Poems of the Past & Present: “Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized”
By Thomas Hardy
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About this ebook
Thomas Hardy was born in the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton about three miles east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, on 2nd June 1840.
Despite a fairly wide education and being an avid reader his parents thought it unlikely he would lead a successful scholarly or clerical career and he was apprenticed in 1856, at age 16, to a local architect whose speciality was in church restoration. Hardy’s only opportunity to read was in the morning before work between the hours of five and eight.
On the back of a failed love affair he moved to London and spent five years working as Arthur Blomfield’s assistant architect, also a restorer and designer of churches. Hardy though had become disillusioned with institutionalised forms of Christianity and abandoned any lingering hopes of ordination in the Anglican Church. However, his poetry was now flourishing, although it was still rejected for publication.
His novel ‘Desperate Remedies’, was published anonymously in 1871 and he now resolved to write full time though he was not yet in a position to achieve financial security or literary success. His second novel, ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, appeared in 1872 and in 1873 ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’, the most autobiographical of his works arrived. With ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ in 1874, came critical acclaim, public attention and financial success. 1878 saw more of the same with ‘The Return of the Native’, and the ensuing years saw him rise to ever greater popularity.
‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ was published in 1886. In 1891 came ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’. It only saw publication after extensive alterations to its plot and deleting long passages to lessen the shock to the prudish Victorian audience who were dismayed by the seduction and ruin of a young girl by a rakish aristocrat. His last novel, ‘Jude the Obscure’, suffered the same fate when it was published in 1895. The uproar so disturbed him that he returned to poetry. In 1898 he had an earlier poetry collection published ‘Wessex Poems’
Hardy spent the years between 1903 and 1908 writing ‘The Dynasts’, an epic poem on the Napoleonic Wars.
In his twilight years came honours and awards from the great and the good and recognition of his stature as one of the most outstanding of British authors. George V conferred on him the Order of Merit in 1910.
In 1924 a new stage production of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, was staged. Meanwhile from 1920 to 1927 he worked, in secret, on his autobiography, which was later published after his death as the work of Florence Hardy.
Thomas Hardy OM died on the 11th January 1928.
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Dorchester, Dorset. He enrolled as a student in King’s College, London, but never felt at ease there, seeing himself as socially inferior. This preoccupation with society, particularly the declining rural society, featured heavily in Hardy’s novels, with many of his stories set in the fictional county of Wessex. Since his death in 1928, Hardy has been recognised as a significant poet, influencing The Movement poets in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Poems of the Past & Present - Thomas Hardy
Poems of the Past & Present by Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy was born in the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton about three miles east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, on 2nd June 1840.
Despite a fairly wide education and being an avid reader his parents thought it unlikely he would lead a successful scholarly or clerical career and he was apprenticed in 1856, at age 16, to a local architect whose speciality was in church restoration. Hardy’s only opportunity to read was in the morning before work between the hours of five and eight.
On the back of a failed love affair he moved to London and spent five years working as Arthur Blomfield’s assistant architect, also a restorer and designer of churches. Hardy though had become disillusioned with institutionalised forms of Christianity and abandoned any lingering hopes of ordination in the Anglican Church. However, his poetry was now flourishing, although it was still rejected for publication.
His novel ‘Desperate Remedies’, was published anonymously in 1871 and he now resolved to write full time though he was not yet in a position to achieve financial security or literary success. His second novel, ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, appeared in 1872 and in 1873 ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’, the most autobiographical of his works arrived. With ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ in 1874, came critical acclaim, public attention and financial success. 1878 saw more of the same with ‘The Return of the Native’, and the ensuing years saw him rise to ever greater popularity.
‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ was published in 1886. In 1891 came ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’. It only saw publication after extensive alterations to its plot and deleting long passages to lessen the shock to the prudish Victorian audience who were dismayed by the seduction and ruin of a young girl by a rakish aristocrat. His last novel, ‘Jude the Obscure’, suffered the same fate when it was published in 1895. The uproar so disturbed him that he returned to poetry. In 1898 he had an earlier poetry collection published ‘Wessex Poems’
Hardy spent the years between 1903 and 1908 writing ‘The Dynasts’, an epic poem on the Napoleonic Wars.
In his twilight years came honours and awards from the great and the good and recognition of his stature as one of the most outstanding of British authors. George V conferred on him the Order of Merit in 1910.
In 1924 a new stage production of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, was staged. Meanwhile from 1920 to 1927 he worked, in secret, on his autobiography, which was later published after his death as the work of Florence Hardy.
Thomas Hardy OM died on the 11th January 1928.
Index of Contents
V.R. 1819–1901
WAR POEMS—
Embarcation
Departure
The Colonel’s Soliloquy
The Going of the Battery
At the War Office
A Christmas Ghost-Story
The Dead Drummer
A Wife in London
The Souls of the Slain
Song of the Soldiers’ Wives
The Sick God
POEMS OF PILGRIMAGE—
Genoa and the Mediterranean
Shelley’s Skylark
In the Old Theatre, Fiesole
Rome: On the Palatine
Rome: Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter
Rome: The Vatican: Sala Delle Muse
Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius
Lausanne: In Gibbon’s Old Garden
Zermatt: To the Matterhorn
The Bridge of Lodi
On an Invitation to the United States
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS—
The Mother Mourns
I said to Love
A Commonplace Day
At a Lunar Eclipse
The Lacking Sense
To Life
Doom and She
The Problem
The Subalterns
The Sleep-worker
The Bullfinches
God-Forgotten
The Bedridden Peasant to an Unknowing God
By the Earth’s Corpse
Mute Opinion
To an Unborn Pauper Child
To Flowers from Italy in Winter
On a Fine Morning
To Lizbie Browne
Song of Hope
The Well-Beloved
Her Reproach
The Inconsistent
A Broken Appointment
Between us now
How great my Grief
I need not go
The Coquette, and After
A Spot
Long Plighted
The Widow
At a Hasty Wedding
The Dream-Follower
His Immortality
The To-be-Forgotten
Wives in the Sere
The Superseded
An August Midnight
The Caged Thrush Freed and Home Again
Birds at Winter Nightfall
The Puzzled Game-Birds
Winter in Durnover Field
The Last Chrysanthemum
The Darkling Thrush
The Comet at Yalbury or Yell’ham
Mad Judy
A Wasted Illness
A Man
The Dame of Athelhall
The Seasons of her Year
The Milkmaid
The Levelled Churchyard
The Ruined Maid
The Respectable Burgher on the Higher Criticism
Architectural Masks
The Tenant-for-Life
The King’s Experiment
The Tree: an Old Man’s Story
Her Late Husband
The Self-Unseeing
De Profundis i.
De Profundis ii.
De Profundis iii.
The Church-Builder
The Lost Pyx: a Mediæval Legend
Tess’s Lament
The Supplanter: A Tale
IMITATIONS, Etc.—
Sapphic Fragment
Catullus: xxxi
After Schiller
Song: From Heine
From Victor Hugo
Cardinal Bembo’s Epitaph on Raphael
RETROSPECT—
I have Lived with Shades
Memory and I
ΑΓΝΩΣΤΩ. ΘΕΩ
THOMAS HARDY – A SHORT BIOGRAPHY
THOMAS HARDY – A CONCISE BIBLIOGRAPHY
V.R. 1819–1901
A REVERIE
Moments the mightiest pass uncalendared,
And when the Absolute
In backward Time outgave the deedful word
Whereby all life is stirred:
"Let one be born and throned whose mould shall constitute
The norm of every royal-reckoned attribute,"
No mortal knew or heard.
But in due days the purposed Life outshone—
Serene, sagacious, free;
—Her waxing seasons bloomed with deeds well done,
And the world’s heart was won . . .
Yet may the deed of hers most bright in eyes to be
Lie hid from ours—as in the All-One’s thought lay she—
Till ripening years have run.
Sunday Night,
27th January 1901.
WAR POEMS
EMBARCATION
(Southampton Docks: October, 1899)
Here, where Vespasian’s legions struck the sands,
And Cerdic with his Saxons entered in,
And Henry’s army leapt afloat to win
Convincing triumphs over neighbour lands,
Vaster battalions press for further strands,
To argue in the self-same bloody mode
Which this late age of thought, and pact, and code,
Still fails to mend.—Now deckward tramp the bands,
Yellow as autumn leaves, alive as spring;
And as each host draws out upon the sea
Beyond which lies the tragical To-be,
None dubious of the cause, none murmuring,
Wives, sisters, parents, wave white hands and smile,
As