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Beci Carver on Thomas Hardy ("The Voice")
2.1k Plays2 years ago
A haunting, haunted poem for us today: Beci Carver joins the podcast to discuss Thomas Hardy's poem for his late wife, "The Voice."
Beci is a lecturer in 20th-century literature at University of Exeter and the author of Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014). Her articles have appeared in journals like Textual Practice, Critical Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, and Essays in Criticism. She is also very close to completing her second monograph, Modernism's Whims, which I await eagerly. You can follow Beci on Twitter.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm thrilled today to be talking to my friend Becky Carver about a poem by Thomas Hardy, which is just a beautiful, haunting, heartbreaking,
00:00:20
Speaker
poem called The Voice. Becky's chosen that poem for our discussion today. And of course, I'll remind you as I am wont to do at this moment in the podcast that for people who'd like to look at the poem, I'll provide a link so that you can see the text as we discuss it. And in the show notes, you'll find
00:00:45
Speaker
There are useful links both to the poem, to Hardy, and about our guest today. But let me tell you a little bit about Becky before we get started. So Becky Carver is currently a lecturer in 20th century literature at the University of Exeter. But before she got to Exeter, well, if we go all the way back, Becky
00:01:12
Speaker
did both her undergraduate and graduate degrees at Cambridge University. And after completing her PhD, she was also a junior research fellow at Trinity College at Cambridge. That was followed by Leverhume Research Fellowship and Teaching Fellowships at University College London and the University of St. Andrews.
00:01:34
Speaker
Now she's at Exeter and so she's talking to us today from there. I think this might be the, I'm sure that it is, the largest geographic and time zone difference I've had on the podcast. It's kind of fun to be connected at great distance.
Becky's Academic Background and Publications
00:01:55
Speaker
Becky is the author of a book called Granular Modernism, which came out from Oxford University Press in 2014. She described me in an email as ancient, but I don't think that's a fair description either of the book's publication date or of the thinking in it. The book is about a group of modernist writers
00:02:17
Speaker
who turn the inchoate nature of modern life into art by attending to the shapelessness of mundane experiences like eating and waiting. Becky also tells me in exciting news that she's very close to completing a book
00:02:37
Speaker
called Modernism's Wins. I was joking with her just now before we started about whether she had chosen that title because it was a hard one to say. Modernism's Wins, it's a great title though. Yeah, sure. And I suspect I've seen bits of it or encountered some of Becky's thinking that's going to be appearing in that book here and there. And I have a very strong feeling that that's going to be a marvelous book.
00:03:07
Speaker
and we all look forward to it. Her articles have appeared in journals like Textual Practice, Critical Quarterly, Modernist Modernity, and Essays in Criticism. I first met Becky at an annual convention of the Modernist Studies Association in Toronto, I think it was 2019,
00:03:32
Speaker
And she gave an amazing paper there on the poetry of Fordback's Ford and the idea of dishevelment. That was her word, dishevelment. And I think what she had in mind was a kind of poem that would seem in its content to be about states of disorganization, whether of hair or of clothing or what have you.
00:03:58
Speaker
But in this poem, or rather such a poem, would also perform its own kind of entropic disorganization, metrically, say, but in other ways besides. It was a marvelous paper. It was really exciting.
00:04:17
Speaker
And the paper I think was exemplary of what I love most in Becky's work, which is namely an attentiveness to the peculiar phenomena, the feelings, the objects, situations that together make up what it is to be alive. Forget about literature for a minute, just what it is to be a human being in the world.
00:04:42
Speaker
but then also a kind of careful working through of how poems and other literary texts, Pekka doesn't only write about poems, but she writes about, you know, these other works of literature that I've heard talk of sometimes, novels and what have you, how poems and other literary texts make those phenomena available to readers and help us think about and experience anew those kinds of
00:05:08
Speaker
ways of being. So, you know, dishevelment and forward, as I said, but also things like driving in Los Angeles or tennis or pulling out of parties or the idea of shy irony.
Choosing Hardy's 'The Voice'
00:05:24
Speaker
or color photography in Nabokov, I think, slot machines, squeamishness. I could just keep going listing amazing things that Becky has called out for our attention, but I won't because that'll keep us from getting to the task at hand today.
00:05:44
Speaker
I was really thrilled when Becky agreed to come on the podcast. And then my thrill redoubled when she told me that the poem she wanted to talk about was Hardy's The Voice. It's a poem that I've come to love. And I can't imagine a better person to talk about it with than my friend Becky Carver. Becky, how are you today?
00:06:03
Speaker
Well, thank you for that. That was amazing. Oh, well, I don't know. That was great. I just said a few things that happened to be true.
00:06:16
Speaker
Yeah, well, like I said, I'm quite excited to talk about Hardy with you, to talk about this poem in particular with you. I don't know. I don't often ask this. Was it difficult to make this choice? Surely some of the most interesting reasons why you've made the choice will become evident over the course of the hour or whatever. But
00:06:41
Speaker
I'll be curious if there's some short version of what led you to choose this poem. Why Hardy? Whenever you're asked to give your favorite poem, it's always difficult because there are always a million poems clamoring in your head. And it's always the poem you're writing about at the moment that you like most, I find, or that you sort of like hate or love hate. But yeah, this is a poem I thought
00:07:09
Speaker
confident in saying I love because I've known it off my heart for 20 years and I've been just singing it to myself. There are bits of it I've misremembered, but which have allowed me to interpret it in my own way. I know that I've put lots of thought into it.
00:07:36
Speaker
I'm sure we'll all see that that's true or hear that that's true as we go. Let me ask you, do you, you know, obviously one of the first things that we ought to do here is to have, I'll ask you to read the poem aloud in just a moment.
Transition from Novelist to Poet
00:07:56
Speaker
Do you think it would be useful to say anything by way of context about the poem before you read it aloud or would you rather read it and then we can get to that?
00:08:07
Speaker
Yeah, I saw a couple of things that I want to say. Well, Hardy's interest in poetry or interest in writing and publishing his poetry is an important context for this. We know him as someone who spent most of his life writing novels and then switched to poetry, but he wrote poems all along. And towards the end of his life, he started to publish his poems.
00:08:36
Speaker
reputation was established by then. And he didn't need to persuade anyone that he was good on the basis of his poems. And so the poems became a freer space where he could do what he wanted. And I think you see some of that license here. It's in some ways quite a perverse poem. It was written after he got married to Florence, but it was written
00:09:06
Speaker
about his wife, Emma, who died. And it belongs to a book of love poems, Elegies, which are love poems at the same time. And Florence could read this book, you know, these wonderful love poems. And it must have
00:09:31
Speaker
must have been really kind of difficult for her. So I think in that perversity, you see a sign of his different relationship with poetry. You see that in poetry, he could be himself, regardless of what the consequences were.
00:09:51
Speaker
Yeah. You know, I, you know, Hardy much, much better than I do. But I, in preparation for this episode, just to sort of remind myself of a few things, looked up the date so that I could have them straight in my mind. So Hardy was born in 1840.
00:10:13
Speaker
This poem is from 1912, so 72-year-old man wrote this poem. He didn't publish his first book of poems until 1898, 58 years old. I mean, I don't know if it was before or after his birthday in that year, but anyway, more or less 58 years old.
00:10:36
Speaker
It's extraordinary, the sense that we might have of Thomas Hardy as the author of Tess or of Jude the Obscure, these novels that are well known, I think, still today.
00:10:50
Speaker
that, I mean, maybe it's true that people don't, you know, people who aren't poetry scholars or specialists in the period or something like that don't first think of Hardy as a poet, but his readers would perhaps also have been surprised to see this novelist publishing poem, sort of making the swerve at the end of his, what seemed to them like a swerve at the end of his career. But as you say, he'd been writing poems all along.
00:11:18
Speaker
He had been quietly writing poems because they were really liked, I suppose, and he'd keep scribbling them and scenarios for poems in his notebooks.
00:11:31
Speaker
So I like this idea that he had this poem singing voice going on in his head and that he thought it's in Wilson's while writing these prose novels. I like the idea of writers who in middle age switch from doing sort of writing that they're supposed to do to doing the sort of writing that they want to do. A few artists like that. And I think it's kind of wonderful. It's like, you know, fuck.
00:11:57
Speaker
And I can do what I want now. I'm gonna have to die. So this is what I want to do. And then they just do the writing they like, which I think is what happened.
00:12:06
Speaker
Yeah, I'm overwhelmed with how to use the term that Brian Glavy has helped me think about in interesting ways. I'm sort of grimacing at how relatable what you just said. Maybe I'll accept middle-aged or maybe not, I don't know, but I get it.
00:12:28
Speaker
And so you mentioned the poem that we're going to be talking about today, and many of the poems that he published at that moment were about his first wife, Emma, who had recently died. So she died in November of 1912.
00:12:51
Speaker
And this poem is from, I think, from the next month, December of 1912. And yet he had already remarried a woman named Florence Dugdale who was many decades younger than him. Yeah, and she was living with them, Florence, in their house. Hardy and Emma's relationship had soured.
00:13:16
Speaker
had done so years and years before. So they were all in the same house and it must have been really awkward.
Reading and Discussing 'The Voice'
00:13:26
Speaker
But there's this great line in the poem where he talks about how she was. He says, now you're not as you were. I think there's a kind of impulse to revive some freshness that was
00:13:42
Speaker
are present in an earlier version of her or an earlier permutation of their relationship. Yeah. Well, I think probably we're ready to hear the poem so that we can have it all in our in our ears. So, right, remember again, you can
00:14:02
Speaker
listeners out there, you can click on a link and look at a text of the poem as Becky reads, but we're about to have the great treat of hearing Becky Carver read the voice to us.
00:14:17
Speaker
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, saying that now you are not as you were, and you are changed from the one who is all to me. But as at first, when our day was fair, can it be you that I hear? Let me view you then, standing as when I drew near to the town, where you would wait for me, ah, as I knew you then, even to the original air-blue gown.
00:14:46
Speaker
Or is it only the breeze in its listlessness, Traveling across the wet mead to me here, You being ever dissolved to one wistlessness? Cured no more again, far or near, Thus I, faltering forward, Leaves around me falling, Wind oozing thin through the dawn from Norwood, And the woman calling,
00:15:16
Speaker
Thanks very much, Becky. Lots for us to talk about. And I think why not begin at the beginning? I'm so struck in particular by the rhythms of that first line and how it is that, I mean, especially I guess in a poem called The Voice,
00:15:46
Speaker
I take it that at least in the first place, Hardy doesn't have his own voice in mind, but I find that as a reader or now as a listener, I'm sort of particularly attentive to the sort of metaphorical construction that is the voice in the poem or your voice as you read the poem to us. What are you noticing in the,
00:16:13
Speaker
rhythms of that first line, or how do you explain the sense of Hardy's voice that we develop right off the bat in this poem? I think that he's searching around for a pulse in that first line, right? And then by the time you get to call to me, call to me, you can hear the words, you can hear the three beats, call to me, call to me, call to me.
00:16:45
Speaker
woman feels, feels disyllabic. And you have, there are moments of wavering like that, but the pulse feels trisyllabic, or primarily cool to me feels like the pulse of a poem. So it's always in search of this, I think the central rhythm. And yeah, that's obviously in parallel with him.
00:17:09
Speaker
listening out for a voice. But she started calling him before the poem starts. We're supposed to hear her all along, I think. And so there's a sense in which the voice isn't the voice we hear in reading the poem. The voice is something that's only present to him. What we get instead is an attempt to revive it. I suppose that's true of every poem, isn't it? It's waiting for a voice.
00:17:37
Speaker
Yeah, maybe so. That's a beautiful idea. But you're hearing something in particular in the first line of this poem that implies that something has been going on just before the first line. Yeah, well, she's been speaking to him. A woman. A woman much missed how you called me, called him. It's often the case in Hardy's poems that
00:18:02
Speaker
someone is calling him, something is calling him off, often a muse. Here's a poem that starts with the idea of a whim carrying him off. And yeah, so there's a sense of being kind of seduced into writing. So having heard the voice,
00:18:27
Speaker
as evidently he has just before the poem has begun, or even as it's beginning, might suggest a kind of proximity that he feels to her. But I guess a voice is not a person. And woman seems like a kind of, I don't know, how do you take just that first word even now? I don't mean so much the musicality or rhythm of it,
00:18:58
Speaker
the poem would be different, wouldn't it? If it began Emma or my wife or something. I don't know, something other than... Woman seems kind of... Am I wrong? Do you think, Becky, in hearing a kind of alienation already from her in giving her that word? Or
00:19:21
Speaker
I think it's coded, isn't it? It's codedly for her. On one level, he's writing it as a poem. He's not writing it as a letter. He addresses woman.
00:19:39
Speaker
I love his relationship with him. So often when you're in love with someone, the most prominent consonants in their name lights up. Emma or woman. I think you can hear her in it if you're looking for her. And then you can hear her in much mist to this kind of fixation on
00:20:05
Speaker
on a letter that is her, on a sound that is her, without being able to say her name. Because if you do say her name, her thesis to be a poem, and you kind of give up on the larger price of it being a poem, or the larger achievement of it. It ceases certainly to be the kind of poem that it is. The kind of poem that he wants to write, which is a poem which has a life beyond his own. Right.
00:20:32
Speaker
Right. Which is so interesting because I guess what's already being posited there in the first line of the poem is that she has a life beyond her own. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she does. And there's a parallel between those things, isn't it? The poem has a posthumous life, the voice of the poem has a posthumous life, and so does she. Hardy was aware that, I mean, the poem is written
00:20:58
Speaker
I'm not saying anything profound here, on the occasion of her death, but it's also written in the awareness of his. Yeah, yeah, his coming death. And yet, both voices will have posthumous life. I suppose that's what you're getting at as well, right? I think so. I think we're differently describing the same, or in any case, a very closely related phenomena.
00:21:26
Speaker
Well, in light of that, then maybe the second line of the poem might begin to describe the way that the posthumous life is different from the previous one. Would that just be the humus life? I don't know. That's not a word for people, yes. No, no. Sounds delicious, though. Would you say something about that second line, then?
00:21:55
Speaker
Yeah, so on one level it's saying that the version who's come back is not
00:22:10
Speaker
as she was when she left. It's circuitous, however you might try to rephrase it. And it's circuitous in its construction too. A woman saying that now you're not as you were. It's a mouthful, but it's two things at once. That she's come back. She's come back.
00:22:38
Speaker
in a form that isn't the version of her who was awkward with Florence, isn't the version of her who withdrew, but who's willing to be intimate again, who's warm again. And on top of that, not as you were means, not as you are now, which is dead.
00:23:04
Speaker
But it's quite complicated, right? Because then by the third line, when you had changed from the one who was all to me, but as at first when our day was fair, yeah, right. Sorry, I feel as though I'm just inelegantly rephrasing something which you just said in a really perceptive way, but so that I've got it clear. It sounds as though in the second line,
00:23:34
Speaker
what he's hearing is a voice from beyond, as it were, right? I no longer am embodied. I'm not as I was, right? But then the third line suggests a more kind of...
00:23:53
Speaker
a transformation that she had suffered from his point of view in life, from the woman he fell in love with into the woman that, I don't know, these are my words and decidedly not his, but that he had grown tired of or estranged from or something. When you had changed from the one who is all to me, I mean, even before she dies then, in other words, as we know, she's no longer the woman who is all to him.
00:24:23
Speaker
No, no, nothing was true for each other. Yeah, but at first when our day was fair, it seems like remembering a time when that was okay. Yeah, when things worked. And also when, and it was, I think it means fair in the sense of a beautiful day too, he's walking around in the wind in this palm, and he's remembering a summer's day when she was wearing blue.
00:24:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's December now. Yeah, it's December, but he can travel across time and across seasons in the poem where she can. I suppose the important thing is that she can. Yeah, and maybe still more important is that
00:25:10
Speaker
we can, you know, in our experience of her in reading the poem or in his of writing it, I guess. Though in the second stanza, he at least, I don't know if it's offered sincerely or as a kind of bit of rhetoric or something, he seems unsure. Can it be you that I hear?
00:25:35
Speaker
Is that a rhetorical question, Becky, do you think? No, I think it's a question addressed to her. And I think the suzer exists so that she can quietly say yes, it is. And then he says, let me view you then. If I can hear you, I cannot see you. And then she turns up. She turns up where? How do you how do you see that she turns up? We're in the original a blue gown.
00:26:02
Speaker
Which is kind of interesting. Someone else who was obsessed with this poem is I. A. Richards. He used to lecture on it and he read it, he said hundreds of times and yet he could never get to the bottom of Air Blue. He thought it was a mistake because nothing was Air Blue.
00:26:25
Speaker
But it's a beautiful word because it's a self-dissolving blue, and the blue in the sky is an illusion anyway. And to say that someone is as real as the sky is blue is also to say, I suppose that they're as real as an illusion, but it's a kind of illusion that's convincing.
00:26:48
Speaker
A concept that's convincing and that is like ever present. Or even better than that, like it goes away at night, but you're sure it will come back the next day. Or even if you live in the English countryside or something and you get a lot of cloudy days, there will be a day when it comes back. You wait for the year two.
00:27:17
Speaker
Well, so, but okay. But then there's also this kind of level that I'm hearing where it's, um, maybe she did have a, maybe there was a particular blue gown that Hardy's remembering. So I'll just stipulate that, you know, such a gown existed in life and he's remembering it fondly. Um, but of course to say,
00:27:46
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if the logic of that second stanza is, oh, so I hear your voice, then show me the body, you know, I want all of you. Well, first of all, it seems like what he might really want is is some earlier version of her that he held in his memory. And then and then it's as though this kind of
00:28:14
Speaker
image of her appears to go along with the voice, but yeah, in that dress it seems as though she may as well be a ghost or something too, like insubstantial as air, as you said. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fading away. Yeah, she's somewhere between there and not there.
00:28:36
Speaker
Air blue hedges its backs, but it's also just a beautifully hopeful colour and it's the colour of her eyes too. I don't know, how do you see air blue? I see it as a pale blue for some reason. I see it as a blue with white in it for some reason, although that's not the colour of the sky when it's
00:28:59
Speaker
bright blue. It's a deeper blue than that, but I find whiter near blue and I know her eyes were vividly blue. They were azure. So it's not quite the blue of her eyes, but it's evocative of it. So there's a sense in which it really is. It's kind of thinking back to her.
00:29:28
Speaker
some faded version of a blue that he knows. Yeah, some faded version, but some related blue. And it just leaps up in this poem, which otherwise is without colour. Even to the original hair blue gown.
00:29:46
Speaker
It's such a striking line. I don't want to get much further without just backing up for a moment. We're kind of at a midpoint of the poem, but before we just barrel ahead, I wonder if we can't zoom out for a moment and do what we haven't, I think, done to this point in this conversation, which is just to describe the
00:30:16
Speaker
kind of structure of
Analyzing Poetic Structure
00:30:17
Speaker
the poem. So it's in four stanzas. They're quatrains. They rhyme. They have a kind of rhythm to them. Becky, is there anything
00:30:30
Speaker
you know, either, is there anything you'd want to say that's more detailed than the very brief sketch I've just given, or is there anything about the formal organization of the poem that, I mean, you'd started today, I guess, by giving us this really lovely reading of the kind of rhythms of the first line and the sense in which it was feeling for a pulse, I guess.
00:30:57
Speaker
I guess there's long been this history of thinking of accentual syllabic meter as related to heartbeat or whatever. There are, I'm sure, a lesson
00:31:12
Speaker
more interesting ways of talking about that kind of thing. But yeah, I mean, what should we notice about the way the poem is sort of laid out or organized either on the page or in your ear?
00:31:28
Speaker
I think maybe the most important thing to draw out is the closing stanza with its abrupt shortening, dasai, faltering forward, give a switch back into a kind of a dicelabic, trochaic opening, which feels like a faltering in a Wilson poem.
00:31:58
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Well, let's save the last stanza. I mean, I want to come back to the last stanza, but, you know, before we get there, I guess, well, let's just take Rhyme as one aspect of the poem. Rhyme can do all kinds of things and maybe for Hardy more than for a poet, surely for Hardy, more than for a poet working today, Rhyme would have seemed like
00:32:25
Speaker
an instinctive sort of tool ready at hand. But rhymes can do different kinds of things with each other. What's the work that rhyme is doing for you, say, in either the first or second stanza of this poem?
00:32:51
Speaker
I think in the first stanza, call to me, call to me.
00:33:02
Speaker
might be thought of as a cheat rhyme and the same is the same is true of the second stanza that you have the cheat rhyme and then then you repeat the word that has come before rather than having to think of a new word. But the point is to retread an old words and to keep as many old words in the poem as possible and to generate a kind of narrowness in the sound
00:33:30
Speaker
When I was working on this ages ago, I was listening to this radio episode with my dad about whistling and how whistling works. It has a matter of organizing your mouth so that it's narrow and breath comes out.
00:33:51
Speaker
particularly when I'm describing it awfully, but... No, no, it's wonderful. In fact, I was just trying to teach my daughter how to whistle and it was a very hard thing to explain. It's really hard to explain. I said, you just have to keep trying until you figure it out. Yeah. Sorry, narrowing that produces a certain kind of... Yeah, kind of narrowing so that you produce a particular kind of resistance in your mouth.
00:34:18
Speaker
which then when you breathe through it or when you call through it, because he uses the sound of a whistle. But I think that's what happens with repetitive sounds, that he's kind of organizing his mouse to create a narrow space through which a particular breath might repeatedly go. And then the giveaway is a whistlessness, which is an ugly word until you see it as a whistle.
00:34:48
Speaker
Ah, that's so good. But before we even get to whistlessness, we'll come to that in a moment. I want to draw out some of the really lovely things that you've just been talking about, Becky. So if I'm hearing you right, the rhymes are, well, first of all, an attempt at preservation or something, rhyme becomes a way to encode
00:35:18
Speaker
or memorialize a thing we've just experienced. That is, you heard it, here it is again, and now that you've heard it a second time, well, we all know that it's easier to
00:35:33
Speaker
memorize a poem, say, when it rhymes. So it's a kind of A towards memory, but here in some very like real way in the space of the poem, the return of these words is enacting a kind of fantasy that the poet is experiencing here as he's hearing the voice of his recently deceased wife. And these rhymes, so you were talking about narrowing
00:36:03
Speaker
I mean, I understand what you mean by that in the context of whistling, but these rhymes are narrow, you were saying, because they're not reaching out for a different word with the same sound, but it's like a rim-rich, you know, in French might be described.
00:36:24
Speaker
So if we just take the, let me view you then, that's the ending of the first line of the second stanza, which, you know, these stanzas rhyme, A, B, A, B, right? So that's the A rhyme. The rhyming pair that it gets in the third line is, as I knew you then. So it's not just the, it's not just the then then, it's this sort of,
00:36:53
Speaker
you know, a term that I've always found so awkward and uncomfortable in prosody, but it's a feminine rhyme, right? It's a rhyme that gets... So let me explain what that is to people who've never heard that term before and whose eyebrows are just raised, right? In prosody, people talk about masculine rhymes and feminine rhymes. A masculine rhyme would be like, you know, cat and hat or something where you get
00:37:20
Speaker
the rhyme sound comes on the final stressed syllable. A feminine rhyme would begin with the final stressed syllable in the line, but the line itself would end with one or more unstressed syllables, and all of it would have to rhyme for it to be a feminine rhyme. Let me view you then as I knew you then. The stressed syllables there would be the view and the new and the you then, it sort of gets swept along with that.
00:37:48
Speaker
I wasn't sure, I'd never been sure why the one was called feminine and the other was called masculine. And I looked it up, it's because of French, obviously, that in French they would call rhymes feminine if they had the extra E at the end of the word that indicated usually that it was a feminine noun or something. So, and then English kind of borrowed that and that term has developed. So, sorry, all of which is just to say,
00:38:18
Speaker
those rhymes, which is you called them cheap, and I get what you mean, the then and the then, or the to me, to me of the first stanza. In the first stanza, it's call to me, all to me. And in the second stanza, it's view you then, knew you then.
00:38:39
Speaker
At the tail end of those rhymes, there is a kind of merely duplicative work that Rhine is doing, but there is difference that's buried before those duplications happen at the very end of the lines. It's actually quite a fascinating work of preservation that the Rhine is doing.
00:39:02
Speaker
Yeah, he has to organize his whole meaning around the possibility of them remaining the way that they are. Yeah. And maybe in the second stanza, that possibility, as you just said, has something to do with the relation between
00:39:23
Speaker
Well, as I say them in this tense, they're no longer going to rhyme, but viewing and knowing, right? The idea of like, I'll believe it when I see it.
00:39:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And those are ideas that rhyme by which you might mean like they're similar and resonant but not identical. Yeah, yeah. You had mentioned to me before we started that, I mean clearly this is a poem that is
00:39:59
Speaker
that one might read as elegy. That's not a word that we've used yet in this conversation, I don't think. So that an elegy traditionally would be a poem that was doing a kind of the work of mourning, sorry, mourning, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, a poem on the occasion of someone's death, a poem that is
00:40:25
Speaker
lamenting the absence of a beloved intimate friend or lover or something, usually, though I guess not necessarily always, and trying to create some kind of compensatory gesture for that loss, trying to sort of summon some kind of presence out of the absence that's been recently suffered.
00:40:55
Speaker
What's so, Becky, is this poem an elegy?
Themes of Presence and Absence
00:40:59
Speaker
No, I have a theory that all of his allergies are written against the elegy form and that they refuse to reconcile themselves to the fact of death or to the fact of absence. Not only is she not gone, she's capable of being revived as she was when she was, they were still in love.
00:41:23
Speaker
It's kind of a wonderful refusal of reality in it, but it's a kind of refusal of reality which is made possible by every poem and keeping a voice alive. Poetry keeps things immortal, so if you're not going to drink something to life in a poem, why can you?
00:41:46
Speaker
That idea, and you asked me if I was going to disagree with you. I'm not disagreeing with you. But I want to put some, I want to like, with you, lean as hard as we can on that idea, which you've just said, which is such a beautiful idea. You know, that a poem can keep things alive, or that Hardy is not
00:42:14
Speaker
is sort of refusing elegy because he's not admitting the absence.
00:42:24
Speaker
There are things that people say in poems or things that people say about poems that are, one gets the sense that the poet, if it's the poet who's saying these things, almost believes them, or wishes that they were true, or maybe in addition to or other than those things,
00:42:49
Speaker
acts as though they were true, but that there is also some recognition that is maybe unspoken, but kind of trumps those feelings in some way, that those things are merely fantasy. But I think I'm getting the sense from you that
00:43:15
Speaker
what I've just been describing is a position that might fit many elegies in, let's just say, the English poetic tradition. But for Hardy, it's like he really isn't admitting the absence in some fundamental, I mean, he knows she's dead, right, Becky? So what is it that, yeah, I mean, what's the strongest case for this kind of refusal to admit the death that you could make here?
00:43:46
Speaker
I was just thinking about it today, alongside a poem of WS Graham's, an analogy of WS Graham's, which starts with a line I called for you today, Peter. It's about turning up at Peter Lanyon's house, knowing he's not there, and the conceiters that he still believes he's there, and finds him not to be there. And it's
00:44:14
Speaker
It's a heartbreaking verse nine. It's impossible to read without tearing up a little bit. Well, I find it hard to anyway. Whereas that's not the tone of the hardy. Calling to me is real in the hardy. And it's not simply something he's imagined. It's something that he then generates in the poem to the rhythm.
00:44:39
Speaker
And then he kind of locks into the rhythm by turning it into a full poem and then having our voices move through it. He has this kind of script through which our voices move.
00:44:54
Speaker
And also, by having the script there, the set of sounds that we can then reanimate with our voices, he's keeping the text open to ghosts permanently. She can go there. It's a place where she can go and crawl.
00:45:16
Speaker
So reading the poem in this view is to perform or admit a kind of act of haunting every time you read it. Yeah, we are haunting every time we read it. Do you think, and I don't mean to reduce the poem to biography, but do you think it's easier to write a poem that does what you've just been suggesting this poem does if
00:45:47
Speaker
before the death occurred, there was already the kind of estrangement that would have made her into a voice. And by that I mean like merely a voice, but no longer a body that he was intimate with, let's say.
00:46:06
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, the real Emma, she wasn't summonable. She was someone who was pretty obstinate, who couldn't have been called upon. So there's a sense in which it doesn't match.
00:46:32
Speaker
the sort of person who she became. But at the same time, I suppose she's the one calling and she's the one inviting him. But yeah, I agree with that, that she maybe needs to have receded a little bit to be treated in this way. In the third stanza,
00:47:01
Speaker
He seems unsure about it all. I'm going to read the third stanza again, and then I want you to tell us something. Tell us what you're hearing in it. Or is it only the breeze and its listlessness traveling across the wet mead to me here, you being ever dissolved to one wistlessness, heard no more again, far or near?
00:47:31
Speaker
That's a question. I didn't read it like it was a question at the end. But yeah, so that third stanza ends in a question. So is it only the breeze being the brunt of this question?
00:47:42
Speaker
Yeah. Well, so in the first dance, he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then in the first dance, he's like, uh-oh, maybe not. And then in the fourth dance, he's like, yeah, he's calling. So yeah, it's kind of a moment of wavering, but it's also the moment when he starts whistling for her. So she stopped calling, but he started whistling as he would for his dog. And he also had a dog. Hmm. Huh.
00:48:13
Speaker
trying to get her attention somehow with the sound that he's making. Do you think it sounds reconciled, that third stanza, even the third stanza, which is maybe the most mournful, maybe the saddest, does it sound reconciled to you? You know what I hear in the third stanza is, and I don't know what Hardy's attitude would have been towards like,
00:48:40
Speaker
And you can tell us, but towards romanticism, you know, I'm pretty romantic poetry, but I'm hearing like the Aeolian harp or something there, you know, this kind of
00:48:53
Speaker
sound produced by the wind, you know, blowing through, well, in this case, traveling across the wet mead that's producing a sound that can be mistaken. I mean, in the, in the romantic, you know, sort of for the romantic poets that would have been like mistaken, mistaken might be the wrong word, but taken is music, is a kind of music. Here, though, it's like taken
00:49:25
Speaker
describing that kind of effect is an expression of skepticism about the kind of persistence of presence that he's just been asserting, right? Oh, it's just the wind, right? Yeah, no, it's, yeah, it's his moment of doubt. He's like, oh, oh, it's just the wind. But there's- So I mean, I guess what I'm saying, to answer your question from a moment ago, Becky, I think I'm taking it as a kind of
00:49:52
Speaker
as a stanza of disenchantment or something, you know. Or not altogether disenchantment because he starts believing again in the fourth. No, I mean, anyone reasonable would start to doubt that a ghost would come back and so
00:50:10
Speaker
in order to continue to come across as reasonable. He has to have that standard there and say, well, maybe it's only the wind. And then you come back and say, no, actually, it's not the wind at all. But there's another poem that he has called, I think it's called A Shadow Across the Stone.
00:50:27
Speaker
Do you know this poem where he's... Not so well that I'll be able to quote it, but yeah, I know the one you mean. It's very beautiful. I can quote it either. But the idea is that he wants to believe that the shadow of falling across the stone is her. And he doesn't want to turn round. Because if he were to turn round, then he'd know that it wasn't. Right. And so he wants to believe. And the same is going on here, but with sound rather than a shadow. Well, belief often works this way, right?
00:50:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, you don't have to. But normally with belief, there isn't evidence available that you can consult. In the case of the shadow, there is, and yet he doesn't want to consult. Right, right, right. Yeah. My daughter once asked me, we were at Disneyland, she asked me if the characters we saw there were the real Mickey and Minnie and so on, or just people in costumes.
00:51:25
Speaker
And I said, well, what do you think? And she said, I think they're real, because if they were just people in costumes, that would be really sad and no one would want to come see them. That's wonderful. So, you know, she was like she knew the truth, but the motivation was strong enough that it was just better to believe. You know, the world was better if you believed. And so she was willing to lie to herself.
00:51:51
Speaker
I mean, I didn't say that to her. I hugged her. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. Well, let's come to the fourth stanza, because it's different from the others in a few ways.
Final Stanzas and Their Impact
00:52:05
Speaker
I mean, the lines get much shorter, at least the... So these are quadrants again, so four line stanzas in the fourth and final stanza, the first, second, and fourth line.
00:52:17
Speaker
are short. They look shorter on the page and they are shorter in terms of their meter. And maybe we should talk about that difference or why and how to account for that difference before we end today. But I actually want to begin just with the
00:52:40
Speaker
with the first word of the fourth stanza, which is an awfully unpoetic word, thus. So that fourth stanza begins, thus I, faltering forward. Thus I, then a semicolon, then faltering forward. So thus,
00:52:57
Speaker
It's a word that tends to do a kind of logical work in English. It means what you're about to hear follows in some sense as though logically or naturally or in the same spirit or style as what you've just been hearing.
00:53:19
Speaker
yeah right it's sort of a it implies a relation between what you're about to hear and what you've just heard that is something like that right like what what's what follows follows naturally from what proceeded but i don't understand
00:53:36
Speaker
I mean, I suppose that kind of relation is being asserted here, but I don't understand why or how it is. So how do you take the first word there of the fourth stanza, thus? Thus I.
00:53:51
Speaker
I think it's a convention in poems sometimes and sonnets especially to sound as though you're summing up and sometimes that's a conceit and I think it's partly a conceit here but it also has the implication of
00:54:11
Speaker
thus I am in this condition, standing as I am now, in this position, in this predicament, thus I, from to forward, lose around me for a day. And then the tune starts up again, the words. Oh, that's good. So you've walked me back a little bit from demanding the kind of logical precision from thus that I seem to be suggesting we ought to find there
00:54:40
Speaker
and not, and don't. There is this, it's such an interesting line, thus I, again with the kind of cesura from the, that we get from the semicolon in the middle of the line and that alliterative second half of the line almost as though it were a bit of Anglo-Saxon verse or something faltering forward. Those words are clearly doing a kind of mimetic
00:55:10
Speaker
rhythmical thing there where they're getting that, those are words that both faltering is on its own, I guess, a dactyl. I'm pausing to make sure I've got it right. With the stressed first syllable, it's a trisyllabic beat with a stress where the stress comes on the first syllable and it's followed by two unstressed syllables.
00:55:38
Speaker
faltering, forward, you have to read as a trochee, right? Where it's a two, you know, a die syllabic beat where the stress comes in the first of the two syllables. So in both cases, it, you know, you feel as a reader as though you're stumbling along. Yeah, yeah. Like you're tripping over something, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:56:08
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. To what does that stumbling or falling correspond in the emotional or psychological or sort of spiritual life of the poem at this point?
00:56:25
Speaker
Well, he's had his moment of doubt in the third stanza, I think, and he's faltering forward. He's faltering, me finding hope again, and then leaves around me falling. There are movement forward into the unknown, and ultimately he can hear our voice. So I think it's the faltering forward is a faltering, it's a faltering climb towards hope.
00:56:52
Speaker
It's not falling back, it's falling forward. Falling forward, faltering, falling forward. I can't remember which of the feet is supposed to be a falling foot and which one is supposed to be a rising foot. I wonder if that's relevant to you. I think these are falling.
00:57:11
Speaker
Yeah, these are falling feet. They're footfalls. You can hear his feet, you can hear his feet as he stumbles. But he's finding his way, he's finding his feet.
00:57:30
Speaker
And it's, yeah, it's a movement, forward is a movement towards, forward is a movement in a positive direction, out of doubt. It reminds me of this, like J L Austin says, when he's stuck in an argument,
00:57:45
Speaker
it can feel like there are brambles in his path and he has to tear them away to move forward and it's not that kind of logical impasse that you're sensing too. It feels kind of like a logical impasse that thus I introduce is or kind of tries to resolve with a language of argument
00:58:10
Speaker
clearing away the brambles also makes me, well, it's related to something I was going to ask you here is whether you have an account of why the lines shorten up in that final stanza. I mean, so here's one possibility, but tell me if you think it's a satisfying one or if you have something in addition to offer that would explain it that
00:58:39
Speaker
Because it would seem, as I'm about to say it, it occurs to me that it would seem to contradict your conviction expressed earlier that he's not admitting the loss in some real way. But the possibility, therefore, is like the lines are shorter because now he's alone. Yeah, no, I think he is alone in that line and has to find her again.
00:59:03
Speaker
So in those first two lines, thus I faltering forward, that's the first line of the fourth stanza, leaves around me falling, the second line of the fourth stanza. Now talk to us about the way that stanza ends. Would you read those last two lines again? Wind oozing thin through the thorn from Lorde, pushing his lips to the front of his mouth. And yeah, you can kind of vividly hear
00:59:33
Speaker
and the resistance of sound against the front of your own mouth. To make those TH sounds. To make the sound. Yeah, yeah. And the ends. Yeah. Thin through the thorn from the Norwood. Try that, listeners, as you listen. Wind using thin through the thorn from Norwood. Okay. And you read that last line almost as though it were a question.
01:00:02
Speaker
Yeah, and the woman calling. I always hear it as a question. I think I must have misremembered that there was a question mark at the end, but I always hear it that way. I mean, there's an attempt to summon her to call again, but he can just about faintly make her out at the end. He's gone from
01:00:28
Speaker
just misbelieving, disbelieving himself altogether to almost hearing her again. And I think you can just about hear her again at the end. But we have to find the voice too when I suppose, I mean, that's kind of our function as readers. To put the voice back in. Yeah, that's a nice, you say function and I'm thinking about how I sometimes say that my
01:00:56
Speaker
The linguist Roman Jakobson has this description of the various kinds of functions that language can have, and he's interested in identifying and saying something interesting about what he calls the poetic function of language.
01:01:13
Speaker
But along the way, he describes something which I've always been more interested in than the poetic function, which is the phatic function, which is the kind of, you know, the most ordinary examples of the phatic function of language are
01:01:28
Speaker
the uses of language, like when you're talking to somebody on the phone and you say, can you hear me now? Or when you step up to a microphone and you say testing 123, it's a use of language that's sort of drawing attention to the contact that exists or doesn't between the
01:01:53
Speaker
the speaker and the addresser in Jakobson's terms and the addresse, so that the content of what's being said is almost beside the point, like two people making small talk on a first date or something. Really what they're talking about is like you and I are here at this table together. We don't care about the weather, it's just filling a kind of role for us here.
01:02:19
Speaker
to put a question mark as you did at the end of that first, at the end of that last line, or even, you know, the question mark isn't there, but to hear it as a kind of question or the impulse, I guess, the instinct you have to read it as though it were a question seems to me that it makes the poem as much, that it sort of makes the poem about the phatic function of language there at the end, like, you know,
01:02:49
Speaker
troubling the question of whether it is really her that I'm hearing or whether she's calling to me. There's not much in the poem except in that second line of the poem saying that now you are not as you were.
01:03:10
Speaker
about what it is she's saying. Like we're aware of her voice, but not of her words, right? No, no, no, no. No, I like that idea that they're phatic, where he's whistling and she's calling. And so the content doesn't matter at all. It's that they're establishing the presence of the other. Yeah. That's Janae's thought. Well, and it's, you know, it also gets at
01:03:35
Speaker
some of my reasons for wanting to do this. I don't mean this particular conversation with you, Becky, but I mean that and the whole project of these conversations period is
01:03:50
Speaker
you know, apart from the insight that we get to shed on particular poems, that sort of feeling of contact that one gets when one is talking about a poem with someone else is so important to me.
Conclusion and Reflection
01:04:04
Speaker
And I've been very grateful to get it from you. So, Becky, thank you so much for taking the hour to talk to me about Thomas Hardy. Oh, such a treat. Thank you so much for inviting me.
01:04:15
Speaker
It was my pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Listeners, remember to follow the podcast, to leave a rating or review if you've been enjoying it, to share it with a friend. Remember also that there's a newsletter that will go out with each episode of the podcast and you can subscribe to that newsletter. You'll see a link to that in the show notes.
01:04:41
Speaker
And one thing that I've been meaning to say, I think I've said as much on Twitter, but I don't think I've mentioned it on the podcast and I've just remembered it. So let me say it now.
01:04:53
Speaker
is that I hope there will be a way to make the podcast available. I mean, those of you who have students and are teachers of poetry at whatever level, high school, elementary school or college or whatever, to make these close readings available to the students.
01:05:16
Speaker
It seems like a very exciting possibility to me. And I've heard of some of that going on already. And it seems like such a delight to me. So I'll put in a plug for the podcast in that way as well. But that's all for today. We'll have a new episode for you soon. And I want to thank you so much for listening. Becky, thank you again.