From 'Wessex Poems' to 'Time's Laughingstocks' : an eco-critical approach to the poetry of Thomas Hardy (original) (raw)

Hardy's suggestion that 'the slow silent walk' (1.2) of a ploughman and his horse was somehow inevitable and immutable was already anachronistic when 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations'" (CP500) was published in 1916, as Hardy was well aware; but he was also well aware that this was the way in which society nonetheless preferred to see itself. The continuing popularity of Hardy's novels suggests that this may be a difficulty with which many people still contend. This is in itself a reason why Hardy's poetry is a valuable resource for the ecocritic. His concerns and difficulties remain our own: the issues with which he wrestles are still being played out, often in the context of what is now thought of as 'environmentalism'. The discussion that follows therefore combines 'historicism' and 'presentism', balancing a situated appreciation of Hardy's ideas with a reassessment that reflects recent environmental and eco-critical debates. 1 And whilst an eco-critical analysis can highlight or illuminate aspects of Hardy's verse that other critics may have overlooked, his idiosyncratic but deeply humanistic verse is its own kind of challenge to contemporary environmentalism, which sometimes tends towards exactly the kind of oversimplification against which its early critics warned: there can be no choosing between humankind and the environment, since both are inextricably linked and mutually interdependent, a point that Hardy, as an early and avid reader of Darwin, would readily have understood. 8 exclusively of city dwellers. Furthermore, that nation was now at war, and in its moment of crisis reached back to a comforting if illusory sense of itself as a country rooted in the land. Reading (in particular) the poem's opening two stanzas, one wonders if Hardy had this in mind in choosing to publish it when he did. In fact, the poem was printed privately, in a run of just twenty-five pamphlets, 'with the express condition that it is not to be published in any book or newspaper,.4 A further twenty-five copies were printed in 1918, but they too were distributed only amongst friends, and the poem was not otherwise published during Hardy's lifetime. Whatever value he attached to the poem, he did not see it as part of a public body of poetry that by 1918 extended to a threevolume verse drama, The Dynasts, five verse collections, and a Selected Poems that would be followed within the year by the first Col/ected Poems (1919). One can only speculate as to why Hardy did not wish to see the poem collected during his own lifetime. Perhaps he felt that it was a piece of juvenilia of interest only to friends; perhaps he felt that it was too different in style to his later, mature work; perhaps its subject matter was simply too personal. Whatever the reason, it has attracted little critical comment. Davie, Marsden, Zietlow and Paulin ignore it; Pinion and Bailey offer brief descriptions, but no analysis; and several anthologies, including Creighton and Armstrong, overlook it. s Yet the poem is a revealing response to a now much changed landscape. Beyond its opening description of the cottage-'the first 4 Purdy, p.177.