Poems of the Past & Present: “Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized”

By Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton about three miles east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, on 2nd June 1840.

Despite a fairly wide education and being an avid reader his parents thought it unlikely he would lead a successful scholarly or clerical career and he was apprenticed in 1856, at age 16, to a local architect whose speciality was in church restoration. Hardy’s only opportunity to read was in the morning before work between the hours of five and eight.

On the back of a failed love affair he moved to London and spent five years working as Arthur Blomfield’s assistant architect, also a restorer and designer of churches. Hardy though had become disillusioned with institutionalised forms of Christianity and abandoned any lingering hopes of ordination in the Anglican Church. However, his poetry was now flourishing, although it was still rejected for publication.

His novel ‘Desperate Remedies’, was published anonymously in 1871 and he now resolved to write full time though he was not yet in a position to achieve financial security or literary success. His second novel, ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, appeared in 1872 and in 1873 ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’, the most autobiographical of his works arrived. With ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ in 1874, came critical acclaim, public attention and financial success. 1878 saw more of the same with ‘The Return of the Native’, and the ensuing years saw him rise to ever greater popularity.

‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ was published in 1886. In 1891 came ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’. It only saw publication after extensive alterations to its plot and deleting long passages to lessen the shock to the prudish Victorian audience who were dismayed by the seduction and ruin of a young girl by a rakish aristocrat. His last novel, ‘Jude the Obscure’, suffered the same fate when it was published in 1895. The uproar so disturbed him that he returned to poetry. In 1898 he had an earlier poetry collection published ‘Wessex Poems’

Hardy spent the years between 1903 and 1908 writing ‘The Dynasts’, an epic poem on the Napoleonic Wars.

In his twilight years came honours and awards from the great and the good and recognition of his stature as one of the most outstanding of British authors. George V conferred on him the Order of Merit in 1910.

In 1924 a new stage production of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, was staged. Meanwhile from 1920 to 1927 he worked, in secret, on his autobiography, which was later published after his death as the work of Florence Hardy.

Thomas Hardy OM died on the 11th January 1928.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portable Poetry
• Release date: Apr 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839673559

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English poet and author who grew up in the British countryside, a setting that was prominent in much of his work as the fictional region named Wessex. Abandoning hopes of an academic future, he began to compose poetry as a young man. After failed attempts of publication, he successfully turned to prose. His major works include Far from the Madding Crowd(1874), Tess of the D’Urbervilles(1891) and Jude the Obscure( 1895), after which he returned to exclusively writing poetry.

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Poems of the Past & Present by Thomas Hardy

 Thomas Hardy was born in the hamlet of Upper Bockhampton about three miles east of Dorchester in Dorset, England, on 2nd June 1840.

Despite a fairly wide education and being an avid reader his parents thought it unlikely he would lead a successful scholarly or clerical career and he was apprenticed in 1856, at age 16, to a local architect whose speciality was in church restoration.  Hardy’s only opportunity to read was in the morning before work between the hours of five and eight.

On the back of a failed love affair he moved to London and spent five years working as Arthur Blomfield’s assistant architect, also a restorer and designer of churches. Hardy though had become disillusioned with institutionalised forms of Christianity and abandoned any lingering hopes of ordination in the Anglican Church.  However, his poetry was now flourishing, although it was still rejected for publication.

His novel ‘Desperate Remedies’, was published anonymously in 1871 and he now resolved to write full time though he was not yet in a position to achieve financial security or literary success. His second novel, ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, appeared in 1872 and in 1873 ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’, the most autobiographical of his works arrived. With ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ in 1874, came critical acclaim, public attention and financial success. 1878 saw more of the same with ‘The Return of the Native’, and the ensuing years saw him rise to ever greater popularity.

 ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ was published in 1886.  In 1891 came ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’. It only saw publication after extensive alterations to its plot and deleting long passages to lessen the shock to the prudish Victorian audience who were dismayed by the seduction and ruin of a young girl by a rakish aristocrat. His last novel, ‘Jude the Obscure’, suffered the same fate when it was published in 1895.  The uproar so disturbed him that he returned to poetry. In 1898 he had an earlier poetry collection published ‘Wessex Poems’

Hardy spent the years between 1903 and 1908 writing ‘The Dynasts’, an epic poem on the Napoleonic Wars.

In his twilight years came honours and awards from the great and the good and recognition of his stature as one of the most outstanding of British authors. George V conferred on him the Order of Merit in 1910.

In 1924 a new stage production of ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, was staged.  Meanwhile from 1920 to 1927 he worked, in secret, on his autobiography, which was later published after his death as the work of Florence Hardy.

Thomas Hardy OM died on the 11th January 1928.

Index of Contents

V.R.  1819–1901

WAR POEMS—

Embarcation

Departure

The Colonel’s Soliloquy

The Going of the Battery

At the War Office

A Christmas Ghost-Story

The Dead Drummer

A Wife in London

The Souls of the Slain

Song of the Soldiers’ Wives

The Sick God

POEMS OF PILGRIMAGE—

Genoa and the Mediterranean

Shelley’s Skylark

In the Old Theatre, Fiesole

Rome: On the Palatine

Rome: Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter

Rome: The Vatican: Sala Delle Muse

Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius

Lausanne: In Gibbon’s Old Garden

Zermatt: To the Matterhorn

The Bridge of Lodi

On an Invitation to the United States

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS—

The Mother Mourns

 I said to Love

A Commonplace Day

At a Lunar Eclipse

The Lacking Sense

To Life

Doom and She

The Problem

The Subalterns

The Sleep-worker

The Bullfinches

God-Forgotten

The Bedridden Peasant to an Unknowing God

By the Earth’s Corpse

Mute Opinion

To an Unborn Pauper Child

To Flowers from Italy in Winter

On a Fine Morning

To Lizbie Browne

Song of Hope

The Well-Beloved

Her Reproach

The Inconsistent

A Broken Appointment

Between us now

How great my Grief

I need not go

The Coquette, and After

A Spot

Long Plighted

The Widow

At a Hasty Wedding

The Dream-Follower

His Immortality

The To-be-Forgotten

Wives in the Sere

The Superseded

An August Midnight

The Caged Thrush Freed and Home Again

Birds at Winter Nightfall

The Puzzled Game-Birds

Winter in Durnover Field

The Last Chrysanthemum

The Darkling Thrush

The Comet at Yalbury or Yell’ham

Mad Judy

A Wasted Illness

A Man

The Dame of Athelhall

The Seasons of her Year

The Milkmaid

The Levelled Churchyard

The Ruined Maid

The Respectable Burgher on the Higher Criticism

Architectural Masks

The Tenant-for-Life

The King’s Experiment

The Tree: an Old Man’s Story

Her Late Husband

The Self-Unseeing

De Profundis i.

De Profundis ii.

De Profundis iii.

The Church-Builder

The Lost Pyx: a Mediæval Legend

Tess’s Lament

The Supplanter: A Tale

IMITATIONS, Etc.—

Sapphic Fragment

Catullus: xxxi

After Schiller

Song: From Heine

From Victor Hugo

Cardinal Bembo’s Epitaph on Raphael

RETROSPECT—

 I have Lived with Shades

Memory and I

ΑΓΝΩΣΤΩ.  ΘΕΩ

THOMAS HARDY – A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

THOMAS HARDY – A CONCISE BIBLIOGRAPHY

V.R.  1819–1901

A REVERIE

Moments the mightiest pass uncalendared,

      And when the Absolute

   In backward Time outgave the deedful word

      Whereby all life is stirred:

"Let one be born and throned whose mould shall constitute

The norm of every royal-reckoned attribute,"

      No mortal knew or heard.

   But in due days the purposed Life outshone—

      Serene, sagacious, free;

   —Her waxing seasons bloomed with deeds well done,

      And the world’s heart was won . . .

Yet may the deed of hers most bright in eyes to be

Lie hid from ours—as in the All-One’s thought lay she—

      Till ripening years have run.

Sunday Night,

         27th January 1901.

WAR POEMS

EMBARCATION

(Southampton Docks: October, 1899)

Here, where Vespasian’s legions struck the sands,

And Cerdic with his Saxons entered in,

And Henry’s army leapt afloat to win

Convincing triumphs over neighbour lands,

Vaster battalions press for further strands,

To argue in the self-same bloody mode

Which this late age of thought, and pact, and code,

Still fails to mend.—Now deckward tramp the bands,

Yellow as autumn leaves, alive as spring;

And as each host draws out upon the sea

Beyond which lies the tragical To-be,

None dubious of the cause, none murmuring,

Wives, sisters, parents, wave white hands and smile,

As