The fairly small number of Hardy's poems that I read as an undergraduate have been among my favorites ever since. "The Darkling Thrush," for instance, is one that I probably think of as often as I think of any poetry, and I made it the first in the 52 Poems series that appeared here in 2018 (here). Yet even though my copy of this Selected Shorter Poems collection shows evidence that I bought it when I was still in my 20s, I somehow never got around to digging more deeply into his work until recently.

The appearance over the past year or so of several of his poems at Poems Ancient and Modern provided the push I apparently needed, making me conscious of how much good work I must be missing. And that was, and is, a lot--I say "is" because this is a pretty small sample of his work, and it seems reasonable to assume that it doesn't include all of his good work. There are fewer than a hundred poems here, out of the nearly one thousand he is said to have written. So I'll soon be buying a more extensive collection--the Norton Critical Edition, maybe, or the Oxford World Classics. 

Judging by this selection, Hardy has everything we want from a major lyric poet: fine craftsmanship with the irrepressible appeal of formal structure; sharp observation and reflection on subjects ranging from the small and everyday to the grand and cosmic; a wide emotional range, from the playful to the grim. And most of the poems don't get far from the rural English land and way of life that Hardy loved and of which he was very much a part. 

His forms are fairly strict but largely non-standard, apparently his own inventions. And he doesn't seem to use most of them more than once. There are a good many poems in ballad meter or something close to it (you know--"Twas in the merry month of May / When green buds all were swelling"). And there are a few sonnets. I speculate that he sometimes started out with a few lines that found an order of their own, and then stuck with it. I notice especially a sometimes jarring tendency toward lines of widely varying length. "Nature's Questioning," for instance, has a four-line stanza, with four, three, three, and six stresses respectively, rhymed ABBA. At a glance I don't think it occurs in another poem. In general his style is somewhat rough around the edges, nothing like the smooth flow of, for instance, Tennyson. Or Housman, with whose lyrics of rural life a very general sort of comparison may be made: you don't find the sort of elegantly polished and very quotable bits of wit in Hardy that you do in Housman.

John Wain, the editor of this collection, was a notable critical presence when I was a student, though I wouldn't be surprised if the academy has forgotten him now, the academy being what it is now. As he puts it in his excellent introduction to this volume:

To vary one's stanza restlessly from poem to poem, to switch from exceedingly long ones, is not experimentation.... It reminds us more of the work of a village craftsman who makes tables and chairs, beds and sofas, adapting the shape of each one to fit a different set of circumstances, but always using the same basic local materials.... His language is not elegant, his lines do not flow smoothly; when he sets himself a difficult metrical task and carries it out with a skill born of long practice, the result is never slick or varnished.

In accordance with the general impression that Hardy tends toward gloom, more of these poems are somber, if not bleak, than otherwise. The passage of time, regret, the vacancy left in places once inhabited by those now lying in the graveyard of the village church, including voices not only in and near the graves but in the grave itself, are frequent themes. Whether this tendency holds throughout Hardy's poetry I can't say until I've read more, but I suppose it would be a little surprising if it did not.

Love lost, or felt but never acted on, or simply outlived, turns up a lot. Some of these are in Hardy's persona, some in others, and of the former many  are made more affecting by knowledge that I would not have had if The Lamp had not published a review of a book called Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry. (Here's a link to the review, which may be subscriber-only.) Hardy married his wife Emma in 1870, when they were both 30. She died in 1912 and it was only after her death that he learned, through journals she left behind (including a notebook alarmingly titled "What I Think of My Husband"!)  that she had been very unhappy. A number of poems written in the following years are full of a combination of longing, regret, and guilt.

The poem which gives the above mentioned book its title, for instance, "The Voice," depicts something close to a haunting by Emma:

 Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me...

This call seems to be something more than metaphorical. I think it's safe here to ignore the twentieth-century critical dogma that forbids us to assume that the speaker of what appears to be a personal poem is in fact the poet: this is clearly Thomas Hardy speaking of Emma Hardy. You can read the whole poem here. The way the final stanza overturns the structure is an example of what Wain says about Hardy's technique, and the effect is very potent. 

I suppose I had early on gotten the impression that Hardy was a novelist who wrote some excellent poems on the side. This is surely wrong; even setting aside the question of his stature as a poet (major? minor? classic?), it's clear that he himself didn't think of his work that way. He wrote poems "before he ever turned to fiction and long after he retired from it," according to Wain.

This collection is out of print, and I'm sure there are other good ones available which similarly put a judicious selection of Hardy's poetry into a handy volume. But this one is very handy indeed: physically small, but well-designed and comfortable to read. And there are the perceptive introduction and a relatively small but useful number of notes. If you're looking for something of this sort you can find plenty of used copies at places like Abebooks. Mine can't have been printed later than the early '70s and is still in pretty good shape physically, with not too much discoloration of the pages. 

I assumed that cover decoration was more or less just that, and more or less random, until I noticed the note on the back: that it's meant to be an illustration of "To Lizbie Browne." That poem is an instance of the lost-love lyric, but with a twist that I don't think I've ever seen before: the lament  of a man who as a boy had silently and shyly adored an older girl, but never ventured to speak to her. And now she probably doesn't even remember him:

So, Lizbie Browne,
When on a day
Men speak of me
As not, you'll say,
'And who was he?'--
Yes, Lizbie Browne

Technically it is another that serves as an example of what John Wain says of Hardy's craftsmanship. I think that phrase "as not" may require a note at some time in the future, or perhaps already does. I take it to be a shortening of "as like as not," which may not be as commonly used as it was. 

"To Lizbie Browne" is not available at the web site of The Poetry Foundation (i.e. Poetry magazine), but when I looked for it elsewhere I found this nice treat: Iain McGilchrist reading it. The text is included as well.

I had planned to post this last week, but a combination of computer problems and the nastiest cold I've had for some time got in the way.

Last Sunday afternoon I heard the Mobile Symphony and the University of South Alabama Concert Choir in the Messiah--the first time I'd ever heard it performed live, and at my age most likely the only time, and the first time the Symphony had ever performed it. 

It was also the first time in decades that I'd heard it. The last time I can say for certain was when I was still in college; I had it on LP then, and thinking of it brings me an image of the apartment and my little portable stereo. Surely somewhere in those fifty or so years I must have heard a recording, but if I did I can't recall it. That LP set disappeared along the way somewhere, and then I acquired another in the great vinyl sell-off of the '90s. But I can't recall that I ever listened to it until this week, after the concert. 

Not actually the cover of my copy--this is the British edition, on EMI, while mine is on Angel, a US subsidiary of EMI. The performance was recorded in 1966. It was one of the early attempts at performing the piece with resources closer to what Handel would have had available.

It was Sunday afternoon instead of the usual Saturday night, because we had a conflict with another event on Saturday night. We ended up being late because of traffic delays, but an usher kindly seated us, and we only missed the prelude. The opening recitativ, "Comfort ye," had just begun when we walked in, so I missed most of it; it could have been worse, but was still regrettable, as it's a very beautiful part of the oratorio; those first few words are deeply sweet and touching. 

Is there any other great work as purely lovable as this one? It's so accessible, so tuneful, and yet it's not lightweight. Anybody who can enjoy a tune can enjoy most of it. Most people, I would think, can enjoy the bits where Handel plays with the words: the way the melody goes wandering on "All we like sheep have gone astray-ay-ay-ay-at-ay-ay-ay," the similar way it stutters when God threatens to "sha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ke the heav'ns and the earth." And yet experts and connoisseurs still find it rewarding and regard it as a great masterpiece. The word "noble" keeps coming to my mind: it is a noble work.

Perhaps some of what makes it, in a sense, easy, is in the fact that it does not spend much time on the Crucifixion. Parts One and Two consist of quotations from the Old Testament prophecies, Part Three of triumphant declarations from the New. The suffering servant prophecies occur in Part Two but are a much smaller part of the whole than the others. And speaking for myself only, but probably not alone, I consider it a great providence that Handel was resident in England and used the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer as his texts. I'm pretty sure I would not love the work quite as much if all the words were in German. (Yes, Bach, perhaps I could love you even more if you had come over to England, at least for a while.)

I don't really have anything of interest to say about the performance. As far as I'm concerned it was great, and I would not have been listening with a critic's or connoisseur's ear even if I had one. The symphony had hired professionals for the solos, and I will tell you their names, with links to their web sites, in case you're interested:

Kathryn Mueller, soprano; Emily Marvosh, contralto; James Reese, tenor; Jonathan Woody, bass.

Mr. Woody is a fairly slight young man, which made his huge bass voice all the more striking. 

I will make one remark about the soloists, all of them: they didn't seem quite as forward as I expected. They didn't stand out from the orchestra and chorus as I expected. A day or two later I listened to part of my recording of the oratorio and had the same thought. Then it occurred to me now that I was probably comparing them to opera singers, who have to punch through everything else, not blend in. Checking the credits of the singers at their web sites, I notice that they seem mostly to perform baroque and earlier music. So that explains that, I guess. 

I was pleased to see that the custom of standing for the Hallelujah Chorus is still observed. Depends on the location and audience, perhaps? Some people--not most, as far as I could judge--seemed to think it meant that the work was over.

The next symphony concert, the last of the season, is only two weeks away. One of the works on the program is Berlios's Symphonie Fantastique, another work which I can't recall having heard since I was a college student. I was never very keen on it; maybe I'll like it better now. Also, Saint-Saëns's Second Piano Concerto, which I don't think I've ever heard. 

I have a bad habit, bad and lifelong, of not bothering to look up unknown words encountered when I'm reading. I make a guess based on the context, or perhaps just ignore the word altogether, figuring or at least hoping that it isn't that important, and press on. I have done that for years with "sempiternal." I suppose I've read Eliot's Four Quartets ten or twelve times, yet have always pressed on past the first two lines of "Little Gidding" very well aware that I did not know what one important word meant, experiencing it as a definite bump in the road, but still not bothering to look it up:

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown....

I had supposed that it meant something involving the ideas both of surprise and transience. That's what spring in midwinter would in fact be, isn't it? But no; it comes close to being a synonym for "eternal," as in the presumably eternal things encountered by Dante in Paradise. The word occurs in Longfellow's translation: 

In such wise of those sempiternal roses
    The garlands twain encompassed us about
    And thus the outer to the inner answered.

--Paradiso, Canto XII

If I had come across that first line in isolation, it might not, to my ear, have instantly fallen into the iambic pentameter in which the translation is written. Some, sometimes much, of our perception of meter depends on our feeling a rhythm which has been clearly established and which we naturally expect to continue. Without that expectation, I might initially have wanted to accent "In" and "wise" and then not known what to do with the rest of the line, because I wouldn't have known how to pronounce "sempiternal."

In reading "Little Gidding" I had always supposed the stress to be on the second syllable: "sempiternal." The preceding line does not have a regular rhythm and so provides no guidance as to how the word should be accented (for those of us who did not already know). But Longfellow's meter is pretty consistent, and he surely means for us to read the line "In such wise of those sempiternal roses."

So what does it mean? Its use by Longfellow finally drove me to my big old Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (Unabridged), which says it's "eternal in futurity...having beginning, but no end." The entry also includes as a second definition a simple synonym for "eternal." Various online dictionaries seem to treat it that way, too. The Latin etymology, semper and eternus, suggests "always eternal," which would seem to be redundant, somewhat along the same lines as "very unique," though not similarly illogical. 

Longfellow must have liked the word, as it occurs four times in his translation, all in the Paradiso. And in every case it seems to mean simply "eternal." That's how Anthony Esolen translates it. The lines above, for instance:

So the two garlands circled round us now,
wreathed of the roses of eternity,
the outer answering the inner bow.

("bow" is there because the garlands have been compared to a double rainbow, and because Esolen rhymes where he can, and it's a slant rhyme with "now.")

The context is one of Dante's very elaborate descriptions, in this case two circles of lights which are souls of the blessed. Neither in this nor in two of the the other occurrences of "sempiternal" is there a suggestion of something that has a beginning but no end. The one possible exception is only possible, maybe even a stretch: it's a reference to the "sempiternal justice" of heaven, which could be read as referring to God's justice toward mankind, which has a beginning insofar as mankind does. As I say, a stretch.

So why did Longfellow use it, if in Dante it means simply "eternal"? Well, one obvious possibility is that it suited his metrical need at those points. I can't blame him for that. But after reaching that conclusion it occurred to me (at last) to look at the Italian, even though I don't know Italian--I thought there might be a visual clue. And there it is, line 19:

...cosi di quelle sempiterne rose...

Google Translate renders that as "so of those everlasting roses." So that explains that. The entire stanza is:

...così di quelle sempiterne rose

volgiensi circa noi le due ghirlande
e sì l'estrema a l'intima rispuose.

 

...so the two wreaths of those eternal roses
circled all around us and, thus reflected,

and so the outermost to the innermost answered.

The second Triad, which is germinating
    In such wise in this sempiternal spring...
("in questa primavera sempiterna")

--Paradiso, Canto XVIII

This is another and even more elaborate description, which I will not try to summarize except to say that it also describes the glittering hierarchies of heaven. What caught my attention was not just the recurrence of "sempiternal" but "sempiternal spring." Surely, I thought, there must be a connection to Eliot here. He knew, loved and was deeply influenced by Dante--had he read Longfellow's translation, and was this an intentional allusion? That would be interesting, and mildly pleasing to me if it turned out that Eliot shared my good opinion of Longfellow's work.

Dante is mentioned frequently in Eliot's prose writings, but the only place I knew of where I would be sure to find him is the essay "What Dante Means To Me." And I can find no suggestion there that he had read Longfellow's translation. If there is any suggestion at all, it goes in the other direction, as Eliot mentions getting to know Dante by reading the Italian with a prose translation at hand. 

But it's not at all far-fetched to suppose that Dante's "sempiterne" influenced Eliot's choice of "sempiternal," given his great knowledge of Dante and the fact that "Little Gidding" includes what Eliot says is his only conscious attempt to imitate Dante (in section II).

So my almost-exciting discovery turned out to be no discovery at all. At least I now know what "sempiternal" means, and the glitch in the opening of "Little Gidding" is removed. But I still am not sure what Eliot meant by it, given that it cannot be literally true. That midwinter spring seems eternal, or a breath of the eternal, as you experience it, perhaps? Or that it will always recur?  Much of the poem deals with the intersection of time and eternity, so this is a description of just such an intersection, an eternal spring which now and then intrudes upon our time, in a wintry moment when perhaps we need it. 

If you read this far, thank you for your patience. I only meant to write a few paragraphs describing the failed attempt to connect Longfellow and Eliot. This all arose from my reading of Longfellow's translation, which I discussed a few weeks ago.