Meter and Context: Hardy's "Neutral Tones"

Abstract

R.W. King's 1925 comment, that Thomas Hardy's well-known 1867 poem, Neutral Tones, was distinguished by kind of acrid clarity in both thought and style, (1) led Claire Senior to reply that, nonetheless, few readers today would praise Hardy for clarity. (2) This exchange might suggest why Neutral Tones continues to be an intriguing poem, since it highlights a paradoxical sense that poem's effectiveness derives from expressive relation between dismal, matter-of-fact aura of its mundane scene, and contrary perception that there is much within and outside poem, that is withheld, elided, obscure. The reading offered in this article is exercised, like that of many critics and biographers since King, by a sense of complex generative ratio between what is clear and singular, though haunting about poem, and all that is reticent, or enigmatic--about its speaker, its situation, and young poet who wrote it. What this piece seeks primarily to do, though, is to approach interlocking affective, subjective, and biographical dimensions of poem through a close, sustained, examination of its meter. The main emphasis is on describing how poem's distinctive modernity surfaces in its registration of disillusion, triumphantly controlled and evident at level of intonation as well as theme. The reading seeks to show how far originality of poem is essentially a matter of voice and tone, of micro-enactments and expressive disjunctions that register fluctuations and refluxes of speaker's stalled feeling and self-awareness. A related biographical suggestion is that very success of poem, premised as it was on an inscription of affective failure and contingency, might have been discomfiting for young Hardy who would shortly after 1867 abandon for an indefinite time his main dedication to poetry. Linda Shires has described definitively post-Romantic aesthetic scoped in poem. (3) However, one wonders (to put it no more strongly) if Hardy at this time was personally equipped to pursue this kind of inspiration. He was, after all, a young man ardent about poetry and romance, as well as wily, gifted and ambitious. However, he was also socially insecure, depressive, hyper-sensitive, and self-doubting, and irony would not have been lost on him that his muse in this first great poem was so relentlessly unsparing, dissociative, and agnostic. Of course, to say that Neutral Tones reveals Hardy's poetic sensibility is not to confuse poem's speaker with Hardy himself. J.M.P. Gleeson has usefully counseled critics against such conflations, while emphasizing that Hardy gains by exploiting two overlapping kinds of tension: firstly, that between biographical and poetic selves, and secondly, that between Romantic and Modernist lyrical modes. (4) In reading that follows, sense of Hardy as a poet between times is evident not merely in specific themes, or temporal problematic, of poem itself, but also rhythmically speaking, in a dynamic derangement of pattern that is means by which specifically ungrounded, disjunctive, and ironic Hardyan voice emerges against nineteenth-century precedents. The well-known analogy drawn in Life between a strategic irregularity in meter, and that of Gothic architecture was, it was worth remembering, one drawn in early years with a certain defensiveness. Through it, Hardy wrote, he fortified himself against undermining strictures of those for whom metrical pauses, and reversed beats were marks of poetic incompetence, rather than necessary resources of a poetry that sought spontaneity, and that was more concerned with stress than ... syllable, poetic texture rather than poetic veneer. (5) This accords with Dennis Taylor's central perception that Hardy's virtuosity in diverse metres and stanzaic forms was related to dialectic between the abstract nature of form and spoken language. …