• 1 Not the least interesting aspect of Human Shows, the volume of Hardy’s verse on which this article (...)
• 2 Tim Armstrong’s excellent article “Thomas Hardy” in The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry (20 (...)

1Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) lived to the age of eighty-seven, a good innings by anyone’s standards but especially good for the time, particularly among writers. Henry James (1843-1916) was born shortly after Hardy and died twelve years before him. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born seventeen years after Hardy and died four years before him. Not the least idiosyncrasy of his career is that Hardy’s longevity enabled him to have two writing lives – following upon his occupation as a novelist. Devoting himself full time to poetry – even though he had always written it – literally gave him a new lease of life, and a second, but by no means secondary, writing life. Poetry, like his first wife, Emma Gifford, was always his first love: during her lifetime she was as it were his virtual muse, morphing into his real one when in the “Poems of 1912-13”, he wrote the poems that lay dormant during his first marriage, waiting to be written while he toiled at his livelihood as a prose writer¹. His first writing life lasted for twenty-seven years. It began with The Poor Man and the Lady (1868), rejected by Macmillan, and ended with Jude the Obscure, published in 1895. Wessex Poems appeared in 1898 and Hardy regularly published poetry over his thirty remaining years. Why is it then that James Gibson’s Literary Life (1996) devotes far more space to the novelist than the poet? The fact that Gibson devotes twelve pages to The Poor Man and the Lady, of which no manuscript subsists, and just three to Human Shows, speaks volumes for current critical attitudes to poetry, and Hardy’s in particular, even coming from the editor of that poetry. R. G. Cox’s Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1970) devotes three quarters of its space to the novels. After covering reviews of the first three volumes of Hardy’s twelve volumes of verse, Cox seems to get fed up with his whole editorial enterprise and doesn’t even bother mentioning Human Shows. Surely this misrepresents the author, whose poems were the part of his literary production that meant most to him. Perhaps the best account of Human Shows is that of Rosemarie Morgan, who both reads the poems closely and assesses the collection as a whole. She relevantly notes that in the collection “significance is given to what seems insignificant” (Morgan 184): the discrepancy or gap between being and seeming lies, as its title suggests, at the thematic heart of the volume, and Morgan’s remark is especially true of the treatment of objects therein, including the objectivisation of what is not originally an object².

• 3 See James Wood who calls Hardy a writer of “animistic” feeling.
• 4 The possible application of Winnicott’s theories to Hardy’s treatment of objects would warrant a se (...)

3Hardy twice underlines the last four words in order to emphasise what he finds in Chesterton’s description of Browning. Hence what is intrinsic to a poet is on the one hand his sense of detail, and on the other the element of possession which Chesterton says would overcome both Browning as he encountered objects and account for the latter’s “bewitched” quality when they met his gaze. This is perhaps a post-Romantic version of Keatsian negative capability – “the poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence” (Keats 119) – since it suggests that there is no hierarchy of subjects in poetry: no subject is worthier of treatment in a poem than any other, partly because, in poetry, subject-matter is in any case not of the essence, but mainly because all things to a poet are equally worthy of interest when it comes to making a poem. This argument would in itself explain the plethora of objects, domestic and outdoor, in Hardy’s writing: what Hardy sees and feels in the phenomena around him is life or, to use Chesterton’s word, soul, even³. Thus the poet’s, and in particular Hardy’s, feeling for the aliveness of the world, an aliveness that is, to some extent, created by the poet, can be related to Winnicott’s notion of the “aliveness and behaviour of the external object” (Winnicott 413) that is available to the child and that will later affect his relationship with religion, the arts, and scientific creativity⁴.

• 5 “the impression left by the book is thin.” (Gittings, 268)

6Hardy’s attentiveness to objects in his poems reflects his attentiveness to, and care for, language: each object is meticulously named and has its own place in the poem. Are objects in Hardy’s poetry a source of wonder? If they are, they would function as an antidote to the poet’s philosophical pessimism. Hardy’s perspective upon objects is to situate them within deep time, the time of geology and archaeology. This lends a density which grants them significance that goes beyond the object’s immediacy. Objects have a resurrectionary power in Hardy’s poetry, capable of reviving the past within the present and bringing something new to it. Hence Robert Gittings’s view, that the poems in Human Shows are “thin”, warrants some qualification: they are not necessarily or not all without substance, and the impression of thinness may in any case conceivably be intended, even if it is true that some poems satisfy more than others⁵. Hardy’s specific focus on objects can be seen as an aesthetic and even political choice, an option for, and celebration of, the everyday, as opposed to the tawdry or the fashionable – the showy, in fact. If a poetics of wonder is to be grounded anywhere, it is to be grounded in the serendipity of commonness and dailiness.

• 6 As J. Hillis Miller has argued: “Without prosopopoeia no poetry.” (quoted in Nishimura 899).
• 7 Tate quoted in Nishimura (904).
• 8 In his “Apology” to Late Lyrics the poetry collection that preceded Human Shows, Hardy rejected the (...)

9Rather than addressing objects, other poems are themselves, in whole or in part, voiced by objects. In several different ways, Hardy exploits the technique of prosopopoeia which, for our purposes, is more than personification since it gives objects the power of speech. Such a device goes to the heart of Hardy’s poetics and perhaps to the heart of the art of lyric poetry⁶. But in previous poems Hardy had used the device to personify Nature as a whole, or took objects in Nature, such as the “pool, /Field, flock, and lonely tree” in “Nature’s Questioning” (Hardy 66-67), as metonymies by which to question Nature as a phenomenon, so that, as Allen Tate pointed out in relation to the poem, the objects themselves are unparticularised⁷. Tate in fact does argue that the objects are “weakly perceived” since their identity as themselves is not sufficiently established. In other words, they merely serve Hardy’s own philosophical “questioning”. It is interesting to note that such poems as “Nature’s Questioning” and “To Outer Nature”, among the main examples of Hardy’s texts chosen by Nashimura and the critics he adduces (he also discusses Under the Greenwood Tree) are taken from Hardy’s first poetry collection, Wessex Poems (1898). Hardy’s writing of objects might then be perceived as part of a trajectory over the course of which he gradually moved from general statements and pathetic fallacy to a greater degree of particularisation and a warmer degree of appreciation both of the natural world and of the link between man and the latter. If this argument were possible, a late poem such as “Afterwards” would tend to bear it out. One of the reasons why this poem is so beloved a part of Hardy’s poetic production is that it takes the objects as they are, and does particularise them (without calling upon any specific rhetorical device). Once in each of the poem’s four stanzas, Hardy contents himself with the more discreet but repeated deictics and the intensifying adjective “such”: “He was a man who used to notice such things”; “To him this must have been a familiar sight”; “such innocent creatures”; “He was one who had an eye for such mysteries”; “He…used to notice such things” (italics mine). Hardy and his poetics are at home with “such things”, and perhaps “things” as such, because his sensibility takes pleasure in what Michael Edwards calls their “quiddity”. Edwards writes that Hardy’s “sensibility responds to the least thing seen or heard” (Edwards 214-215). Hardy is thus perhaps more satisfying as a poet when he leaves off his Wordsworthian “obstinate questionings/Of sense and outward things” (from the “Immortality” ode⁸) and devotes his attention to realia as they are and in what they mean to him.

• 9 Robert Gittings’ unsurpassed biography of the poet shows how, around the time Hardy was composing t (...)
• 10 Another possible example of this technique is “Inscriptions for a Peal of Eight Bells (After a Rest (...)

10In Human Shows objects are observed for themselves, despite the theatrically-inflected⁹ title of the collection, without (necessarily) being part of a pathetic fallacy. The persona’s voice in “Green Slates” (Hardy 712) as it were hands over to the eponymous objects in the last two lines of the poem¹⁰. But there are several objects in the poem, typical of the way in which Hardy concretises his thought through object-metaphors as well as describing what are intended to be realia. Hardy’s use of the indeterminate term “A form” serves to objectify, or rather reify, the pictorial abstract figure of Emma against “the slate background” in Penbethy slate quarry in Cornwall where, in 1870, Hardy had gone, accompanied by Emma and her married elder sister Helen, to inspect the slate to be used for the restoration of St Juliot’s Church for which Hardy had been commissioned. The poem commemorates then a partial crystallisation of Hardy’s love for Emma “fifty years” (!) after the event. Emma’s “form” is made even more abstract by the unusual diction and contorted syntax which works against natural word-order: the speaker saw “A form against the slate background there, /Of fairness eye-commanding.”, Hardy splitting the noun group “Of fairness” from its antecedent, “A form”, at the beginning of the previous line, so that at first the woman (in the next stanza we learn to what, or to whom, the “form” corresponds) seems to be a mere form, insisting on the form’s beauty through the Miltonic inversion and the invention of the compound adjective, as though no already-existing adjective could do that beauty justice. The green slates themselves, physically and geographically detached – quarried – from their original site, serve as an objective correlative of Hardy’s incipient love for the young woman:

• 11 Hardy told Alfred Noyes that he was in this respect “not consistent”. See West 131 n4. Hardy says t (...)
• 12 See, for example, the well-known scene at the farmers’ market in Chapter XII of Far from the Maddin (...)
• 13 As Ralph Elliott points out, Hardy commonly uses the word “scene”, nor is the use of theatrical ima (...)

16Conversely to poems previously examined, the persona of “Bags of Meat” does not reify a living being (in the sense that Hardy sees the Emma of “Green Slates” as a mere “form”, for instance). Rather, Hardy castigates the lack of empathy for animals which he finds within the farming trade – Hardy or, rather, his speaker, since the writer himself admitted he was not vegetarian¹¹. He takes on the mantle of polemicist in this poem, just as his whole poetic oeuvre is an explicit – and sometimes explicit – rebuke to critics of his prose fiction. There is possibly a slight touch of irony or ambiguity to the poem since Hardy criticises the exploitation of animals for human consumption while espousing, not without relish, the “show” of the cattle auction, with its sense of theatre and ritual¹². The theatrical side of the setting Hardy stresses through the word “scene” in the last stanza: the speaker imagines the animals reproaching the humans for bringing them to the “sinister scene” of the cattle market. This reinforces and dramatises the undoubted tragic element of the poem¹³.

• 14 In a different vein, Hardy did adopt this technique for “Why She Moved House (The Dog Muses)” also (...)
• 15 The remark is not quite fair: in the same collection, if other, agricultural animals are “consigned (...)

17The poem consists of a series of observations of the sale of animals at a cattle-market. Unusually for Hardy, he eschews regularity in the poem, be it in terms of metre, rhyme or number of lines per stanza. The first stanza is made up of eight lines; the second, six lines; the third, four; the fourth and fifth, eight lines; and the sixth, eleven lines. Hardy takes the poem-title from the words of the auctioneer presenting a steer at a cattle-market: “Here’s a fine bag of meat”, words which Hardy quotes in slightly altered form as the first line of the poem, adding the plural and removing the adjective, and which transform the living animal proleptically into an inanimate object, the commercial end-product of its life. The auctioneer does not see the animal as a living being but as mere commodity: hence the poem is anti-bucolic, in keeping with Hardy’s perspective on country life since Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), in which, over half a century before “Bags of Meat”, he invented his own, Wessex, brand of anti-pastoral. “Bags of Meat” is a protest at the inhumane treatment of animals and ecological protest at the exploitation of the natural world for material gain, contrasting the jocular sales-talk of the auctioneers with the undignified treatment of the animals, and the latter’s own feelings as the speaker imagines them. Hardy focuses in turn on a steer, a heifer, a bull, and a calf. The implication of the plural in the poem-title is that they will all be turned into bags of meat. In the last stanza, the speaker reverses the perspective, revealing the underside of a situation vaunted by the auctioneers for its glamour: the “young bull” is worth thirty pounds to “have his picter done”. The glamour of the cattle market is precisely an example of the human show Hardy’s title sets forth, except that the show here is more inhuman than human, and Hardy wants to expose what he calls in the last stanza its “sinister” side. This is but one of a series of adjectives in the last stanza designed to counter the sales talk about the animals and their mistreatment – the way in which they are “prodded” (first stanza), “rapped on the horns and snout” (fourth), struck “on the buttock” and branded (fifth). It is arguable that Hardy’s view in the poem is Manichean, especially as he himself was not vegetarian. But poem’s simple, fixed moral standpoint need not detract from the poem’s power: quite the contrary, if anything. One might, in conclusion, compare this poem with a latterday “kin”, “The Cows on Killing Day”, by the Australian poet Les Murray (1938-2019) (Murray 125). Murray keeps Hardy’s anthropomorphic premise but takes it a stage further by having the cows themselves voice the poem¹⁴, which they do through the object-pronoun “me” used throughout the poem as the subject-pronoun: “A stick goes out from the human /and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down /with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.” Hardy’s poem omits explicit representation of the slaughter but adumbrates it through the violence meted out to the beasts, including, as in Murray’s poem, their being struck with a stick: the bull is “rapped on the horns and snout” while, concerning the calf, “The stick falls […], /On the buttock of the creature sold”. The last stanza of Hardy’s poem stages an agonistic struggle between eros – the farmer keeping the beast on the land – and thanatos – the butcher: a struggle in which, this being Hardy¹⁵, “the butcher wins”. After awarding the beasts both subjectivity and subject-status in the early part of the stanza – “Each beast […] /Looks round at the ring of bidders there /With a much-amazed reproachful stare”, the last words of the poem (“the butcher wins, and he’s [sc. the beast’s] driven from the place.”) return the animal to its object-status announced in the poem-title and first line.

• 16 In “Genetrix Laesa”.
• 17 A further study would contrast the commonplace idea that repetition in music and poetry are sources (...)

19The poem gives no direct indication as to what the “things” that make up the speaker’s repetition compulsion might be, any more than to whom the “you” refers. As with any fine poem, several readings are possible. The poem gives an impression of presence – one might say, the poem presents, or presences itself – through the repetition of the deictics: these, this, these, this. The speaker seems to be questioning himself – thinking out loud, even – in the first two lines, and the first line of the second stanza. The dynamism of the poem is reflected not only in the metre, a combination of regularity and irregularity in the stress patterns and line lengths, but also in the poem’s temporal features: “while” the first stanza anchors, but not freezes, poem, speaker and interlocutor in the present, the second is wholly proleptic. In fact, if there is a tension at work here, which there undoubtedly is, it is not the dialectical relationship between “past and present”, but rather the dialectical dynamic between present and future which is by definition, to apply a spatial metaphor to rhetoric, forward-looking. At the same time, as the poem look to the future the questioning forms and tone of the first four sentences, all of which are questions, gives way to the long, four-line sentence that constitutes the answer to the question posed in the second stanza’s first line. The sense of certainty the poem conveys is reinforced by the minimal number of rhymes, only three rhyme sounds (“ings”, “ease”, and “ear”) for ten lines in all, perhaps designed to give a (willed) impression of monotony. The syntax is sufficiently varied, however, to counter or at least balance this impression, above all in the line which houses two named objects, the cloak and wings, the structure of which might indeed seem clumsy, though it could just as well be delicate, making the reader (this reader, at least) pause for a second, to notice that “have” does double duty both for “dropped” and “taken”, and that the subject of the verb “have taken” is not “you” but “wondrous wings”. It is the presence of the “you”, the anonymous addressee, who could be a, or the, Muse (depicted, by Ovid for example, as winged), or a current love or a past one, that, according to the argument of the poem, keeps the poet “doing these things”. As Tim Armstrong writes: “Demonstrative pronouns and adjectives which normally have a clear referent – ‘then’, ‘the thing that I did’, ‘one who’s there’ – come unlocated and mysterious […]” (Armstrong 328) The only objects, as one usually understands the word, are the “cloak” and “wings” which are relatively unproblematic, although generically different from each other, and clearly intended to be. This leaves the meaning of “these things” undecided. Even so, the adjective “wondrous” acts as an expression of wonder which attends the positive dimension of Hardy’s lyric achievement, and indeed Gitting calls the poetry-writing of Hardy’s old age a “miracle” (Gittings 274). Given that the demonstrative could refer to what the speaker is currently concerned with, the “things” in question are arguably the poems Hardy is currently working on. Independently of the quality of the poems themselves, there is a heroism in the act of writing them, in Hardy, the craftsman, the journeyman till the end, expending himself, every morning at his writing desk, in the task at hand, in the work he knew: “He allows nothing to interfere with his morning’s work”, Florence Hardy wrote (255); “Lyrics still poured from him, some of them as moving and accomplished as anything he had written in all his long life” (274). What Gittings calls Hardy’s “lyrics” could be the “things” Hardy does here: the enduring, disciplined writing of them. Hence, poems are done as well as made, since they involve willed activity, if only (if such is the case) the physical committing of them to paper and print. Although poems can, especially since Zukovsky and the Objectivists, be considered as objects, it is perhaps more fruitful to consider them, in Hardy’s case, as things such as Ingold’s perspective takes the latter to be: phenomena involved in setting, time and process. Harder to interpret satisfactorily are the “mechanic repetitions”, which seem to refer back to “these things” and forward to “dinning gear”, all of which are linked by the demonstratives and seem to refer to the same phenomena. “Mechanic repetitions” might refer to the principles of metre and rhyme which are, by definition, repetitive. They need not be mechanical, but they might be habitual, and Hardy may be pointing to his lifelong habit of verse-writing which invariably respects these principles. “Gear” would echo the adjective “mechanic” while “dinning”, more dynamic an adjective than “mechanic”, can only denote sound: Hardy is saying that his poems, though some have musical titles, are not mellifluous, an idea borne out by the fact that Human Shows is the collection of Hardy’s in which the Latin term “concordia discors” appears¹⁶. The spectre or Muse figure represented by “you” literally compels the speaker to keep writing, producing the “things” (the dynamic, processing objects) that are his poems which do, after all, “please¹⁷”. His writing is thus compulsive, with the risk, according to a negatively-connoted reading, of transforming the poet himself into an automat, and therefore an object. His writing is thus compulsive, the presence of, and wonder induced by, “you”, keeping the poet in a permanent state of dynamism and creation and, yes, pleasure.