TTHA Poem of the Month » The Voice of Things
The Voice of Things
Welcome to the Poem of the Month for February. This is ‘The Voice of Things’, from Moments of Vision (no. 353 in Jim Gibson’s Variorum edition), one of a number of poems in the volume in which Hardy ponders the ‘forty Augusts – aye, and several more’ separating his first meeting with Emma in Cornwall in 1870, and her death in 1912. But other than that interval of time there is nothing in the poem to identify either Emma or Cornwall, and those who want to resist a biographical reading can point out that neither Hardy himself nor his biographers mention a visit ‘a double decade’ after the first.
There are a few manuscript variants worth noticing. ‘Augusts’ was originally ‘years’; in line 2, ‘loosed’ replaced Hardy’s first thought, which was ‘free’; in line 7, the manuscript has ‘shapes’ instead of ‘toils’. Otherwise the diction is entirely characteristic of Hardy: the short final line of the stanzas, the dialect word ‘thwarts’ (obstacles), the formal ‘supplicate’, the colloquial (and idiosyncratic) ‘wagging’, the suddenly flat ‘Things that be’.
The Voice of Things’ takes its place in a long line of poems in which the speaker contemplates the landscape – Wordsworth’s ‘mighty world of eye and ear’ – and either seeks some relation to it, or reflects on its blank refusal to offer meaning or comfort (Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ is a familiar example). What does this poem take from or add to that tradition? What does its jagged diction and edgy rhythm contribute to its meaning? And how should we understand the ending: as a moment of vision, or of its failure?
I look forward to your comments.
The Voice of Things Forty Augusts – aye, and several more – ago, When I paced the headlands loosed from dull employ, The waves huzza’d like a multitude below In the sway of an all-including joy Without cloy. Blankly I walked there a double decade after, When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me, And I heard the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter At the lot of men, and all the vapoury Things that be. Wheeling change has set me again standing where Once I heard the waves huzza at Lammas-tide; But they supplicate now – like a congregation there Who murmur the Confession – I outside, Prayer denied.