Moments Of (Re)vision: Thomas Hardy Making Amends

Abstract

Abstract Considered far less critically rewarding resources than those of the author’s prose, the manuscripts of Thomas Hardy’s verse have long been neglected. This essay seeks, in part, to challenge the ways in which we attribute significance to such documents, attempting a close textual study of the ‘fair’ copy of Moments of Vision (1917) – a late draft of the volume only minimally revised. The collection is one which invites us to attend to the hitherto overlooked, and in remaining attentive to the seemingly minor alterations of the manuscript itself, I work to uncover Hardy’s attempt to address an oversight of his own. Focusing upon the poems penned for Emma following her death, I read them against the narrative which has traditionally surrounded them: one of a re-visioning of a period of discontent. The manuscript’s revisions are rather those which work against the initial impulse to smooth over animosity, striving consistently to paint a harsher version of events, and to acknowledge differences now past alteration. The way in which an endlessly mutable form allows for reflection upon an ‘immutable’ division holds central focus, as I trace the ways in which this tension complicates the long-established view of the Emma verses as an ‘expiation’. I suggest, rather, that in keeping with a much wider sensibility found running through Hardy’s verse, these revisions work to undermine his attempt to offer the famously neglected Emma a long overdue attention; they are amendments, in short, which problematize the very possibility of amends.