Chapter 3
âThe Beats of Beingâ
In an essay of 1925, R. W. King suggested that the lyrical functions of Hardyâs poetry principally involved the registering of a âmomentary sensationâ or âa brief incidentâ, so that it becomes shaped as:
a significant anecdote, chosen, or invented, not merely for its own sake, but for its value as a symbol, as a âmoment of visionâ, which gathers up the emotional experience of years. âBeeny Cliff, for instance, not only renders the radiance of that March day in 1870, but suggests the whole course of the poetâs life since then.
Likewise, he wrote:
To Hardy the commonest object - a garden seat, a âlittle old tableâ, a signpost or an almanack - may have tremendous significance, may carry memories and associations of a lifetimeâs love, with all its joys and sorrows. He says truly of himself: â only need the homeliest of heartstirrings.â1
Today Kingâs emphasis may seem overly biographical, but it indicates the familiar way in which Hardyâs poems often turn on his receptivity to âseemingsâ, âimpressionsâ, to phenomena which telegraph a kind of message to his âidiosyncratic mode of regardâ (Life, p. 225), like the coffin lid of William Barnes in âThe Last Signalâ, as it catches the light of the setting sun:
Thus a farewell to me he signalled on his grave-way, As with a wave of his hand. (Complete Poems, p. 473)
What is important and characteristic is the way in which the poem unpacks its dimension of meaning from such an accidental effect. The reflection from a coffin lid becomes a kind of hieroglyph, expanding in Hardyâs mind into an intimate and many-sided meditation on his relation to Barnes. In another poem, the Roman coin shown to Hardy by a little girl in Fiesole is identical to âcoins of like impressâ buried at home, and consequently:
her act flashed home In that mute moment to my opened mind
The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome. (Complete Poems, p. 102)
These cases usefully show how Hardyâs creativity is fundamentally not a matter of free invention, but of his capacity for finding an adequate language for such âmoments of visionâ. A humble phenomenon, perceived or imagined, will act like a genieâs lamp, releasing a cloud of significant emotion which gradually takes on definition and intelligibility as the poet translates it into poetry. This chapter explores the role of music in this context, since countless poems originate with moments of musical inspiration. Inspiration, in fact, is the key idea throughout the chapter, chosen since it preserves obvious links with the concept of individuation, as well as because it has specific applications to the affirmative aspects of Hardyâs poetry. Like individuation, inspiration is a way of describing enhancements and renewals of self-expression that depend on extra-subjective modes of relatedness or transmission.
The more one contemplates Hardyâs âmoments of visionâ, indeed, the more musical experience appear to have an exemplary status for Hardy as he focuses on the happiness and pleasure, and the experiences of transcendence, that it carries with it. In many such scenes in poems, music creates incidental and surprising effects of concordance and significance, within an otherwise discordant, prosaic mise-en-scĂšne. Musicâs âinsistent calls of joyâ produce a real rapture, even though such magical effects tend to be transient and inconsequential, ironically encroached upon by loss, betrayal, forgetfulness, and death. The phrase is from the closing lines of âAfter the Burialâ, where Hardy writes of the joyful peals of the church bells, as heard by the mourners:
Nor window did they close, to numb
The bellsâ insistent calls Of joy;
but suffered the harassing din to come
And penetrate their souls. (Complete Poems, p. 876)
Beyond the scenic and dramatic effects of these musical interludes, an invasive musicality will manifest itself for the reader in complementary ways at the level of hearing, as unpredictable, intensive features of metre or sound off-set the otherwise disharmonious texture of the verse. So, it is a typical experience (and a tantalizing and pleasurable one) when reading Hardyâs poetry, to find for an ephemeral, virtual instant that an evocative power of sound has abolished oneâs distance from the scene, turning the poem inside out, so that the reader is introduced into its world of perception and feeling before the effect vanishes again. The ecstatic responsiveness which a poem plays out as a major element of its drama is thus effected in a similar way in this corresponding transfer - rush - between the forms of content and expression. These lines, from âThe Fiddlerâ, are a clear example of this:
Thereâs many a heart now mangled,
And waiting its time to go,
Whose tendrils were first entangled
By my sweet viol and bow!â (Complete Poems, p. 248)
The seductive arabesques of sound entangle the reader, inspiring an instantaneous sense of immediate connection to the scene as surely as the âblazeâ of Barnesâs coffin-lid did for Hardy in the other poem.
In such ways, the âLyric Ecstasy inspired by musicâ, in Hardyâs phrase, can be importantly referred both to the musical transports of the dramatis personae of the poems, and to their formal correlates for the reader in effects of sound. This phrase, from a note in the Life, records a collection projected in 1892 as a set of songs (as the furore over Tess broke out):
Title: - âSongs of Five-and-Twenty Yearsâ. Arrangement of the songs: Lyric Ecstasy inspired by music to have precedence. (Life p. 243)
âLyric ecstasyâ here is a power of transformative expression, occasioned by music, that the poems as songs explicitly aspire to reproduce in their own lyricism. At the same time, the concentration on music also implies how musical experience offers Hardy himself both an important source for his own poetic inspiration, and also, as in the fiction, a template or analogue for his thinking about it. In this respect, the poems can be read as auto-meditations - through music as metaphor - on the mysterious processes of inspiration that provoke them, as well as expressions and dramatizations of these processes.
So far as the poetâs own experiences and reflections on lyrical composition are concerned, Hardy is himself often explicit about its involuntary and inspirational features, as in his description of the writing of The Dynasts:
Lyrical activity was essential for my existence - and The Dynasts was crying for materialization, crying to be born, for many years. I wrote it because I had to, because of orders from within. (Life, p. 334)
For Hardy, qua poet, the art of writing is always a form of automatic writing, however much it entails conscious challenges and satisfactions of its own (as in Davieâs notion that Hardy as a poet be considered primarily as an engineer of words, metres and verse forms).2 The technical emphasis on control, that is, cannot account for the poetâs own experience of yielding to the incalculable imperatives, the strange transpositions of mind, associated with inspiration. On Christmas Day 1890, Hardy records:
While thinking of resuming âthe viewless wings of poesyâ before dawn this morning, new horizons seemed to open, and worrying pettinesses to disappear. (Life, p. 230)
In terms of Hardyâs own life, such effects of imaginative and spiritual enlargement can be seen as evidence of the âdeveloping sense of a liberated subjectivityâ that Tim Armstrong identifies in Hardyâs turning to poetry.3 Implicit also in this, and in these associations of ecstasy, lyricism and inspiration, is the affirmative ethical strain in Hardyâs work, his desire to celebrate life. An early critic, Arthur S. Macdowall, referred to such an innate vitality, as Hardyâs âimmediate response to lifeâ,4 and Armstrong writes of how âLife calls him to songâ, and of âthe moments of revivificationâ which are central to Hardyâs work.5 Musical experience is implicitly ethical, as well as aesthetic, for Hardy because for him goodness and joy are inseparable from the reanimating events and processes of self-expression through which ânew horizonsâ seem âto open, and worrying pettinesses to disappearâ. Further, ethics is inseparable from the social, even the ecological, because self-expression is always a function of relations with other people and nature. For this reason, this study puts what is seen as a corrective emphasis on the side of the evaluation of life that Hardyâs poetry implicitly affirms.6
Further, it is one of the fascinations of music for Hardy that its experiences of joy are undeniably physical and mundane, even as they appear also to have metaphysical import. But to stress physicality is not to deny transcendence, although it makes it essential to understand in what sense the idea of transcendence is being used. John Lucas links the question to the more specific issue of what Hardyâs relation to Romanticism might be. He writes:
Hardy is too intelligent to indulge in a timeless, idyllic past, a golden world from which he has been thrust out into the cold hillside.7
One could even identify Hardy in these terms as a great poet of âthe cold hillsideâ. However, in his lyricism he remains a residual romantic, and his work can be seen as carrying on a subtle dialogue with these more remote forebears, as well as with Browning, Barnes, or Swinburne. Lucas in fact more than any critic indicates how Hardyâs poetry is written around - out of - âmoments of visionâ. The apparent paradox - on which Lucas insists - is that Hardyâs world-view refuses any notion of a transcendent âgolden worldâ from which one is exiled, while his poetic work remains fascinated by, shot through with, glimmers of the ideal. My account of this paradox is that Hardyâs work depends not on a secondary transcendent domain, but on transcendent moments. In these the limits of chronology and identity are opened up to ecstatic affirmations of those subsistent, virtual powers of relatedness and self-differentiation which define the âsoulâ for Hardy. Transcendence is a function of the immanent, of mobile sensory and affective moments, of significant events that introduce the respondent into a momentarily expanded and real (however temporary and unsustainable) sense of connection and expression. Hardyâs apparent lack of belief in immortality, in myth or religion, or in any form of enduring happiness, did not prevent him acknowledging the reality of experience as punctuated by such events. Moreover, in these inspiring passages are repeated what Lucas also sees as âtimelessâ, ideal, potentials of relatedness and creativity. Music offers in this context potent and irrefutable signs of transcendence through physical connection. The captivating effects of rhythm and melody may be impermanent, but they return, and in doing so, repeat these inexhaustible possibilities.
So, the desires and pleasures associated with music off-set the reality principle operative in the poems. A poem seeks to capture this intensity and promise of longing, and to make it endlessly repeatable within its own substance. Often, of course, the circumstances are unpropitious, as in âOn Stinsford Hill at Midnightâ, where, the speaker feels compelled, with mounting desperation, to call out to the singing woman, though she remains oblivious or unheeding:
Her voice swam on; nor did she show
Thought of me anyhow.
I called again: âCome nearer; much
That kind of note I need!â
The song kept softening, loudening on
In placid calm unheed.
âWhat home is yours now?â then I said;
âYou seem to have no care.â
But the wild wavering tune went forth
As if I had not been there.
âThis world is dark, and where you are,â
I said, â cannot be!â
But still the happy one sang on,
And had no heed of me. (Complete Poems, p. 597)
At the end of the poem, the poet registers his mortification, as the âwild wavering tuneâ torments him in his compulsive desire to connect. However, as the language recurrently and teasingly evokes her song (âsoftening, loudening onâ), so thereby this disappointment is turned into an endlessly renewable erotic drama of possibility: poetry, like music or desire in this case, exploits the flirtatious time of the continuous present. Although the poem results in disappointment and frustration for the poetic figure who narrates it, it is still constitutively organized around music as innately a sign of longed-for ecstasy.
These preliminary remarks make it possible now to describe the main ways in which the topic of inspiration organizes the following sections. Firstly, musical incidents in Hardyâs poetry set up scenes of identification, whereby the distinction of self and other is suspended, and through these the poetry investigates ethical and political possibilities obscured by custom: music provides a powerful way of feeling with or as another person. Secondly, such inspiring augmentations of identity are constantly evident in erotic terms too in the Complete Poems, and the chapter explores the links between music and love, and the loss of love. Thirdly, there are many poems which involve what can be...