If I am asked what it is that lifts this poem out of the usual run of nostalgic recollection to be, like D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Piano’ (see week 171), one of the great poems of childhood remembrance, I would say it is an individuality, an integrity, an immediacy of tactile memory. Lawrence has his ‘boom of the tingling strings’, Hardy has his floor, ‘footworn and hollowed’, worn thin by the passage of generations of long-departed feet. Not so long ago I visited Hardy’s childhood home at Higher Bockhampton, and it is all still there: that floor, the parlour where he danced as a boy, leaping to the tune of his father’s fiddle, the deep seat by his bedroom window where he would have sat at night looking out on the country darkness and the stars above the trees.

I sometimes think of Hardy as a kind of literary icebreaker, shouldering improbabilities of plot and diction aside by sheer force of will. The diction here is less idiosyncratic than in many of his poems, but still we have the verbal richness of that ‘Blessings emblazoned’, that ‘glowed with a gleam’, set against the simplicity of the rueful, wondering last line. Definitely one of my favourite pieces among all his work.

The Self-Unseeing

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day;
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!

Thomas Hardy