Thomas Hardy

Abstract

Thomas Hardy Indy Clark (bio) Most of the year’s work comes from two sources: the Thomas Hardy Journal, the official critical publication of the Hardy Society, and Fathom, an occasional e-journal generated by the French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies. In addition to celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Hardy Society, the Autumn 2018 edition of the Thomas Hardy Journal is the first edited by Karin Koehler, and I should like to wish her well in her new venture. I look forward to the exciting and thought-provoking work that will undoubtedly be encouraged under her stewardship. As with last year, loss and mourning occupy the thoughts of Hardy scholars, with desire and gaze providing additional emphases for this year. Once again, “Poems of 1912–13” features heavily. With new writing by such critical heavyweights as Linda M. Shires, Roger Ebbatson, Jane Thomas, and Stephen Regan, this really has been a pleasure to compile. “Hardy’s Poems and the Reader: The Power of Unmaking” (Thomas Hardy Journal 34 [Autumn 2018]: 17–34) by Linda M. Shires begins with a consideration of the word poesis, which, in Latin, means simply “poem” or “poetry.” Its Greek meaning, the “activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before,” acts almost as a counterpoint to the central argument of this article. Hardy’s poems, writes Shires, “invite readers into a process, to unmake them—yet not to ruin or destroy” (p. 17); instead, the “unmaking” that Shires detects in the reading of Hardy’s poetry is a system of picking out or taking apart. “Unlike Romantic and Victorian predecessors,” she argues, “Hardy does not just reshape—but also destabilizes—the poetic voice” (p. 18). In a series of close, critical, and convincing readings, the “larger [End Page 399] goals” and “different kinds of pleasure” that can result from reading Hardy’s poems both with and against the grain are explored (p. 17). The first poem under investigation is “The Convergence of the Twain,” written to commemorate the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Shires was initially drawn to it by the unfamiliar: words such as “thrid” or the phrase “rhythmic tidal lyres.” Most of all, perhaps, she “vaguely sensed that part of the power of Hardy’s poetry lay in collisions: physical, mental, and emotional” (p. 17). Fifty years later, the words are still striking, and they, along with the effects of sound symbolism and the triplet structure, provide the focus of the reading. Shires contends that the diction provides layers of meaning, with “maiden,” for example, evoking not only inaugural and unwed but also something made, and the description of the fires as “salamandrine” links the flames to sea worms (p. 21). The sound imagery comes mostly in the form of sibilance and especially the interplay between hard and soft s sounds, as the first five stanzas represent the ship beneath the water’s surface. Although the tercets recall Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shires sees more association with the closing elegiac triplets of Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle and with the poem’s sense of destiny, consummation, and return. As Shires admits, she has written about “Heiress and Architect” many times before (see, for example, “Matter, Consciousness, and the Human in Wessex Poems,” Studies in English Literature 55, no. 4 [2015]: 899–924; and “Hardy’s Memorial Art: Image and Text in Wessex Poems,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 4 [2013]: 743–764), but here she returns to the poem to consider its “journey of reduction and of unmaking” as a “discourse on poetry” (pp. 24, 23). It is more a discourse on subjectivity, as the reader wrestles with Hardy’s “construction and reduction of selfhood” (p. 24). With “Self-Unconscious,” Hardy explores the blending and splintering of a point of view in a single consciousness. Once again, the diction is key, with Hardy’s use of “limn,” an unusual word of Middle English origin, providing an effective jolt. This, combined with the words “shapes” and “reveries,” suggests that “there is never a perception of wholeness, since for him there is no whole” (p. 25). The mordant humour of “Ah, Are You Digging...