Hardy's Key Themes

Hardy's Key Themes

1. DISAPPOINTMENT

   • Neutral Tones
     • looking back at a woman he has fallen out of love with
       • it's a broken love affair
         • 'Over tedious riddles solved years ago
     • love another recurring theme
       • but disappointment that H is getting from falling in love
   • I look into my glass
     • writer recalling his age and time that is passing
       • idea of ageing
         • therefore disappointing
           • rather depressing poem
         • 'And view my wasting skin'
   • The Going
     • H constantly asks Emma why she didn't warn him about her death
       • 'Why did you give no hint that night'
     • and why she left him as if she was 'indifferent quite' to his feelings w/o saying bye
     • Hardy v upset about her death
       • 'It altered all'
     • E was giving H feelings of wanting to go and leave his house, in hope he would see her, but he did and it was a major cause for disappointment
       • 'The yawning blankness of perspective sickens me!'

2. SUFFERING

   • Neutral Tones
   • I look into my glass
   • The Voice
     • H imagines he can hear her, & asks her to appear for him
       • causes S because all just imagination and will never happen bc she is dead
     • “You being ever consigned to existlessness, heard no more again far or near?”
       • E no live anymore, and bound to non-existence
         • H = sad & upset, adds to his suffering over her death
     • “Leaves around me falling, wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward.”
       • depressing scenery reflects his feelings of sadness
       • from this point on, reader can see H needed E in his life and he was 'faltering forward' w/o her

3. WAR

   • Drummer Hodge
     • main feature is meter used
       • tetrameter, followed by trimeter
       • creates a gentle drum beat
         • to commemorate what Hodge did in the war
   • In Time of the Breaking of Nations
     • H presents reader with 3 different glimpses of everyday life
       • suggests they will not change
         • even when countries rise & fall through war
         • and even after wars have been fought
     • “Yet this will go onward the same through Dynasties pass.”
       • Those glimpses of everyday life will never fade away
     • “War’s annals will cloud into night ere their story die.”
       • That means that war history will be completely forgotten before those basic activities are forgotten.
   • in these poems, H presents the people as having little control over their fate

4. LOVE

   • The Voice
     • H tries to remember E when she was in her youth & how beaut she was till the day she died
       • “Saying that now you are not as you were when you had changed from the one who was all to me, but as at first, when our day was fair.
   • The Going
     • H remembers places he and E had visited together while dating. wished that they could have gone there again to rekindle their love
       • “Did we not think of those days long dead, and ere your vanishing strive to seek that time’s renewal? We might have said, ‘In this bright spring weather we’ll visit together those places that once we visited.’”
   • On The Departure Platform
     • recalls of a woman of the past yet again, and the separation between the writer and his lover
   • The Pine Planters
     • from 'The Woodlanders'
       • Marty's love for Giles
     • She loves him, he doesn't love her, both work together in woods everyday
   • definitely a similarity between his love themed poems, and Hardy is not one to share his emotions

5. FATE

   • Drummer Hodge
     • in these poems, H presents the people as having little control over their fate
   • The Convergence of the Twain
     • idea that iceburg & Titanic built for each other so one day they could converge
       • 'In the shadowy silent distance grew the Iceburg too'
     • H thinks fate governs us and is waiting for us - one of reasons it is a recurring theme throughout
   • During Wind and Rain
     • H contrasts happiness of dead wife's childhood w/ inescapable grip time has on life
       • 'Elders and juniors' work in garden to make 'the pathways neat and the garden gay'
         • then fate and time catch up to them and release their wrath and the 'white storm-birds wing across'
           • quote shows that a storm made by fate is coming and coming to upset the happy occasion
     • 'they are blithely breakfasting all' and everybody is having good time 'under summer tree' until fate suddenly comes through w/ a storm and 'the rotten rose is ripe from the wall'
     • writer also speaks about them all dying and fate catching up to them
       • “they change to a high new horse.”
         • But even at death, fate and time are still cruel and it still affects them and makes it presence known as “down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.”

6. NATURE

   • The Darkling Thrush
     • recalls death of an old century/beginning of a new one
     • thrush meant to represent new century
       • but ironic as thrush is of an old generation surviving through this change
         • 'An aged thrush, thin, frail, gaunt, and small'