lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYthe memory in virtue of the clear statement of thepoet's feeling, and the depth, the beauty, and theabsolute sincerity of that feeling—The Darkling Thrush,Beyond the Last Lamp, The Going, "Only a man harrowingclods,'' The Night of Trafalgar, and manyothers. In contrast with the author of The ShropshireLad, Hardy experimented in a great variety ofmetres and stanza forms. There is always a slightlywheezy note in the music, but there is music and that,like the choice of theme and the diction, always Hardy'sown. It would be difficult to find sources or parallelsfor such rhythms asFarmer Dewy, Tranter. Reuben, Farmer Ledlow, late at plough,Robert's kin and John's and Ned's,And the Squire and Lady Susan, lie in Melstock churchyard now !andWhile rain, with eve in partnership,Descended darkly, drip, drip, drip,Beyond the last low lamp I passedWaking slowly, whispering sadly,Two linked loiterers, wan, downcast :Some heavy thought constrained each face,And blinded them to time and place,but he owes something, it seems to me, of suggestionat any rate, in his rhythms and stanzas, to a beautifullyrist of an earlier decade—the Dorsetshire poet WilliamBarnes, whose first dialect pieces appeared as early as1842 and the collected Poems of Rural Life in the DorsetDialect in 1879; For Hardy was deeply read in, andan ardent lover of, the romantic poetry of the centuryfrom Shelley to Swinburne. His lyrics on other poetsare interestingly different from Watson's; no effort ata critical estimate, but intensely personal statementsof the romantic appeal made to his own imagination156