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.