Thomas Hardy, 1840 - 1928

The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England (1840). Dorset was a poor, rural county where life hadn't changed very much for hundreds of years and older people spoke a local dialect similar to German. Hardy would stay up late reading poetry and magazines, and listening to his grandmother tell stories about the time of Napoleon. His father was a mason and a building contractor, and when Hardy was sixteen he left school and became an apprentice to a well-known architect.

He was more interested in poetry than architecture, though, and he would get up early every morning to study Latin and Greek. When he was twenty-two he moved to London, where he began writing his own poetry. He wasn't able to publish it, and so he tried writing novels instead. His first novel, Desperate Remedies, was published anonymously in 1871. His first big success was Far from the Madding Crowd, published in 1874. He went on to write The Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), and he became one of the most popular novelists of his time.

Most of his novels were first published serially in popular magazines, and Hardy made sure not to write anything that might be considered too offensive to his readers. But when he published Tess of the D'Urbervilles in book form, he included several chapters that were cut from the magazine version.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles is about a young woman who has an illegitimate child and eventually goes on to murder the child's father, but Hardy portrayed the woman sympathetically and critics called the book shameless and immoral. His next novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), created an even bigger scandal.

Hardy had always thought of writing novels as no more than a way to make a living, and by this point he was so fed up with the criticism that he announced he would never write fiction again. He had been writing poetry for over thirty years, and now that he had become a famous novelist he was able to publish much of what he had written. His first collection, Wessex Poems, was published in 1898, and he would publish nothing but poetry for the last thirty years of his life. His Collected Poems came out in 1930.

*Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

*It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

*There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.

*No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

*The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.”

*Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.”

*Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change

*Once victim, always victim -- that's the law!”

*The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him

*Fear is the mother of foresight.



The Self-Unseeing

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.
She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.
Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!

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Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

The Voice


1Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
2Saying that now you are not as you were
3When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
4But as at first, when our day was fair.

5Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
6Standing as when I drew near to the town
7Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
8Even to the original air-blue gown!

9Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
10Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
11You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
12Heard no more again far or near?

13Thus I; faltering forward,
14Leaves around me falling,
15Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
16And the woman calling.
Notes

1] On Thomas Hardy's first wife. The 1914 edition has the date "December 1912." at the end of the poem.
10] mead: meadow.
11] dissolved to wan wistlessness: "consigned to existlessness" in 1914.
15] norward,: "norward" in 1914.