"Proud Songsters"

The thrushes sing as the sun is going,
And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,
And as it gets dark loud nightingales
                In bushes
Pipe, as they can when April wears,
        As if all Time were theirs.

These are brand-new birds of twelve-months' growing
Which a year ago, or less than twain,
No finches were, nor nightingales,
                Nor thrushes,
But only particles of grain,
        And earth, and air, and rain.

In 1926 Virginia Woolf visited the 86-year-old Thomas Hardy at his home in Dorchester, Dorset. He was, she wrote, "extremely affable and aware of his duties." What impressed her most was "his freedom, ease and vitality" (A Writer's Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf, 1953).

Those three words also fit the poems he was working on at the time, which showed undiminished powers of observation, reflection and metrical invention. A writer for the Spanish newspaper El País once quipped that Hardy had the rare distinction of being of one the finest novelists of the 19th century and one of the finest poets of the 20th.

And Hardy was prolific: by the time of his death in January 1928, he had written, rewritten or selected 105 poems for an eighth collection of his poetry. It was published the following October, with the title Winter Words. 

The work was drawn from five decades; "Proud Songsters" was placed near the head of the book, and it has remained one of Hardy's best known poems. A few years later, Gerald Finzi set the poem for tenor and piano, finding music that follows the progress of the words, from the matter-of-fact first stanza to the wonderstruck second.

There are many poems about spring, but this is one of my favorites: as quiet as an April morning, but pulsing with life, like the season itself.

• AUDIO: Finzi's setting of Hardy's poem, sung by Roderick Williams
• "The Voice," a Hardy love poem
• Hardy's "Snow in the Suburbs"
• Max Gate: Hardy's home in Dorchester
• The Thomas Hardy Society website

Hardy at the Garrick Theatre, London for a production of Tess of the D'Ubervilles in December 1926 (Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery)

"Snow in the Suburbs"

       

        Every branch big with it,

        Bent every twig with it;

    Every fork like a white web-foot;

    Every street and pavement mute:

Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when

Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.

    The palings are glued together like a wall,

    And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

        A sparrow enters the trees,

        Whereon immediately

    A snow-lump thrice his own slight size

    Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,

        And overturns him,

        And near inurns him,

    And lights on a nether twig, when its brush

Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

    The steps are a blanched slope,

    Up which, with feeble hope,

    A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin:

        And we take him in.

Thomas Hardy, 1925

One of the most surprising things about Thomas Hardy's poetry is that, prolific as he was--his Collected Poems runs to nearly a thousand pages--he seldom if ever used the same metrical form twice. Here his words seem to float and drift and fly, just like the snow.

This poem appeared in Hardy's seventh collection, Human Shows, published in 1925 when he was 85. It was his last collection that he would see in print, but, after his death three years later, his literary executors--Florence Hardy and Sydney Cockerell--published "Winter Words", which contains some of Hardy's best loved poems ('Proud Songsters' is a special favorite of mine.)

Few poets in any language have done some of their finest work in their ninth decade, as Hardy did.

• Bruce Alexander reads the poem
• "The Voice" - Hardy the love poet
• Justine Waddell - an outstanding Tess
• The Thomas Hardy Society

"The Voice"

Thomas Hardy in 1914 (Photo by E.O. Hoppe)

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But, as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Traveling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I: faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

December 1912

A writer in a Spanish newspaper once quipped that Thomas Hardy had the amazing good fortune to be "one of the finest novelists of the 19th century, and one of the finest poets of the 20th." It's true: Hardy gave up writing fiction after 1895, partly because of the hostility he faced after publishing Jude the Obscure. Hardy had been writing poetry since his teenaged years, and he released Wessex Poems, his first collection, in 1898, at the age of 58.

Over the next 30 years, Hardy published more than a thousand poems. They are among the best English verse ever written and are especially loved by other poets. Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin are among the diverse group of writers who championed--and learned from--Hardy's mastery of English verse.

"The Voice," written after the death of Hardy's wife Emma in 1912, is a prime example of Hardy's ability to take up the English poetic tradition and put it to his own passionate, personal use. It is musical and intricately patterned, but all is at the service of the speaker's profound disquiet--as we might expect from the man who described poetry as "emotion put into measure".

Composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten have found Hardy's verse appealing, too. Some of the best settings are by British composer Gerald Finzi; I've included a recording of one of his songs below.

• AUDIO: Richard Burton reading "The Voice"
• VIDEO: "Far from the Madding Crowd" on YouTube
• An overview of Hardy's verse from the Poetry Foundation
• AUDIO: Roderick Williams sings Finzi's setting of "To Lizbie Browne"
• Max Gate: the Hardys' home in Dorchester

Like his novels, Hardy's poems celebrate the Dorset countryside he loved. (Photo by Richard Tulloch)