"How It Rained! . . . How It Snowed! . . . How It Shone!"

Please bear with me:  I have decided to get these swede poems out of my system.  The two poems that follow have to do with the "docking" of swedes, which consists of cutting away soil and fibers from the harvested root.  The first poem is by Thomas Hardy, and is based upon incidents from Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Evelyn Mary Dunbar (1906-1960)

"A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling"

          We Field-Women

               How it rained
When we worked at Flintcomb-Ash,
And could not stand upon the hill
Trimming swedes for the slicing-mill.
The wet washed through us -- plash, plash, plash:
               How it rained!

               How it snowed
When we crossed from Flintcomb-Ash
To the Great Barn for drawing reed,
Since we could nowise chop a swede. --
Flakes in each doorway and casement-sash:
               How it snowed!

               How it shone
When we went from Flintcomb-Ash
To start at dairywork once more
In the laughing meads, with cows three-score,
And pails, and songs, and love -- too rash:
               How it shone!

Thomas Hardy, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928).

Hardy is one of the few poets who, as a man, can successfully write a poem from the point-of-view of a woman, without doing so in a false or patronizing fashion.  (Perhaps, as a man, I am not qualified to opine on the matter.  Hence, I apologize for any presumption.)  In addition to "We Field-Women," I am thinking of, for instance, "Autumn in King's Hintock Park" (an elderly woman raking up leaves) and "The Farm-Woman's Winter" (a woman whose husband has died, leaving her alone on the farm).  And there are many others.  As I have noted before, Hardy had a great deal of empathy with, and compassion for, his fellow human beings (as individuals, not as "humanity" in the abstract).  This may account for his ability to place himself into another person's shoes.

Evelyn Mary Dunbar, "Winter Garden" (c. 1929-1937)

The scenes depicted in "We Field-Women" seem positively bucolic in comparison with the less-than-idyllic Welsh drama of the following poem by R. S. Thomas.  Hardy is often (rightly and wrongly) accused of being a pessimist.  But Thomas can make Hardy look like an innocent Pollyanna daydreaming of rural arcadias.

                    On the Farm

There was Dai Puw.  He was no good.
They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
And took the knife from him, when he came home
At late evening with a grin
Like the slash of a knife on his face.

There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
Every evening after the ploughing
With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,
And stare into the tangled fire garden,
Opening his slow lips like a snail.

There was Huw Puw, too.  What shall I say?
I have heard him whistling in the hedges
On and on, as though winter
Would never again leave those fields,
And all the trees were deformed.

And lastly there was the girl:
Beauty under some spell of the beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life's dark book
The shrill sentence:  God is love.

R. S. Thomas, The Bread of Truth (Rupert Hart-Davis 1963).

Whew!  Now, I believe that the caricature of R. S. Thomas as a curmudgeon is overdone.  That being said, I suspect that some of his Welsh parishioners may have found him to be a less-than-outgoing and less-than-warm vicar.  On the other hand, I also suspect that Thomas was truthful to what he saw.  And we must not forget that his Wales is also marked by moments of transcendent beauty.

Evelyn Mary Dunbar, "A Land Girl and the Bail Bull" (1945)

"To Fling His Soul Upon The Growing Gloom"

As I have observed on more than one occasion, each generation believes that it is living in a time in which the world is going to Hell in a handbasket.  (The Baby Boom Generation -- of which, alas, I am a member -- is particularly prone to self-regarding, self-aggrandizing delusions about its historical uniqueness and importance.)  Thus, some may look upon the coming year with a bit of trepidation.  I respectfully suggest that, in order to gain some perspective, they have a gander at, say, Herodotus. 

Reading the poetry of Thomas Hardy also gives one a sense of perspective.  Hardy dated the following poem "31 December 1900," and it is directed at the turning of the century, not simply the turning of the year.  Yet, it provides a reminder that -- along with Human Nature -- we will always have thrushes (in some form or another) with us.  

           The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
        When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
        The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
        Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
        Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
        The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
        The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
        Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
        Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
        The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
        Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
        In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
        Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
        Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
        Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
        His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
        And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901).

                        Evelyn Dunbar, "Winter Garden" (c. 1929-1937)

Several times each year, I figuratively slap myself on the forehead and say:  "Why do I always forget how good Hardy is?"  This occurs either after I have stumbled upon a wonderful poem unknown to me among his 940-or-so poems, or, alternatively, after I have revisited a familiar poem and am struck anew by its excellence. 

"The Darkling Thrush" is one of Hardy's most-anthologized, best-known poems.  Thus, it is easy to take for granted.  But then something new hits you.  For me, this time, it was these lines:  "Had chosen thus to fling his soul/Upon the growing gloom."  "Gloom" is endemic in Hardy's poetry, so its appearance comes as no surprise.  No, what struck me this time around was "fling his soul."  These are the moments that bring one back to Hardy.

                      Edward Bawden, "Lindsell Church, Essex" (1959)

Philip Larkin On Thomas Hardy: "One Reader At Least Would Not Wish Hardy's Collected Poems A Single Page Shorter"

Philip Larkin said on more than one occasion that his discovery of Thomas Hardy's poetry was a turning point in the writing of his own poetry.  Prior to that time, Larkin's poetry was marked by the influence of Auden and Yeats.  But Hardy's impact on Larkin was not a matter of style.  (Even those of us who love Hardy's poetry must concede that his idiosyncratic style is not amenable to imitation.)

Instead, what drew Larkin to Hardy's poetry was its content.  In a BBC Radio 4 talk given in 1968, Larkin said:

I don't think Hardy, as a poet, is a poet for young people.  I know it sounds ridiculous to say I wasn't young at twenty-five or twenty-six, but at least I was beginning to find out what life was about, and that's precisely what I found in Hardy.  In other words, I'm saying that what I like about him primarily is his temperament and the way he sees life.  He's not a transcendental writer, he's not a Yeats, he's not an Eliot; his subjects are men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love.
. . . . . . . . . .
When I came to Hardy it was with the sense of relief that I didn't have to try and jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life -- this is perhaps what I felt Yeats was trying to make me do.  One could simply relapse back into one's own life and write from it.  Hardy taught one to feel rather than to write -- of course one has to use one's own language and one's own jargon and one's own situations -- and he taught one as well to have confidence in what one felt.  I have come, I think, to admire him even more than I did then.

Philip Larkin, "The Poetry of Hardy," in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (Faber and Faber 1983), pages 175-176.

                   Evelyn Dunbar, "The Queue at the Fish Shop" (1944)

Larkin also addresses the issue of the volume of Hardy's poetic output.  The Macmillan edition of Hardy's poetry (published in 1976 and edited by James Gibson) contains 947 poems.  (I did not count them!  They are numbered.)  This vast expanse can be daunting.  But I am in complete agreement with Larkin (he was writing in response to two critical studies of Hardy that were, he thought, improperly dismissive of Hardy's poetry):

To these two gentlemen . . . may I trumpet the assurance that one reader at least would not wish Hardy's Collected Poems a single page shorter, and regards it as many times over the best body of poetic work this century so far has to show?

Philip Larkin, "Wanted: Good Hardy Critic" (1966), in Required Writing, page 174.

I have been plugging away at Hardy's poems for decades, and it may be vain to hope that I will be able to read them all.  But I will not give up the attempt.  Larkin is correct (as he said in his BBC talk):  "I like him because he wrote so much. . . . One can read him for years and years and still be surprised."  I have been visiting Hardy recently, and I came upon the following surprise (unknown to me till now).

                         Nobody Comes

     Tree-leaves labour up and down,
          And through them the fainting light
          Succumbs to the crawl of night.
     Outside in the road the telegraph wire
          To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travellers like a spectral lyre
          Swept by a spectral hand.

     A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
          That flash upon a tree:
          It has nothing to do with me,
     And whangs along in a world of its own,
          Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
          And nobody pulls up there.

   9 October 1924

Thomas Hardy, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925).  The date at the end of the poem was included by Hardy in the original printing.

                  Evelyn Dunbar, "A Land Girl and the Bail Bull" (1945)

Lists, Part One: "The Dearness Of Common Things"

When it comes to what I call "list poems" (a more imaginative term does not come to mind at the moment), Ivor Gurney is a good place to begin, for he was fond of lists.  "Encounters" -- which I have previously posted -- is a wonderful example.  Here is another.

               Common Things

The dearness of common things --
Beech wood, tea, plate-shelves,
And the whole family of crockery --
Wood-axes, blades, helves.

Ivory milk, earth's coffee,
The white face of books
And the touch, feel, smell of paper --
Latin's lovely looks.

Earth fine to handle;
The touch of clouds,
When the imagining arm leaps out to caress
Grey worsted or wool clouds.

Wool, rope, cloth, old pipes
Gone, warped in service;
And the one herb of tobacco,
The herb of grace, the censer weed,
Of whorled, blue, finger-traced curves.

Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by George Walter) (J. M. Dent 1996).

In order to put Gurney's lists into perspective, the following poem may be helpful.  (I have posted it before, but it bears revisiting.)

                            The Escape

I believe in the increasing of life whatever
Leads to the seeing of small trifles . . .
Real, beautiful, is good, and an act never
Is worthier than in freeing spirit that stifles
Under ingratitude's weight; nor is anything done
Wiselier than the moving or breaking to sight
Of a thing hidden under by custom; revealed
Fulfilled, used, (sound-fashioned) any way out to delight.
.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
Trefoil . . . . hedge sparrow . . . the stars on the edge of night.

Ibid.  The ellipses are in the original.  As is often the case with Gurney's poems (especially those that were not published in his lifetime), his punctuation (or lack thereof) can make things a bit puzzling.  But the point is clear, I think:  pay attention.  

                                        Evelyn Dunbar (1906-1960)
                 "A 1944 Pastoral: Land Girls Pruning at East Malling"