heart of every writer, as Graham Greene would say. This works nicely in postmodern thinking, though one can see the beginning of it with Auden and perhaps even earlier. It is part brash, part defensive. It engenders a quick cleverness that I have seen in a lot of writing, both student and published.
The second sort of poetry is that which seems to have really brought Hardy’s voice into focus – his loss. Such poetry is of sadness and often bitter personal regret. Thus Hardy’s ‘poems of 1912-1913’ all of which attempt to come to terms with his bereavement, but cannot really come to terms. It gives sorrow words. You don’t know what you’ve got til its gone.
The third sort is more difficult to come by. Perhaps because there is still an adherence to the saying that ‘happiness writes white’. But it is a sort of poetry of beholding, of trying to acknowledge that the world is both wonderful and inexplicable. Love poetry of the simpler sort would fit in here, together with some of Raymond Carver’s short verses. ‘That I have been beloved on this earth’. A poetry of gratefulness and wonder and content. It is not completely defunct – in fact Todd Swift ends his latest collection ‘Mainstream Love Hotel’ with a poem of this ilk. But studying Hardy I feel the lack of it, and a sort of sadness myself (misplaced and patronising no doubt) that for all he lived a full literary life, he did not seem to experience much joy.
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