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A Poet First: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy

by Adam Sedia

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is known today primarily as one of the great novelists of late Victorian England—and one of the greatest novelists in English. Among his best-known novels are Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Perhaps his best-known novel is Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), whose sympathetic portrayal of the “fallen woman” has inspired many television and film adaptations, including Roman Polanski’s acclaimed 1979 film.

Despite his acclaim as a novelist, Hardy considered himself a novelist only out of necessity—to earn a living. Indeed, he held a rather low opinion of the novel as an art form. He considered himself first and foremost a poet. He believed that poetry “contained the essence of all imaginative and emotional literature.”[1] Those unfamiliar or superficially familiar with Hardy’s poetry will find it a world as delightful as it is voluminous.

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Life

Hardy was born in an isolated thatched cottage built by his great-grandfather in Upper Bockhampton, a hamlet three miles east of Dorchester, in the impoverished rural southwest of England that he portrayed in his novels as Wessex (named for the ancient Saxon kingdom in the area). He moved to London in 1862 to work as an architect. Although he fully partook in the cultural life London offered, he never felt at home there, where he was made keenly aware of his inferior social status. He returned to Dorset five years later, never to move away again.

He turned to prose writing as a source of income, but his first novel was rejected for publication in 1870 as too radical. After publishing his next two novels anonymously, the success of Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874 allowed him to give up architectural work and write full-time. He authored eighteen novels, which he classified into “novels of character and environment,” “romances and fantasies,” and “novels of ingenuity,” as well as numerous short stories.

He married Emma Gifford in 1874, but they remained childless, and Hardy eventually excluded her from his professional life until they became estranged. However, Emma’s death in 1912 affected him profoundly and led him to produce a flurry of lyric poetry to express his remorse. In 1914, he married his secretary, Florence Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior, and to whom he dictated his final poem on his deathbed.

In 1885 he moved into his custom-built manor, Max Gate, in Dorchester, where he lived and worked until his death. In 1910, he refused a knighthood, but had by then become the “grand old man” of English letters, hosting literary figures at Max Gate including Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Virginia Woolf, as well as the Prince of Wales. From 1910 through 1927 he received 25 nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but never won the award.[2]

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Poetry

Hardy’s first volume of poems did not appear until 1898, when he published Wessex Poems, a collection of 200 poems written over the previous three decades. Over the next 30 years, Hardy would publish seven further collections of poetry, as well as The Dynasts, a verse drama in three parts, 19 acts, and 131 scenes, making it one of the longest poems in the English language. Aside from The Dynasts, Hardy’s poetic oeuvre is massive, totaling 947 poems written over nearly seventy years.

Hardy’s poems were not well-received during his lifetime; a critic in the London Spectator wrote in 1902, “Poetry is not his proper medium . . . he is not at home, he does not move easily in it.” His poetry would withstand these opinions, and eventually have a profound influence on Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin. Today, though he is considered a Victorian novelist, Hardy is considered as one of the great poets of the twentieth century. No less a figure than Ezra Pound, who claimed, “No-one has taught me anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died,” viewed Hardy’s novels as merely practice for his poetry, calling Hardy’s poems “the harvest of having written twenty novels first.”

Praise from Ezra Pound notwithstanding, Hardy is anything but a modernist in style and tone. His poems are always faithful to traditional form, written in rhyme and meter, even though by his death in 1928 literary Modernism had risen to dominance; T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the first volume of Pound’s Cantos had already been published. Yet Hardy’s work at the same time is anything but a throwback to Victorian poetry. His poems avoid the overt sense of dutiful nationalism in Tennyson and Kipling and the sentimentality of the Pre-Raphaelites. Instead, Hardy’s poems are deeply personal insights, verse settings of contemplation and introspection that foreshadow Robert Frost and W.H. Auden.

Hardy’s architectural training contributed significantly to his attitude towards poetic form.
Yet his study of Gothic art introduced him to the principle of spontaneity. Structure and function are intimately related, yet Hardy also preferred “poetic texture” to “poetic veneer”—in his own words a “sweet disorder,” in which “inexact rhymes now and then are far more pleasing than correct ones.” Not only off-rhymes, but also metrical pauses, uneven syntax, and inversions frequently appear, conveying an architect’s sense of deliberate spontaneity.

No study of Hardy’s poetry could ignore his most famous poem, “The Convergence of the Twain,” written in response to the famously tragic sinking of the RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage in 1912. Its famous subject makes it an excellent place to begin exploring Hardy’s poetry:

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The Convergence of the Twain

by Thomas Hardy

___I
___In a solitude of the sea
___Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

___II
___Steel chambers, late the pyres
___Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

___III
___Over the mirrors meant
___To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

___IV
___Jewels in joy designed
___To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

___V
___Dim moon-eyed fishes near
___Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?” …

___VI
___Well: while was fashioning
___This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

___VII
___Prepared a sinister mate
___For her—so gaily great—
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

___VIII
___And as the smart ship grew
___In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

___IX
___Alien they seemed to be:
___No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.

___X
___Or sign that they were bent
___By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

___XI
___Till the Spinner of the Years
___Said “Now!” And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

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Like many contemporary observers, Hardy sought an explanation for the sinking of the supposedly “unsinkable ship.” For him, it was not a question of incompetence or even hubris, but a matter of fate. The ship, the latest and proudest work of artistry and engineering, had its antithesis in the raw, irrational forces of nature. As human genius meticulously built the ship, silent, unseen, “alien,” natural forces carved the “Shape of Ice” or “Iceberg,” personified as a proper name: “twin halves of one august event.” But the merging of thesis and antithesis here do not produce synthesis, but Nemesis: the natural and irrational annihilate the artificial and rational.

The numbering of the stanzas is almost intrusive, and its addition cannot be anything but deliberate. It is often remarked that the shape of the stanzas resembles the shape of the ship itself, with the numerals representing the funnels, or smokestacks. While interesting and perhaps valid, this also overlooks the numbering of the stanzas: eleven. Their presentation in Roman numerals resembles conventional depictions of the Ten Commandments: with an extra one, seeming to indicate human hubris exceeding God’s law. At the same time eleven falls one short of twelve, the traditional number of perfection, completion, and order, thus representing the incompleteness of the voyage as well as the imperfection and seemingly chaotic nature of the world. Yet Hardy makes the event decreed by the “Spinner of the Years”—a likening of God to the Greek Fates, who spin and cut the lives of mortals. What seems chaos is in fact divinely ordained. Hardy affirms cosmic order, but portrays it to emphasize implicitly humanity’s comparative powerlessness. All the forces of science and art are not enough to overcome raw nature or the decrees of fate.

Love is a favorite subject of Hardy’s lyrical poems, but Hardy is far from a love-poet as seen in the love-struck sonnets of Petrarch or Shakespeare. Hardy’s love-poetry is complex, often displaying ambivalent or even hostile attitudes towards love, perhaps reflecting the coolness of his own marriage. The following appears as one of the first poems in Wessex Poems, his first published volume of poetry from 1898:

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Neutral Tones

by Thomas Hardy

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
—They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro—
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing . . .

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

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The title indicates the importance of the color palette in the poem. The neutral tones—the sun’s white and the leaves’ gray—reflect the spark of love gone dead. These neutral tones, however, are not bland but overwhelming, as are the expressions of the once-beloved addressed. Her eyes seem to “rove / Over tedious riddles solved years ago,” and, in a marvelous turn of phrase, her “smile . . . was the deadest thing” yet “Alive enough to have strength to die.” Love has not merely died, but turned to “bitterness.” Yet the speaker and his once-beloved remain together—compelled to remain so perhaps by marriage, as Hardy was with Emma. At the end, the speaker finds in his once-beloved’s face, “the God-curst sun,” and the dead colors of the scene “keen lessons that love deceives, / And wrings with wrong” (another delicious turn of phrase). Here Hardy offers a masterful and highly personal portrayal of love’s after-effects, the ashes left once the fire burns out, with the former lovers forced to endure each other by mutual obligation.

Contrast this with a 1913 poem, one of the many Hardy wrote in the wake of Emma’s death:

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A Night in November

by Thomas Hardy

I marked when the weather changed,
And the panes began to quake,
And the winds rose up and ranged,
That night, lying half-awake.

Dead leaves blew into my room,
And alighted upon my bed,
And a tree declared to the gloom
Its sorrow that they were shed.

One leaf of them touched my hand,
And I thought that it was you
There stood as you used to stand,
And saying at last you knew!

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Hardy begins by painting with words a stormy November night, with its winds shaking the bedroom windows. The autumnal scene “when the weather changed” mirrors Hardy’s own aging. Though the poetic voice never says that the addressee is dead, it strongly hints at her death, describing her habitual standing in past tense and thinking the dead leaf touching his hand was hers—almost a ghostly encounter, but only in the mind of the poetic voice.

The final line is enigmatic—appropriately for the haunting scene. The poetic voice envisions his departed addressee saying that “at last” she “knew.” Hardy never states or even hints what the poem’s addressee “knew”—it could be anything, and it does not matter. That this knowledge occurs “at last,” conveys a desire for final settlement of some secret or dispute left unresolved. That closing line leaves an overwhelming sense of guilt and regret, heightened by the natural setting.

A poem just as poignant comes from his 1909 collection, Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses.

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The Man He Killed

by Thomas Hardy

_‘Had he and I but met
_By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
_Right many a nipperkin!

_‘But ranged as infantry,
_And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
_And killed him in his place.

_‘I shot him dead because—
_Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
_That’s clear enough; although

_‘He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,
_Off-hand like—just as I—
Was out of work—had sold his traps—
_No other reason why.

_‘Yes; quaint and curious war is!
_You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
_Or help to half-a-crown.’

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Here Hardy presents a dramatic monologue. The entire poem is in quotations, to emphasize that a definite character, not a generalized poetic voice, is speaking—in this case a veteran soldier. Hardy’s soldier presents the human view of war, reducing geopolitics and strategy to a simple fight to the death between two men.

The soldier reminisces on a battlefield kill, beginning and ending with a remark that had he met his enemy in a bar instead of combat he would have bought him a drink instead of killing him. Indeed, he expresses sympathy with his dead enemy, pondering his circumstances: perhaps just like him the enemy enlisted “off-hand” because he “was out of work” and needed money—“no other reason why.” Nor can the soldier articulate any reason why he killed his enemy; he simply “shot him dead because— / Because he was my foe, / Just so . . . .”

Yet the soldier expresses no guilt or regret over having killed a man he plainly acknowledges he had no reason to kill other than for being a designated “foe.” The soldier does not see tragedy in this, but instead calls the situation “quaint and curious.” Perhaps Hardy is criticizing how easily men use war to justify killing while openly acknowledging the humanity of their enemies. Or, perhaps more likely, Hardy takes a tragic view similar to “The Convergence of the Twain.” For all our feelings of sympathy and shared humanity, war will continue, and men will continue kill men when called upon by their country. It is simply the way of the world; the tragedy lies not in the battlefield slaughter, but in its inevitability—“quaint and curious,” indeed! Tragically, Hardy’s commentary seems eerily prophetic, anticipating by five years the outbreak of World War I.

Hardy’s final collection of poems, Winter Words in Various Moods and Meters was published posthumously in 1928, and contains the works of the prolific final three years of his life. One of the most striking poems from that collection is a historic piece:

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The Ballad of Love’s Skeleton

by Thomas Hardy

(179-)

“Come, let’s to Culliford Hill and Wood,
_And watch the squirrels climb,
And look in sunny places there
__For shepherds’ thyme.”

—“Can I have heart for Culliford Wood,
_And hill and bank and tree,
Who know and ponder over all
__Things done by me!”

—“Then Dear, don hat, and come along:
_We’ll strut the Royal strand;
King George has just arrived, his Court,
__His guards, and band.”

—“You are a Baron of the King’s Court
_From Hanover lately come,
And can forget in song and dance
__What chills me numb.

“Well be the royal scenes for you,
_And band beyond compare,
But how is she who hates her crime
__To frolic there?

“O why did you so urge and say
_‘Twould soil your noble name! —
I should have prized a little child,
__And faced the shame.

“I see the child—that should have been ,
_But was not , born alive;
With such a deed in a woman’s life
__A year seems five.

“I asked not for the wifely rank,
_Nor maiden honour saved;
To call a nestling thing my own
__Was all I craved.

“For what’s the hurt of shame to one
_Of no more note than me?
Can littlest life beneath the sun
__More littled be?”

—“Nay, never grieve. The day is bright,
_Just as it was ere then:
In the Assembly Rooms to-night
__Let’s joy again!

“The new Quick-Step is the sweetest dance
_For lively toes and heels;
And when we tire of that we’ll prance
__Bewitching reels.

“Dear, never grieve! As once we whirled
_So let us whirl to-night,
Forgetting all things save ourselves
__Till dawning light.

“The King and Queen, Princesses three,
_Have promised to meet there
The mayor and townsfolk. I’ve my card
__And One to spare.

“The Court will dance at the upper end;
_Only a cord between
Them and the burgher-throng below;
__A brilliant scene!”

—“I’ll go. You’ve still my heart in thrall:
_Save you, all’s dark to me.
And God knows what, when love is all,
__The end will be!”

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This poem is striking for a number of reasons. First, although it is a ballad, it is not a typical song-piece, but instead a dramatic dialogue set in 1790’s Georgian England between a baron native to the German state of Hanover (George III’s ancestral realm) and his mistress of a lower social class. In striking contrast to its joyous setting is its grave and dark subject matter: abortion. The skeleton of love in the title is a literal skeleton produced by erotic love.

The mistress expresses to the baron her deep regret over aborting their child at his behest, lest an illegitimate child harm his reputation: “With such a deed in a woman’s live / A year seems five.” The baron dismisses her, telling her twice, “never grieve,” and urges her instead, “As once we whirled / So let us whirl to-night, / Forgetting all things save ourselves . . . .” Of course, “whirl” can be read as much more than dancing. He also reminds her of all the dignitaries—the celebrities of their day—who will attend. At the end his mistress yields to his persuasion, but her response broods with sadness and desperation: her relationship with her lover is the only joy that remains to her, and when that is done, “God knows what . . . the end will be.”

Hardy’s poem sounds remarkably contemporary, even though he sets it more than a century before his own time. A mother destroys her unborn child then comes to regret it deeply. Selfishness lies at the root of the deed: she yielded to her lover’s will to keep him and he wanted to rid himself of a potential embarrassment. And the baron urges her to drown her regret in self-serving pleasure: partying, fornicating, and chasing celebrity. The mistress clings to this as the only remaining joy she has after what she has done, but she acknowledges it is a superficial joy, a distraction from the all-consuming grief she feels.

Hardy does not rail or preach. Instead he shows. Through brilliant characterization he criticizes the motives behind and grieves over the effects of abortion. He places blame primarily on the baron, whom he portrays as a cad. Yet while he offers a sympathetic portrayal of the mistress, reminiscent of the similarly-situated Tess of the d’Urbervilles, he does not absolve her from her decision, either. Despite its merry setting, the poem reveals one of the tragedies of human existence, a recurring theme in both Hardy’s poems and his novels.

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Conclusion

Five out of a thousand poems cannot come close to conveying the breadth of Hardy’s metrical forms and subject matter. But in this small selection hopefully the reader can catch a glimpse of the richness of Hardy’s poetic oeuvre and find inspiration to read further. What awaits is a fascinating world; each poem is not only crafted masterfully but full of delightful phrasing and demonstrates an emotional depth and nuanced views of its subject. Hardy’s poems are at once delightful on an aesthetic level and thought-provoking in their substance—true poetry.

A world that remembers Hardy primarily for his novels does him grave injustice. While his novels are certainly well worth reading, they are married to their time and place in a way that his poetry is not. And Hardy considered himself a poet first. According to his own appraisal his poems should be much better known and widely read than they are.

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Footnotes

[1] “Thomas Hardy 1840-1928.” The Works of Thomas Hardy. Introduction. Wordsworth Ed’ns, Ltd., 1994. v.
[2] Biography taken from Fincham, Tony. “Life of Thomas Hardy.” The Hardy Society. https://www.hardysociety.org/life/ (last visited Aug. 7, 2025).
[3] “Thomas Hardy 1840-1928,” vii.
[4] “Thomas Hardy.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-hardy (last visited Aug. 7, 2025).
[5] “Thomas Hardy 1840-1928,” v.
[6] Id., vii.

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Adam Sedia (b. 1984) lives in his native Northwest Indiana and practices law as a civil and appellate litigator. He has published four books of poetry and his poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in various literary journals. He is also a composer, and his musical works may be heard on his YouTube channel.