1st Edition

Thomas Hardy Selected Poems

By Tim Armstrong Copyright 2009

    In Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems Tim Armstrong brings together over 180 poems in the first comprehensively annotated selection of Hardy’s poetry. Unlike most previous selections, this edition preserves the shape of the poet’s career by presenting the poems in the order in which they appeared in the Collected Poems of 1930, rather than re-ordering them thematically.

    Head notes to each poem give the reader information about its composition, publication, sources and metrical scheme; on-the-page notes list significant variants in Hardy’s manuscripts, point out literary and other allusions, and give explanatory glosses. An appendix contains a selection of relevant passages from Hardy’s notebooks, letters, and autobiography; and a bibliography suggests further reading.

    Tim Armstrong’s critical Introduction discusses Hardy’s career, his poetics, his use of memory and allusion and examines his position in the context of Victorian debates on aesthetics and belief. The generous selection of poems includes many lesser-known poems as well as those which have received most critical commentary, and the important elegiac sequence ‘Poems of 1912-13’ is included in its entirety.

     

    Contents

     

    Acknowledgements

    List of abbreviations

    Chronology

     

    Introduction

     

    Hardy’s ‘second’ career

    Turning to poetry

    Poetry as posthumous vision

    Necessity and free will

    Typology and the pattern of a life

    Sequences and patterns

    God and history

    Hardy and the dead

    The ‘Poems of 1912-13’

    Restoration and the past

    Wessex

    Hardy’s style

    The Gothic art-principle

    Words

    Prosody

    Hardy and literary tradition

    Selecting Hardy

    A note on the annotations

     

    A note on the text

     

    The Poems

    From Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

    1. The temporary the All
    2. Hap
    3. Neutral Tones
    4. The Peasant’s Confession
    5. A Sign-Seeker
    6. Friends Beyond
    7. Thoughts of Phena
    8. Nature’s Questioning
    9. In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury
    10. ‘I look into my glass’

     

    From Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

    1. V.R. 1819-1901
    2. Drummer Hodge
    3. The Souls of Slain
    4. Rome: Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter
    5. Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats
    6. A Commonplace Day
    7. To an Unborn Pauper Child
    8. Her Reproach
    9. His Immortality
    10. Winter in Durnover Field
    11. The Darkling Thrush
    12. The Respectable Burgher on ‘The Higher Criticism’
    13. The Self-Unseeing
    14. In Tenebris I
    15. In Tenebris II
    16. In Tenebris III
    17. Tess’s Lament
    18. Sapphic Fragment
    19. ’AΓΝΩΣΤΩӨЕΩ

     

    From Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909)

    1. The Revisitation
    2. A Trampwoman’s Tragedy
    3. In the Mind’s Eye
    4. He Abjures Love
    5. Let Me Enjoy
    6. Julie-Jane
    7. The Dead Quire
    8. Night in the Old Home
    9. After the Last Breath
    10. One We Knew
    11. George Meredith, 1828-1909
    12. Yell’ham Wood’s Story
    13. A Young Man’s Epigram on Existence

     

    From Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914)

    1. In Front of Landscape
    2. Channel Firing
    3. The Convergence of Twain
    4. ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’
    5. Wessex Heights
    6. A Singer Asleep
    7. Self-Unconscious
    8. Under the Waterfall

     

    ‘Poems of 1912-13’

    1. The Going
    2. Your Last Drive
    3. The Walk
    4. Rain on a Grave
    5. ‘I found her out there’
    6. Without Ceremony
    7. Lament
    8. The Haunt
    9. The Voice
    10. His Visitor
    11. A Circular
    12. A Dream or No
    13. After a Journey
    14. A Death-Day Recalled
    15. Beeny Cliff
    16. At Castle Boterel
    17. Places
    18. The Phantom Horsewoman
    19. The Spell of Rose
    20. St Launce’s Revisited
    21. Where the Picnic Was
    22. The Obliterate Tomb
    23. The Workbox
    24. Exeunt Omnes
    25. A Poet
    26. In the Cemetery

     

    From Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917)

    1. Moments of Vision
    2. The Voice of Things
    3. Apostrophes to an Old Psalm Tune
    4. At the Word ‘Farewell’
    5. Heredity
    6. Near Laniet, 1872
    7. Copying Architecture in an Old Minster
    8. To Shakespeare
    9. Quid Hic Agis?
    10. On a Midsummer Eve
    11. The Blinded Bird
    12. The Statue of Liberty
    13. The Change
    14. Lines to a Movement in Mozart’s E-Flat Symphony
    15. The Pedigree
    16. His Heart: A Woman’s Dream
    17. The Oxen
    18. The Photograph
    19. The Last Signal
    20. The Figure in the Scene
    21. Overlooking the River Stour
    22. The Musical Box
    23. Old Furniture
    24. The Five Students
    25. The Wind’s Prophecy
    26. During Wind and Rain
    27. A Backward Spring
    28. He Revisits His First School
    29. ‘I thought, my heart’
    30. The Shadow on the Stone
    31. ‘For Life I had never cared greatly’
    32. The Pity of It
    33. In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’
    34. A New Year’s Eve in War Time
    35. ‘I looked up from my writing’
    36. Afterwards

     

    From Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)

    1. Weathers
    2. ‘According to the Might Working’
    3. The Contretemps
    4. ‘And There Was a Great Calm’
    5. The Selfsame Song
    6. At Lulworth Cove a Century Back
    7. The Collector Cleans His Picture
    8. On the Tune Called the Old-Hundred-and-fourth
    9. Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard
    10. After a Romantic Day
    11. In the Small Hours
    12. Last Words to a Dumb Friend
    13. A Drizzling Easter Morning
    14. ‘I was the midmost’
    15. The Inscription
    16. The Whitewashed Wall
    17. After Reading Psalms XXXIX, XL, etc.
    18. Surview

     

    From Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925)

    1. Waiting Both
    2. A Bird-Scene at a Rural Dwelling
    3. In a Former Resort after Many Years
    4. A Cathedral Façade at Midnight
    5. The Monument-Maker
    6. The Later Autumn
    7. An East-End Curate
    8. Sine Prole
    9. A Sheep Fair
    10. Snow in the Suburbs
    11. A Light Snow-Fall after Frost
    12. Music in a Snowy Street
    13. In Sherborne Abbey
    14. The Mock Wife
    15. ‘Not only I’
    16. Her Haunting-Ground
    17. Days to Recollect
    18. This Summer and Last
    19. ‘Nothing matters much’
    20. Before My Friend Arrived
    21. The Bird-Cather’s Boy
    22. Song to an Old Burden
    23. ‘Why do I?’

     

    From Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928)

    1. The New Dawn’s Business
    2. Proud Songsters
    3. The Prophetess
    4. A Wish for Unconsciousness
    5. The Love-Letters
    6. Throwing a Tree
    7. Lying Awake
    8. Childhood Among the Ferns
    9. A Poet’s Though
    10. ‘I watched a blackbird’
    11. A Nightmare, and the Next Thing
    12. So Various
    13. An Evening in Galilee
    14. We field-women
    15. He Never Expected Much
    16. Standing by the Mantelpiece
    17. Our Old Friend Dualism
    18. Drinking Song
    19. The Aged Newspaper Soliloquizes
    20. Christmas: 1924
    21. The Boy’s Dream
    22. Family Portrait
    23. Christmas in the Elgin Room
    24. ‘We are getting to the end’
    25. He Resolves to Say No More

     

    From Hardy’s Uncollected Poems

    1. Thoughts from Sophocles
    2. The Eve of Waterloo
    3. Prologue
    4. Epilogue
    5. On One Who Thought No Other Could Write Such English as Himself

     

    Selections from Hardy’s Autobiography

    Appendix I: Two Early Versions of Poems by Hardy

     

    Appendix II

    Biography

    Tim Armstrong