On a Fine Morning.
Whence comes Solace?
--Not from seeing
What is doing,
suffering, being,
Not from noting Life's conditions,
Nor from heeding Time's monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.
IIThus do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its irised embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man.
……………………………………………………….
She hears the Storm
There was a time in former years
--While my roof-tree was his
--When I should have been distressed by fears
At such a night as this!
I should have murmured anxiously,
'The prickling rain strikes cold;
His road is bare of hedge or tree,
And he is getting old.'
But now the fitful chimney-roar,
The drone of Thorncombe trees,
The Froom in flood upon the moor,
The mud of Mellstock Leaze,
The candle slanting sooty-wick'd,
The thuds upon the thatch,
The eaves drops on the window flicked,
The clanking garden-hatch,
And what they mean to wayfarers,
I scarcely heed or mind;
He has won that storm-tight roof of hers
Which Earth grants all her kind.
……………………………………………….
Shelley's Lark.
Somewhere afield here something lies
In Earth's oblivious eyeless trust
That moved a poet to prophecies
-A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust
The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,
And made immortal through times to be;
-Though it only lived like another bird,
And knew not its immortality.
Lived its meek life;
then, one day,
fell -A little ball of feather and bone;
And how it perished,
when piped farewell,
And where it wastes,
are alike unknown.
Maybe it rests in the loam I view,
Maybe it throbs in a myrtle's green,
Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue
Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.
Go find it, faeries, go and find
That tiny pinch of priceless dust,
And bring a casket silver-lined,
And framed of gold that gems encrust;
And we will lay it safe therein,
And consecrate it to endless time;
For it inspired a bard to win
Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.
……………………………………………………
The Bullfinches
Bother Bulleys,
let us sing
From the dawn till evening!
-For we know not that we go not
When the day's pale pinions fold
Unto those who sang of old.
When I flew to Blackmoor Vale,
Whence the green-gowned faeries hail,
Roosting near them I could hear them
Speak of queenly Nature's ways,
Means, and moods,
--well known to fays.
All we creatures, nigh and far(Said they there),
the Mother's are:
Yet she never shows endeavour
To protect from warrings wild
Bird or beast she calls her child.
Busy in her handsome house
Known as Space,
she falls a-drowse;
Yet, in seeming, works on dreaming,
While beneath her groping hands
Fiends make havoc in her bands.
How her hussif'ry succeeds
She unknows or she unheeds,
All things making for Death's taking!
--So the green-gowned faeries say
Living over Blackmoor way.
Come then, brethren, let us sing,
From the dawn till evening!
-For we know not that we go not
When the day's pale pinions fold
Unto those who sang of old.………………………………………..
The darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate,
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to me
The Century's corpse outleant,
Its crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind its death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervorless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead,
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited.An aged thrush, frail,
gaunt and small,
With blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night airSome blessed Hope,
whereof he knew,
And I was unaware.
Saturday 24 January 2009
Saturday 17 January 2009
Some of Thomas Hardy's Poems
At a Lunar Eclipse
Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,
Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine
In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.
How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil and misery?
And can immense Mortality but throw So small a shade,
and Heaven's high human scheme
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?
Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,
Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,
Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?
………………………………………………..
At an Inn
When we as strangers sought
Their catering care,
Veiled smiles bespoke their thought
Of what we were.
They warmed as they opinedUs more than friends
--That we had all resignedFor love's dear ends.
And that swift sympathyWith living love
Which quicks the world--maybe
The spheres above,
Made them our ministers,
Moved them to say,"Ah, God, that bliss like theirs
Would flush our day!"
And we were left alone
As Love's own pair;
Yet never the love-light shoneBetween us there!
But that which chilled the breathOf afternoon,
And palsied unto deathThe pane-fly's tune.
The kiss their zeal foretold,
And now deemed come,
Came not: within his hold
Love lingered numb.
Why cast he on our port
A bloom not ours?
Why shaped us for his sport
In after-hours?
As we seemed we were not
That day afar,
And now we seem not what
We aching are.
O severing sea and land,
O laws of men,Ere death,
once let us stand
As we stood then!
………………………………………
Birds at Winter Nightfall
Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone
From holly and cotoneaster
Around the house.
The flakes fly!--faster
Shutting indoors that crumb-outcaster
We used to see upon the lawn
Around the house.
The flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone!
………………………………………….
During Winter Rain
They sing their dearest songs--He,
she, all of them--yea,
Treble and tenor and bass.
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss--Elders and juniors--aye,
Making the pathways neatAnd the garden gay;And they build a shady seat....Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!
They are blithely breakfasting all--Men and maidens--yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee....
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ripped from the wall.
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them--aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.
………………………………………….
From Victor Hugo.
Child, were I king,
I'd yield my royal rule,
My chariot,
sceptre, vassal-service due,
My crown, my porphyry-basined waters cool,
My fleets, whereto the sea is but a pool,
For a glance from you!
Love, were I God,
the earth and its heaving airs,
Angels, the demons abject under me,
Vast chaos with its teeming womby lairs,
Time, space, all would I give--aye, upper spheres,
For a kiss from thee!
………………………………………………………
I Look into my glass
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, "Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!"
For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
…………………………………………….
In a Wood
In a WoodPale beech and pine-tree blue,
Set in one clay,
Bough to bough cannot you
Bide out your day?
When the rains skim and skip,
Why mar sweet comradeship,
Blighting with poison-drip
Neighborly spray?
Heart-halt and spirit-lame,
City-opprest,
Unto this wood I cameAs to a nest;
Dreaming that sylvan peaceOffered the harrowed ease—Nature a soft releaseFrom men’s unrest.But, having entered in,
Great growths and small
Show them to men akin—Combatants all!
Sycamore shoulders oak,Bines the slim sapling yoke,
Ivy-spun halters chokeElms stout and tall.
Touches from ash,
O wych,Sting you like scorn!
You, too, brave hollies, twitch
Sidelong from thorn.
Even the rank poplars bearIlly a rival’s air,
Cankering in black despairIf overborne.
Since, then, no grace I find
Taught me of trees,
Turn I back to my kind,Worthy as these.
There at least smiles abound,
There discourse trills around,
There, now and then,
are foundLife-loyalties.
……………………………………………………..
In Time 'The breaking of nations'
Only a man harrowing clodsIn a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
……………………………………………
Lines on the Loss of Titanic
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her,
stilly couches she.Steel chambers,
late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid,
and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls
-- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mindLie lightless,
all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gearAnd query:
"What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
...Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate
For her -- so gaily great --A Shape of Ice,
for the time far and dissociate.
And as the smart ship grewIn stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes,
and jars two hemispheres.……………………………………………
Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,
Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine
In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.
How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil and misery?
And can immense Mortality but throw So small a shade,
and Heaven's high human scheme
Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?
Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,
Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,
Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?
………………………………………………..
At an Inn
When we as strangers sought
Their catering care,
Veiled smiles bespoke their thought
Of what we were.
They warmed as they opinedUs more than friends
--That we had all resignedFor love's dear ends.
And that swift sympathyWith living love
Which quicks the world--maybe
The spheres above,
Made them our ministers,
Moved them to say,"Ah, God, that bliss like theirs
Would flush our day!"
And we were left alone
As Love's own pair;
Yet never the love-light shoneBetween us there!
But that which chilled the breathOf afternoon,
And palsied unto deathThe pane-fly's tune.
The kiss their zeal foretold,
And now deemed come,
Came not: within his hold
Love lingered numb.
Why cast he on our port
A bloom not ours?
Why shaped us for his sport
In after-hours?
As we seemed we were not
That day afar,
And now we seem not what
We aching are.
O severing sea and land,
O laws of men,Ere death,
once let us stand
As we stood then!
………………………………………
Birds at Winter Nightfall
Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone
From holly and cotoneaster
Around the house.
The flakes fly!--faster
Shutting indoors that crumb-outcaster
We used to see upon the lawn
Around the house.
The flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone!
………………………………………….
During Winter Rain
They sing their dearest songs--He,
she, all of them--yea,
Treble and tenor and bass.
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss--Elders and juniors--aye,
Making the pathways neatAnd the garden gay;And they build a shady seat....Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!
They are blithely breakfasting all--Men and maidens--yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee....
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ripped from the wall.
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them--aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.
………………………………………….
From Victor Hugo.
Child, were I king,
I'd yield my royal rule,
My chariot,
sceptre, vassal-service due,
My crown, my porphyry-basined waters cool,
My fleets, whereto the sea is but a pool,
For a glance from you!
Love, were I God,
the earth and its heaving airs,
Angels, the demons abject under me,
Vast chaos with its teeming womby lairs,
Time, space, all would I give--aye, upper spheres,
For a kiss from thee!
………………………………………………………
I Look into my glass
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, "Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!"
For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
…………………………………………….
In a Wood
In a WoodPale beech and pine-tree blue,
Set in one clay,
Bough to bough cannot you
Bide out your day?
When the rains skim and skip,
Why mar sweet comradeship,
Blighting with poison-drip
Neighborly spray?
Heart-halt and spirit-lame,
City-opprest,
Unto this wood I cameAs to a nest;
Dreaming that sylvan peaceOffered the harrowed ease—Nature a soft releaseFrom men’s unrest.But, having entered in,
Great growths and small
Show them to men akin—Combatants all!
Sycamore shoulders oak,Bines the slim sapling yoke,
Ivy-spun halters chokeElms stout and tall.
Touches from ash,
O wych,Sting you like scorn!
You, too, brave hollies, twitch
Sidelong from thorn.
Even the rank poplars bearIlly a rival’s air,
Cankering in black despairIf overborne.
Since, then, no grace I find
Taught me of trees,
Turn I back to my kind,Worthy as these.
There at least smiles abound,
There discourse trills around,
There, now and then,
are foundLife-loyalties.
……………………………………………………..
In Time 'The breaking of nations'
Only a man harrowing clodsIn a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
……………………………………………
Lines on the Loss of Titanic
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her,
stilly couches she.Steel chambers,
late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid,
and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls
-- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mindLie lightless,
all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gearAnd query:
"What does this vaingloriousness down here?"
...Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate
For her -- so gaily great --A Shape of Ice,
for the time far and dissociate.
And as the smart ship grewIn stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes,
and jars two hemispheres.……………………………………………
The enchanting World of Thomas hardy of Dorset
Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June, 1840 – 11 January, 1928) was an English author of the naturalist movement, though he regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Thomas Hardy was born at Higher Bockhampton, a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford to the east of Dorchester in Dorset,England. His father worked as a stonemason and local builder. His mother was well-read and educated Thomas until he went to his first school at Bockhampton at age 8. His formal education ended at the age of 16 when he became apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect. Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862; there he enrolled as a student at King's College,London. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. Hardy never truly felt at home in London and when he returned five years later to Dorset he decided to dedicate himself to writing.
In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he married in 1874. Although he later became estranged from his wife, who died in 1912, her death had a traumatic effect on him. After her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places linked with their courtship, and his Poems 1912-13 reflect upon her passing. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. However, he remained preoccupied with his first wife's death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry.
Hardy became ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died in January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed. His funeral was on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, and it proved a controversial occasion because Hardy and his family and friends had wished for his body to be interred at Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma. However, his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted that he be placed in the abbey's famous Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets' Corner.
Shortly after Hardy's death, the executors of his estate burnt his letters and notebooks. Twelve records survived, one of them containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s. Research into these provided insight into how Hardy kept track of them and how he used them in his later work.
Hardy's work was admired by many authors including D.H.Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Robert Graves, in his autobiography Goodbye to All That, recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s. Hardy received Graves and his newly married wife warmly, and was encouraging about the younger author's work.
In 1910, Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit ("OM"). Hardy's cottage at Brockhampton and Max Gate in Dorchester are owned by the National Trust.
Hardy's early religious experience was with the Plymouth Brethren. He was often in the company of Henry R.Bastow, a fellow architect, when they studied the Greek new Testament together. Bastow went to Australia and maintained a long correspondence with Hardy, but eventually Hardy tired of these exchanges and the correspondence ceased. Hardy's links with the Brethren also concluded.
Hardy’s idea of fate in life gave way to his philosophical struggle with God. Although Hardy’s faith remained intact, the irony and struggles of life led him to question God and His traditional meaning in the Christian sense.
“ The Christian god – the external personality – has been replaced by the intelligence of the First Cause…the replacement of the old concept of God as all-powerful by a new concept of universal consciousness. The ‘tribal god, man-shaped, fiery-faced and tyrannous’ is replaced by the ‘unconscious will of the Universe’ which progressively grows aware of itself and ‘ultimately, it is to be hoped, sympathetic’. ” Hardy's religious life seems to have mixed agnosticism and spiritism. Once, when asked in correspondence by a clergyman about the question of reconciling the horrors of pain with the goodness of a loving God, Hardy replied,
“ Mr. Hardy regrets that he is unable to offer any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr.Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness. Perhaps Dr. Grosart might be helped to a provisional view of the universe by the recently published Life of Darwin, and the works of Herbert Spencer, and other agnostics. ” Nevertheless, Hardy frequently conceived of and wrote about supernatural forces that control the universe, more through indifference or caprice than any firm will. Also, Hardy showed in his writing some degree of fascination with ghosts and spirits. Despite these sentiments, Hardy retained a strong emotional attachment to the Christian liturgy and church rituals, particularly as manifested in rural communities, that had been such a formative influence in his early years. Some attributed the bleak outlook of many of his novels as reflecting his view of the absence of God. A sentence found in his Tess of the d'Urbervilles neatly sums up Hardy's philosophical stance:
“ The inherent will to enjoy and the circumstantial will against enjoyment ” In far From the Madding Crowd, Oak’s entire flock, and livelihood, dies. For Oak, being a simple farmer with nothing to his name, to encounter such a loss is a tragedy wherein Hardy wants his readers to consider the role of God in this type of situation along with the universe’s cruelty. Biblical references can be found woven throughout many of Hardy’s novels as he became friends with a Dorchester minister,Hourace Moule. Moule also influenced Hardy’s point of view by introducing him to scientific studies and ideas that questioned the literal meaning of the Bible These new ideas, along with Darwinism, and a series of unsettling events in Hardy’s life may be the reason for his pessimistic attitude that is perceived by many critics and readers alike.
Hardy's first novel,The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher and Hardy destroyed the manuscript so only parts of the novel remain. He was encouraged to try again by his mentor and friend, Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith.Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) were published anonymously. In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a story drawing on Hardy's courtship of his first wife, was published under his own name.
Hardy said that he first introduced Wessex in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his next (and first important) novel. It was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Over the next twenty-five years Hardy produced ten more novels.
The Hardys moved from London to Yeovil and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878). In 1885, they moved for a last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother. There he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), the last of which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was initially refused publication. Its subtitle, A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented, was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle-classes.
Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, met with even stronger negative outcries from the Victorian public for its frank treatment of s ex, and was often referred to as "Jude the Obscene". Heavily criticised for its apparent attack on the institution of marriage, the book caused further strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy was concerned that Jude the Obscure would be read as being autobiographical. Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags, and the Bishop of Wakefield is reputed to have burnt a copy. In his postscript of 1912, Hardy humourously referred to this incident as part of the career of the book: "After these [hostile] verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop - probably in his despair at not being able to burn me".
Despite this criticism, Hardy had become a celebrity in English literature by the 1900s, with several highly successful novels under his belt, yet he felt disgust at the public reception of two of his greatest works and gave up writing novels altogether. Several critics have commented, however, that there was very little left for Hardy to write about, having creatively exhausted the increasingly fatalistic tone of his novels.
Although he wrote a great deal of poetry, mostly unpublished until after 1898, Hardy is best remembered for the series of novels and short stories he wrote between 1871 and 1895. His novels are set in the imaginary world of Wessex, a large area of south and south-west England, using the name of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that covered the area. Hardy was part of two worlds; on the one hand he had a deep emotional bond with the rural way of life which he had known as a child, but on the other he was aware of the changes which were under way, and the current social problems from the innovations in agriculture - he captured the epoch just before the railways and the Industrial Revolution changed the English countryside - to the unfairness and hypocrisy of Victorian sexual behaviour.
Hardy critiques certain social constraints that hindered the lives of those living in the 19th century. Considered a Victorian Realist writer, Hardy examines the social constraints that are part of the Victorian status quo, suggesting these rules hinder the lives of all involved and ultimately leading to unhappiness. In Two on a Tower, Hardy seeks to take a stand against these rules and sets up a story against the backdrop of social structure by creating a romantic story of love that crosses the boundaries of class. The reader is forced to consider the option of disposing of the conventions set up for love. 19th century society enforces the conventions and societal pressure ensures conformity. Swithin St Cleeve's idealism pits him against contemporary social constraints. He is a self-willed individual set up against the coercive strictures of social rules and mores.
“ In a novel structured around contrasts, the main opposition is between Swithin St Cleeve and Lady Viviette Constantine, who are presented as binary figures in a series of ways: aristocratic and lower class, youthful and mature, single and married, fair and dark, religious and agnostic…she (Lady Viviette Constantine) is also deeply conventional, absurdly wishing to conceal their marriage until Swithin has achieved social status through his scientific work, which gives rise to uncontrolled ironies and tragic-comic misunderstandings (Harvey 108). ” Hardy’s stories take into consideration the events of life and their effects. Fate plays a big role as the thematic basis for many of his novels. Characters are constantly encountering crossroads, which are symbolic of a point of opportunity and transition. Far From the Madding Crowd tells a tale of lives that are constructed by chance. “Had Bathsheba not sent the valentine, had Fanny not missed her wedding, for example, the story would have taken an entirely different path.” Once things have been put into motion, they will play out. Hardy’s characters are in the grips of too much overwhelming fate.
He paints a vivid picture of rural life in the 19th century, with all its joys and suffering, a fatalistic world full of superstition and injustice. His heroes and heroines are often alienated from society and rarely become readmitted into it. He tends to emphasise the impersonal and, generally, negative powers of fate over the mainly working class people he represented in his novels. Hardy exhibits in his books elemental passion, deep instinct, the human will struggling against fatal and ill-comprehended laws, a victim also of unforeseeable change. Tess, for example, ends with:
“ Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on. ” In particular, Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure is full of the sense of crisis of the later Victorian period (as witnessed in Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach'). It describes the tragedy of two new social types, Jude Fawley, a working man who attempts to educate himself, and his lover and cousin, Sue Bridehead, who represents the 'new woman' of the 1890s.
His mastery, as both an author and poet, lies in the creation of natural surroundings making discoveries through close observation and acute sensitiveness. He notices the smallest and most delicate details, yet he can also paint vast landscapes of his own Wessex in melancholy or noble moods. (His eye for poignant detail - such as the spreading bloodstain on the ceiling at the end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and little Jude's suicide note - often came from clippings from newspaper reports of real events).
In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and published collections until his death in 1928. Although not as well received by his contemporaries as his novels, Hardy's poetry has been applauded considerably in recent years, in part because of the influence on Philip Larkin. However, critically it is still not regarded as highly as his prose.
Most of his poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and life, and mankind's long struggle against indifference to human suffering. Some, like The Darkling Thrush and An August Midnight, appear as poems about writing poetry, because the nature mentioned in them gives Hardy the inspiration to write those. A vein of regret tinges his often seemingly banal themes. His compositions range in style from the three-volume epic closet drama The Dynasts to smaller, and often hopeful or even cheerful ballads of the moment such as the little-known The Children and Sir Nameless, a comic poem inspired by the tombs of the Martyns, builders of Athelhampton.
A few of Hardy's poems, such as The Blinded Bird (a melancholy polemic against the sport of vinkenzetting), display his love of the natural world and his firm stance against animal cruelty, exhibited in his antivivisectionist views and his membership in the RSPCA.
Composers who have set Hardy's text to music include Gerald Finzi, who produced six song-cycles for poems by Hardy, Benjamin Britten, who based his song-cycle Winter Words on Hardy's poetry, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Holst also based one of his last orchestral works, Egdon Heath, on Hardy's work. It is said to be Holst's masterpiece. Composer Lee Hoiby's setting of "The Darkling Thrush" became the basis of the multimedia opera Darkling and Timothy Takach, a graduate of St. Olaf, has also put "The Darkling Thrush" into arrangement for a 4-part mixed choir.
Prose Hardy divided his novels and collected short stories into three classes: Novels of Character and Environment
The Poor Man and the Lady (1867, unpublished and lost)
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
The Return of the Native (1878)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
The Woodlanders (1887)
Wessex Tales (1888, a collection of short stories)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
Life's Little Ironies (1894, a collection of short stories)
Jude the Obscure (1895)
Romances and Fantasies
A Pair of Bkue Eyes (1873)
The Trumpet -Major (1880)
Two on a Tower (1882)
A Group of Noble Dames (1891, a collection of short stories)
The Well-Beloved (1897) (first published as a serial from 1892).
Novels of Ingenuity
Desperate Remedies (1871)
The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)
A Laodicean (1881)
Hardy also produced a number of minor tales and a collaborative novel, The Spectre of the Real (1894). An additional short-story collection, beyond the ones mentioned above, is A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913). His works have been collected as the 24-volume Wessex Edition (1912-1913) and the 37-volume Mellstock Edition (1919-1920). His largely self-written biography appears under his second wife's name in two volumes from 1928-1930, as The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891 and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928, now published in a critical one-volume edition as The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate (1984).
Short stories (with date of first publication)
"How I Built Myself A House" (1865)
"Destiny and a Blue Cloak" (1874)
"The Thieves Who Couldn't Stop Sneezing" (1877)
"The Duchess of Hamptonshire" (1878)
"The Distracted Preacher" (1879)
"Fellow-Townsmen" (1880)
"The Honourable Laura" (1881)
"What The Shepherd Saw" (1881)
"A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four" (1882)
"The Three Strangers" (1883)
"The Romantic Adventures Of A Milkmaid" (1883)
"Interlopers At The Knap" (1884)
"A Mere Interlude" (1885)
"A Tryst At An Ancient Earthwork" (1885)
"Alicia's Diary" (1887)
"The Waiting Supper" (1887-88)
"The Withered Arm" (1888)
"A Tragedy Of Two Ambitions" (1888)
"The First Countess of Wessex" (1889)
"Anna, Lady Baxby" (1890)
"The Lady Icenway" (1890)
"Lady Mottisfont" (1890)
"The Lady Penelope" (1890)
"The Marchioness of Stonehenge" (1890)
"Squire Petrick's Lady" (1890)
"Barbara Of The House Of Grebe" (1890)
"The Melancholy Hussar of The German Legion" (1890)
"Absent-Mindedness in a Parish Choir" (1891) "The Winters And The Palmleys" (1891)
"For Conscience' Sake" (1891)
"Incident in Mr. Crookhill's Life"(1891)
"The Doctor's Legend" (1891)
"Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk" (1891)
"The History of the Hardcomes" (1891)
"Netty Sargent's Copyhold" (1891)
"On The Western Circuit" (1891)
"A Few Crusted Characters: Introduction" (1891)
"The Superstitious Man's Story" (1891)
"Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver" (1891)
"To Please His Wife" (1891)
"The Son's Veto" (1891)
"Old Andrey's Experience as a Musician" (1891)
"Our Exploits At West Poley" (1892-93)
"Master John Horseleigh, Knight" (1893)
"The Fiddler of the Reels" (1893)
"An Imaginative Woman" (1894)
"The Spectre of the Real" (1894)
"A Committee-Man of 'The Terror'" (1896)
"The Duke's Reappearance" (1896)
"The Grave By The Handpost" (1897)
"A Changed Man" (1900)
"Enter a Dragoon" (1900)
"Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer" (1911)
"Old Mrs. Chundle" (1929)
"The Unconquerable"(1922) Poetry (not a comprehensive list)
The Photograph (1890)
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
Poems of the Past and Present (1901)
The Dynasts,Part 1 (1904)
The Dynasts, Part 2 (1906)
The Dynasts,Part 3 (1908)
Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909)
Satires of Circumstance (1914)
Moments of Vision (1917)
Collected Poems (1919, part of the Mellstock Edition of his novels and poems)
Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses (1922)
Human Shows, Far Phantasies,Human Shows, Far Phantasies , Songs and Trifles (1925)
Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928, published posthumously)
Drama
The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923)
Hardy provides the springboard for D.H.Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy (1936). Though this work became a platform for Lawrence's own developing philosophy rather than a more standard literary study, the influence of Hardy's treatment of character and Lawrence's own response to the central metaphysic behind many of Hardy's novels helped significantly in the development of The Rainbow (1915, suppressed) and Women in Love (1920, private publication). Hardy was clearly the starting point for the character of the novelist Edward Driffield in W.Somerset Maugham's novel Cakes and Ale.
Thomas Hardy was born at Higher Bockhampton, a hamlet in the parish of Stinsford to the east of Dorchester in Dorset,England. His father worked as a stonemason and local builder. His mother was well-read and educated Thomas until he went to his first school at Bockhampton at age 8. His formal education ended at the age of 16 when he became apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect. Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862; there he enrolled as a student at King's College,London. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. Hardy never truly felt at home in London and when he returned five years later to Dorset he decided to dedicate himself to writing.
In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he married in 1874. Although he later became estranged from his wife, who died in 1912, her death had a traumatic effect on him. After her death, Hardy made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places linked with their courtship, and his Poems 1912-13 reflect upon her passing. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. However, he remained preoccupied with his first wife's death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry.
Hardy became ill with pleurisy in December 1927 and died in January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife on his deathbed. His funeral was on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, and it proved a controversial occasion because Hardy and his family and friends had wished for his body to be interred at Stinsford in the same grave as his first wife, Emma. However, his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, insisted that he be placed in the abbey's famous Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets' Corner.
Shortly after Hardy's death, the executors of his estate burnt his letters and notebooks. Twelve records survived, one of them containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s. Research into these provided insight into how Hardy kept track of them and how he used them in his later work.
Hardy's work was admired by many authors including D.H.Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Robert Graves, in his autobiography Goodbye to All That, recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s. Hardy received Graves and his newly married wife warmly, and was encouraging about the younger author's work.
In 1910, Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit ("OM"). Hardy's cottage at Brockhampton and Max Gate in Dorchester are owned by the National Trust.
Hardy's early religious experience was with the Plymouth Brethren. He was often in the company of Henry R.Bastow, a fellow architect, when they studied the Greek new Testament together. Bastow went to Australia and maintained a long correspondence with Hardy, but eventually Hardy tired of these exchanges and the correspondence ceased. Hardy's links with the Brethren also concluded.
Hardy’s idea of fate in life gave way to his philosophical struggle with God. Although Hardy’s faith remained intact, the irony and struggles of life led him to question God and His traditional meaning in the Christian sense.
“ The Christian god – the external personality – has been replaced by the intelligence of the First Cause…the replacement of the old concept of God as all-powerful by a new concept of universal consciousness. The ‘tribal god, man-shaped, fiery-faced and tyrannous’ is replaced by the ‘unconscious will of the Universe’ which progressively grows aware of itself and ‘ultimately, it is to be hoped, sympathetic’. ” Hardy's religious life seems to have mixed agnosticism and spiritism. Once, when asked in correspondence by a clergyman about the question of reconciling the horrors of pain with the goodness of a loving God, Hardy replied,
“ Mr. Hardy regrets that he is unable to offer any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr.Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness. Perhaps Dr. Grosart might be helped to a provisional view of the universe by the recently published Life of Darwin, and the works of Herbert Spencer, and other agnostics. ” Nevertheless, Hardy frequently conceived of and wrote about supernatural forces that control the universe, more through indifference or caprice than any firm will. Also, Hardy showed in his writing some degree of fascination with ghosts and spirits. Despite these sentiments, Hardy retained a strong emotional attachment to the Christian liturgy and church rituals, particularly as manifested in rural communities, that had been such a formative influence in his early years. Some attributed the bleak outlook of many of his novels as reflecting his view of the absence of God. A sentence found in his Tess of the d'Urbervilles neatly sums up Hardy's philosophical stance:
“ The inherent will to enjoy and the circumstantial will against enjoyment ” In far From the Madding Crowd, Oak’s entire flock, and livelihood, dies. For Oak, being a simple farmer with nothing to his name, to encounter such a loss is a tragedy wherein Hardy wants his readers to consider the role of God in this type of situation along with the universe’s cruelty. Biblical references can be found woven throughout many of Hardy’s novels as he became friends with a Dorchester minister,Hourace Moule. Moule also influenced Hardy’s point of view by introducing him to scientific studies and ideas that questioned the literal meaning of the Bible These new ideas, along with Darwinism, and a series of unsettling events in Hardy’s life may be the reason for his pessimistic attitude that is perceived by many critics and readers alike.
Hardy's first novel,The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher and Hardy destroyed the manuscript so only parts of the novel remain. He was encouraged to try again by his mentor and friend, Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith.Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) were published anonymously. In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a story drawing on Hardy's courtship of his first wife, was published under his own name.
Hardy said that he first introduced Wessex in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his next (and first important) novel. It was successful enough for Hardy to give up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Over the next twenty-five years Hardy produced ten more novels.
The Hardys moved from London to Yeovil and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878). In 1885, they moved for a last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother. There he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), the last of which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was initially refused publication. Its subtitle, A Pure Woman: Faithfully Presented, was intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian middle-classes.
Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, met with even stronger negative outcries from the Victorian public for its frank treatment of s ex, and was often referred to as "Jude the Obscene". Heavily criticised for its apparent attack on the institution of marriage, the book caused further strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy was concerned that Jude the Obscure would be read as being autobiographical. Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags, and the Bishop of Wakefield is reputed to have burnt a copy. In his postscript of 1912, Hardy humourously referred to this incident as part of the career of the book: "After these [hostile] verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop - probably in his despair at not being able to burn me".
Despite this criticism, Hardy had become a celebrity in English literature by the 1900s, with several highly successful novels under his belt, yet he felt disgust at the public reception of two of his greatest works and gave up writing novels altogether. Several critics have commented, however, that there was very little left for Hardy to write about, having creatively exhausted the increasingly fatalistic tone of his novels.
Although he wrote a great deal of poetry, mostly unpublished until after 1898, Hardy is best remembered for the series of novels and short stories he wrote between 1871 and 1895. His novels are set in the imaginary world of Wessex, a large area of south and south-west England, using the name of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that covered the area. Hardy was part of two worlds; on the one hand he had a deep emotional bond with the rural way of life which he had known as a child, but on the other he was aware of the changes which were under way, and the current social problems from the innovations in agriculture - he captured the epoch just before the railways and the Industrial Revolution changed the English countryside - to the unfairness and hypocrisy of Victorian sexual behaviour.
Hardy critiques certain social constraints that hindered the lives of those living in the 19th century. Considered a Victorian Realist writer, Hardy examines the social constraints that are part of the Victorian status quo, suggesting these rules hinder the lives of all involved and ultimately leading to unhappiness. In Two on a Tower, Hardy seeks to take a stand against these rules and sets up a story against the backdrop of social structure by creating a romantic story of love that crosses the boundaries of class. The reader is forced to consider the option of disposing of the conventions set up for love. 19th century society enforces the conventions and societal pressure ensures conformity. Swithin St Cleeve's idealism pits him against contemporary social constraints. He is a self-willed individual set up against the coercive strictures of social rules and mores.
“ In a novel structured around contrasts, the main opposition is between Swithin St Cleeve and Lady Viviette Constantine, who are presented as binary figures in a series of ways: aristocratic and lower class, youthful and mature, single and married, fair and dark, religious and agnostic…she (Lady Viviette Constantine) is also deeply conventional, absurdly wishing to conceal their marriage until Swithin has achieved social status through his scientific work, which gives rise to uncontrolled ironies and tragic-comic misunderstandings (Harvey 108). ” Hardy’s stories take into consideration the events of life and their effects. Fate plays a big role as the thematic basis for many of his novels. Characters are constantly encountering crossroads, which are symbolic of a point of opportunity and transition. Far From the Madding Crowd tells a tale of lives that are constructed by chance. “Had Bathsheba not sent the valentine, had Fanny not missed her wedding, for example, the story would have taken an entirely different path.” Once things have been put into motion, they will play out. Hardy’s characters are in the grips of too much overwhelming fate.
He paints a vivid picture of rural life in the 19th century, with all its joys and suffering, a fatalistic world full of superstition and injustice. His heroes and heroines are often alienated from society and rarely become readmitted into it. He tends to emphasise the impersonal and, generally, negative powers of fate over the mainly working class people he represented in his novels. Hardy exhibits in his books elemental passion, deep instinct, the human will struggling against fatal and ill-comprehended laws, a victim also of unforeseeable change. Tess, for example, ends with:
“ Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on. ” In particular, Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure is full of the sense of crisis of the later Victorian period (as witnessed in Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach'). It describes the tragedy of two new social types, Jude Fawley, a working man who attempts to educate himself, and his lover and cousin, Sue Bridehead, who represents the 'new woman' of the 1890s.
His mastery, as both an author and poet, lies in the creation of natural surroundings making discoveries through close observation and acute sensitiveness. He notices the smallest and most delicate details, yet he can also paint vast landscapes of his own Wessex in melancholy or noble moods. (His eye for poignant detail - such as the spreading bloodstain on the ceiling at the end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and little Jude's suicide note - often came from clippings from newspaper reports of real events).
In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and published collections until his death in 1928. Although not as well received by his contemporaries as his novels, Hardy's poetry has been applauded considerably in recent years, in part because of the influence on Philip Larkin. However, critically it is still not regarded as highly as his prose.
Most of his poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and life, and mankind's long struggle against indifference to human suffering. Some, like The Darkling Thrush and An August Midnight, appear as poems about writing poetry, because the nature mentioned in them gives Hardy the inspiration to write those. A vein of regret tinges his often seemingly banal themes. His compositions range in style from the three-volume epic closet drama The Dynasts to smaller, and often hopeful or even cheerful ballads of the moment such as the little-known The Children and Sir Nameless, a comic poem inspired by the tombs of the Martyns, builders of Athelhampton.
A few of Hardy's poems, such as The Blinded Bird (a melancholy polemic against the sport of vinkenzetting), display his love of the natural world and his firm stance against animal cruelty, exhibited in his antivivisectionist views and his membership in the RSPCA.
Composers who have set Hardy's text to music include Gerald Finzi, who produced six song-cycles for poems by Hardy, Benjamin Britten, who based his song-cycle Winter Words on Hardy's poetry, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Holst also based one of his last orchestral works, Egdon Heath, on Hardy's work. It is said to be Holst's masterpiece. Composer Lee Hoiby's setting of "The Darkling Thrush" became the basis of the multimedia opera Darkling and Timothy Takach, a graduate of St. Olaf, has also put "The Darkling Thrush" into arrangement for a 4-part mixed choir.
Prose Hardy divided his novels and collected short stories into three classes: Novels of Character and Environment
The Poor Man and the Lady (1867, unpublished and lost)
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
The Return of the Native (1878)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
The Woodlanders (1887)
Wessex Tales (1888, a collection of short stories)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
Life's Little Ironies (1894, a collection of short stories)
Jude the Obscure (1895)
Romances and Fantasies
A Pair of Bkue Eyes (1873)
The Trumpet -Major (1880)
Two on a Tower (1882)
A Group of Noble Dames (1891, a collection of short stories)
The Well-Beloved (1897) (first published as a serial from 1892).
Novels of Ingenuity
Desperate Remedies (1871)
The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)
A Laodicean (1881)
Hardy also produced a number of minor tales and a collaborative novel, The Spectre of the Real (1894). An additional short-story collection, beyond the ones mentioned above, is A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913). His works have been collected as the 24-volume Wessex Edition (1912-1913) and the 37-volume Mellstock Edition (1919-1920). His largely self-written biography appears under his second wife's name in two volumes from 1928-1930, as The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891 and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928, now published in a critical one-volume edition as The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate (1984).
Short stories (with date of first publication)
"How I Built Myself A House" (1865)
"Destiny and a Blue Cloak" (1874)
"The Thieves Who Couldn't Stop Sneezing" (1877)
"The Duchess of Hamptonshire" (1878)
"The Distracted Preacher" (1879)
"Fellow-Townsmen" (1880)
"The Honourable Laura" (1881)
"What The Shepherd Saw" (1881)
"A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four" (1882)
"The Three Strangers" (1883)
"The Romantic Adventures Of A Milkmaid" (1883)
"Interlopers At The Knap" (1884)
"A Mere Interlude" (1885)
"A Tryst At An Ancient Earthwork" (1885)
"Alicia's Diary" (1887)
"The Waiting Supper" (1887-88)
"The Withered Arm" (1888)
"A Tragedy Of Two Ambitions" (1888)
"The First Countess of Wessex" (1889)
"Anna, Lady Baxby" (1890)
"The Lady Icenway" (1890)
"Lady Mottisfont" (1890)
"The Lady Penelope" (1890)
"The Marchioness of Stonehenge" (1890)
"Squire Petrick's Lady" (1890)
"Barbara Of The House Of Grebe" (1890)
"The Melancholy Hussar of The German Legion" (1890)
"Absent-Mindedness in a Parish Choir" (1891) "The Winters And The Palmleys" (1891)
"For Conscience' Sake" (1891)
"Incident in Mr. Crookhill's Life"(1891)
"The Doctor's Legend" (1891)
"Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk" (1891)
"The History of the Hardcomes" (1891)
"Netty Sargent's Copyhold" (1891)
"On The Western Circuit" (1891)
"A Few Crusted Characters: Introduction" (1891)
"The Superstitious Man's Story" (1891)
"Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver" (1891)
"To Please His Wife" (1891)
"The Son's Veto" (1891)
"Old Andrey's Experience as a Musician" (1891)
"Our Exploits At West Poley" (1892-93)
"Master John Horseleigh, Knight" (1893)
"The Fiddler of the Reels" (1893)
"An Imaginative Woman" (1894)
"The Spectre of the Real" (1894)
"A Committee-Man of 'The Terror'" (1896)
"The Duke's Reappearance" (1896)
"The Grave By The Handpost" (1897)
"A Changed Man" (1900)
"Enter a Dragoon" (1900)
"Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer" (1911)
"Old Mrs. Chundle" (1929)
"The Unconquerable"(1922) Poetry (not a comprehensive list)
The Photograph (1890)
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
Poems of the Past and Present (1901)
The Dynasts,Part 1 (1904)
The Dynasts, Part 2 (1906)
The Dynasts,Part 3 (1908)
Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909)
Satires of Circumstance (1914)
Moments of Vision (1917)
Collected Poems (1919, part of the Mellstock Edition of his novels and poems)
Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses (1922)
Human Shows, Far Phantasies,Human Shows, Far Phantasies , Songs and Trifles (1925)
Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928, published posthumously)
Drama
The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923)
Hardy provides the springboard for D.H.Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy (1936). Though this work became a platform for Lawrence's own developing philosophy rather than a more standard literary study, the influence of Hardy's treatment of character and Lawrence's own response to the central metaphysic behind many of Hardy's novels helped significantly in the development of The Rainbow (1915, suppressed) and Women in Love (1920, private publication). Hardy was clearly the starting point for the character of the novelist Edward Driffield in W.Somerset Maugham's novel Cakes and Ale.
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