Trees And Epitaphs

This afternoon I walked down a green tunnel of trees.  Is there anything lovelier than to stand beneath a tree in summer looking up through the interlaced leaves into a blue sky?  Especially if the leaves are rustling in a breeze?  I can think of no better way to spend Eternity.

Which leads me to Thomas Hardy.  Although I don't know why.

John Constable, "Malvern Hall, Warwickshire" (1809)

     A Necessitarian's Epitaph

A world I did not wish to enter
Took me and poised me on my centre,
Made me grimace, and foot, and prance,
As cats on hot bricks have to dance
Strange jigs to keep them from the floor,
Till they sink down and feel no more.

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

J. M. W. Turner

"Buttermere Lake, with Part of Cromackwater, Cumberland" (c. 1798)

        Epitaph on a Pessimist

I'm Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd,
     I've lived without a dame
From youth-time on; and would to God
     My dad had done the same.

Thomas Hardy, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925).

Hardy includes this note to the poem: "From the French and Greek."  Hardy owned a copy of J. W. Mackail's Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (1906), which contains the following translation of a Greek epitaph:  "I Dionysius of Tarsus lie here at sixty, having never married; and I would that my father had not."  J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (1970), page 557.  "Dionysius of Tarsus" becomes "Smith of Stoke" in order to bring us up-to-date.

Hardy's sympathetic reading of Schopenhauer is perhaps reflected in "Epitaph on a Pessimist."  Schopenhauer opined that, when all is said and done, not having been born may have been the best option for us.  Giacomo Leopardi, who Schopenhauer admired, came to the same conclusion.  Yes, it sounds harrowing, doesn't it?  But, when you read Schopenhauer and Leopardi, they are two extremely jolly fellows, and are quite entertaining about the whole business.

          Cynic's Epitaph

A race with the sun as he downed
          I ran at evetide,
Intent who should first gain the ground
          And there hide.

He beat me by some minutes then,
          But I triumphed anon,
For when he'd to rise up again
          I stayed on.

Thomas Hardy, Ibid.

"Epitaph on a Pessimist" and "Cynic's Epitaph" were published together in the September, 1925, issue of The London Mercury, when Hardy was 85.

George Lambert, 

"View of Copped Hall in Essex, from Across the Lake" (1746)

Hardy wrote all of these epitaphs when he was in his eighties.  Thus, he would seem to be trying them on for himself.  But we are all cynics and pessimists and necessitarians at some point in our lives, aren't we?  For all of Hardy's supposed pessimism, his compassion for, and his empathy with, his fellow human beings never wavered.  The epitaphs are for him and for each of us.

     A Placid Man's Epitaph

As for my life, I've led it
With fair content and credit:
It said: 'Take this.'  I took it.
Said: 'Leave.'  And I forsook it.
If I had done without it
None would have cared about it,
Or said: 'One has refused it
Who might have meetly used it.'

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

Francis Towne, "Haldon Hall, near Exeter" (1780)

                         Epitaph

I never cared for Life: Life cared for me,
And hence I owed it some fidelity.
It now says, 'Cease; at length thou hast learnt to grind
Sufficient toll for an unwilling mind,
And I dismiss thee -- not without regard
That thou didst ask no ill-advised reward,
Nor sought in me much more than thou couldst find.'

Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses (1922). "Toll" (line 4) is "a proportion of the grain or flour taken by the miller in payment for grinding."  OED.

I think that the final two epitaphs best describe Hardy himself.

John Glover, "Thirlmere" (c. 1820)

"The Unremitting Voice Of Nightly Streams"

Carrying further the observations of Philip Larkin and Patrick Kavanagh on the beneficent qualities of water, let us consider a poem written by William Wordsworth late in his life.  The conventional wisdom is that Wordsworth's best years as a poet came to an end around the time that he turned 40 (in 1810).  Even Matthew Arnold, who greatly admired Wordsworth's poetry, accedes to this view:  "Wordsworth composed verses during a space of some sixty years; and it is no exaggeration to say that within one single decade of those years, between 1798 and 1808, almost all his really first-rate work was produced."  (Essays in Criticism, Second Series, "Wordsworth.")

However, there are still gems to be found in Wordsworth's later years.  The following poem was written in 1846, when Wordsworth was 76.  It is untitled.

The unremitting voice of nightly streams
That wastes so oft, we think, its tuneful powers,
If neither soothing to the worm that gleams
Through dewy grass, nor small birds hushed in bowers,
Nor unto silent leaves and drowsy flowers, --
That voice of unpretending harmony
(For who what is shall measure by what seems
To be, or not to be,
Or tax high Heaven with prodigality?)
Wants not a healing influence that can creep
Into the human breast, and mix with sleep
To regulate the motion of our dreams
For kindly issues -- as through every clime
Was felt near murmuring brooks in earliest time;
As, at this day, the rudest swains who dwell
Where torrents roar, or hear the tinkling knell
Of water-breaks, with grateful heart could tell.

William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works, Volume Four (edited by Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbyshire) (1947).

The thought expressed in the poem is a lovely one:  the sound of moving water enters our dreams as we sleep and takes us to peaceful places.  However, I sometimes feel that Wordsworth should have left out the parenthetical aside that appears in Lines 7 through 9.  I find the syntax and the meaning of the lines a bit strange and out-of-place.  Moreover, cutting them out would reduce the poem to 14 lines, and potentially turn it into a fine sonnet.

                                                       Francis Towne
                                     "Waterfall near Ambleside" (1786)