“ ‘I am leaving you…Farewell!’ I said,
As I followed her on
By an alley bare boughs overspread;
‘I soon must be gone!’
Even then the scale might have been turned
Against love by a feather,
—But crimson one cheek of hers burned
When we came in together.”—Thomas Hardy, from “At the Word ‘Farewell,’ in Hardy: Poems (Everyman’s Library, Pocket Poets edition, 1995)
Like Robert Penn Warren, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)—born on this date 170 years ago--was celebrated as a grand master of two forms—the novel and poetry—by the time of his death well into his eighties. And, just as Warren returned again and again to the history-haunted American South, Hardy’s work focused repeatedly on his own special literary province: “Wessex,” based on his native Dorset County, in Great Britain.
I went through something of a Hardy phase in a period of two years, when I was a high-school senior and college freshman. At a time of your life when, all the grown-ups tell you, he world is your oyster, there’s nothing guaranteed to disabuse you of such a notion than full immersion in novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and especially Jude the Obscure.
(Another fan of Hardy’s, I later discovered, was, of all people, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Years ago, he mentioned to reporters about having read The Return of the Native. Disbelieving, they pressed him for more details, and finally gave up when he began to expound upon the fine points of Eustacia Vye. My God, who’d have thought The Boss ever went in for this kind of stuff?)
A benevolent God is notably absent from the literature of this Victorian—in fact, he wrote a poem called “God’s Funeral”—but that didn’t mean that his characters were freed from wrestling with fate. And nothing caught them up in this web so inextricably as the passionate, tortured relations between men and women.
All of life can turn on a touch, as in this poem I’ve quoted, or in Hardy's novels, such as Far From the Madding Crowd, adapted into a 1967 film starring Terence Stamp and Julie Christie (in the image accompanying this post), in a caress close in spirit to our Quote of the Day.
As I followed her on
By an alley bare boughs overspread;
‘I soon must be gone!’
Even then the scale might have been turned
Against love by a feather,
—But crimson one cheek of hers burned
When we came in together.”—Thomas Hardy, from “At the Word ‘Farewell,’ in Hardy: Poems (Everyman’s Library, Pocket Poets edition, 1995)
Like Robert Penn Warren, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)—born on this date 170 years ago--was celebrated as a grand master of two forms—the novel and poetry—by the time of his death well into his eighties. And, just as Warren returned again and again to the history-haunted American South, Hardy’s work focused repeatedly on his own special literary province: “Wessex,” based on his native Dorset County, in Great Britain.
I went through something of a Hardy phase in a period of two years, when I was a high-school senior and college freshman. At a time of your life when, all the grown-ups tell you, he world is your oyster, there’s nothing guaranteed to disabuse you of such a notion than full immersion in novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and especially Jude the Obscure.
(Another fan of Hardy’s, I later discovered, was, of all people, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Years ago, he mentioned to reporters about having read The Return of the Native. Disbelieving, they pressed him for more details, and finally gave up when he began to expound upon the fine points of Eustacia Vye. My God, who’d have thought The Boss ever went in for this kind of stuff?)
A benevolent God is notably absent from the literature of this Victorian—in fact, he wrote a poem called “God’s Funeral”—but that didn’t mean that his characters were freed from wrestling with fate. And nothing caught them up in this web so inextricably as the passionate, tortured relations between men and women.
All of life can turn on a touch, as in this poem I’ve quoted, or in Hardy's novels, such as Far From the Madding Crowd, adapted into a 1967 film starring Terence Stamp and Julie Christie (in the image accompanying this post), in a caress close in spirit to our Quote of the Day.
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