To those who think of Thomas Hardy as predominantly a purveyor of doom and gloom, it may come as a surprise to find that he could also be rather funny, as in this encounter between a working girl who has stayed on the farm and a friend who has chosen a somewhat different path in life. Of course, it is possible to read the poem in a morally earnest way: to wonder if Amelia is not whistling in the dark, as it were, and whether the life of a ‘ruined maid’ back then was really that much fun or if it was not simply exchanging one kind of servitude for another, less honest one. It would certainly be typical of Hardy to present the choices of human existence in such a lose-lose way, but I think that really he was just getting a bit of his own back by poking fun at the moral conventions of his times that had led to so much censure of his work.

The Ruined Maid

‘O ‘Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?’ —
‘O didn’t you know I’d been ruined?’ said she.

— ‘You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;
And now you’ve gay bracelets and bright feathers three!’ —
‘Yes: that’s how we dress when we’re ruined,’ said she.

— ‘At home in the barton you said ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’
And ‘thik oon,’ and ‘theäs oon,’ and ‘t’other’; but now
Your talking quite fits ‘ee for high compa-ny!’ —
‘Some polish is gained with one’s ruin,’ said she.

— ‘Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I’m bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!’ —
‘We never do work when we’re ruined,’ said she.

— ‘You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you’d sigh, and you’d sock; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!’ —
‘True. One’s pretty lively when ruined,’ said she.

— ‘I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!’ —
‘My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined,’ said she.

Thomas Hardy

At first sight one is tempted by its sprightly tone and dancing measure to take this as one of Hardy’s lighter poems, like the morbidly cheerful ‘Voices From Things Growing In A Churchyard’. Yet really it has such a blend of pathos, nostalgia and defiance that it can well stand as a valediction not just to the poet’s own life but to the life of a whole age. And I wonder if this was the last time when our society had a sufficient cultural unity to make such a poem possible – it is hard to imagine an equivalent leave-taking being written now.

An Ancient to Ancients 

Where once we danced, where once we sang,
Gentlemen,
The floors are sunken, cobwebs hang,
And cracks creep; worms have fed upon
The doors. Yea, sprightlier times were then
Than now, with harps and tabrets gone,
Gentlemen!

Where once we rowed, where once we sailed,
Gentlemen,
And damsels took the tiller, veiled
Against too strong a stare (God wot
Their fancy, then or anywhen!)
Upon that shore we are clean forgot,
Gentlemen!

We have lost somewhat of that, afar and near,
Gentlemen,
The thinning of our ranks each year
Affords a hint we are nigh undone,
That shall not be ever again
The marked of many, loved of one,
Gentlemen.

In dance the polka hit our wish,
Gentlemen,
The paced quadrille, the spry schottische,
‘Sir Roger’–And in opera spheres
The ‘Girl’ (the famed ‘Bohemian’),
And ‘Trovatore’ held the ears,
Gentlemen.

This season’s paintings do not please,
Gentlemen
Like Etty, Mulready, Maclise;
Throbbing romance had waned and wanned;
No wizard wields the witching pen
Of Bulwer, Scott, Dumas, and Sand,
Gentlemen.

The bower we shrined to Tennyson,
Gentlemen,
Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon
Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,
The spider is sole denizen;
Even she who voiced those rhymes is dust,
Gentlemen!

We who met sunrise sanguine-souled,
Gentlemen,
Are wearing weary. We are old;
These younger press; we feel our rout
Is imminent to Aides’ den,–
That evening shades are stretching out,
Gentlemen!

And yet, though ours be failing frames,
Gentlemen,
So were some others’ history names,
Who trod their track light-limbered and fast
As these youth, and not alien
From enterprise, to their long last,
Gentlemen.

Sophocles, Plato, Socrates,
Gentlemen,
Pythagoras, Thucydides,
Herodotus, and Homer, –yea,
Clement, Augustin, Origen,
Burnt brightlier towards their setting-day,
Gentlemen.

And ye, red-lipped and smooth-browed; list,
Gentlemen;
Much is there waits you we have missed;
Much lore we leave you worth the knowing,
Much, much has lain outside our ken;
Nay, rush not: time serves: we are going,
Gentlemen. 

Thomas Hardy

166

I like this poem very much, even though it inspires in me considerable pangs of guilt concerning my father’s writing-desk. This was made of some dark wood, with a flap that let down on brass lopers, and many pigeonholes at the top where he kept his papers; these were of no interest to me, but below the flap were two shelves behind leaded lights which held the books from his own childhood, and tucked away behind them was a full set of Arthur Mee’s ‘The Children’s Encyclopaedia’. So it was that I cut my reading teeth on a combination of sturdy Victorian fare – Captain Marryat, G.A.Henty, R.M.Ballantyne, Rider Haggard, Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, Talbot Baines Reed – together with a science that had no notion of relativity, DNA and continental drift, a history innocent of the Second World War and a geography in which most of the world was still coloured red. I am still trying to catch up.

The desk could have been mine when my mother died, but we had little room, and even I, not known for my sensitivity in matters of décor, could see that it did not ‘go with’ our other furniture, so I passed on it, and consequently don’t see as often as I might the man who spent so many hours seated there and the small boy sprawled on his stomach on the carpet nearby. We don’t have much time for ghosts in our lives these days; fortunately for us, Hardy did.

Old Furniture

I know not how it may be with others
Who sit amid relics of householdry
That date from the days of their mothers’ mothers.
But well I know how it is with me
Continually.

I see the hands of the generations
That owned each shiny familiar thing
In play on its knobs and indentations,
And with its ancient fashioning
Still dallying:

Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler,
As in a mirror a candle-flame
Shows images of itself, each frailer
As it recedes, though the eye may frame
Its shape the same.

On the clock’s dull dial a foggy finger,
Moving to set the minutes right
With tentative touches that lift and linger
In the wont of a moth on a summer night,
Creeps to my sight.

On this old viol, too, fingers are dancing –
As whilom – just over the strings by the nut,
The tip of a bow receding, advancing
In airy quivers, as if it would cut
The plaintive gut.

And I see a face by that box for tinder,
Glowing forth in fits from the dark,
And fading again, as the linten cinder
Kindles to red at the flinty spark,
Or goes out stark.

Well, well. It is best to be up and doing,
The world has no use for one today
Who eyes things thus – no aim pursuing!
He should not continue in this stay,
But sink away.

Thomas Hardy

I once tried to make a list of my ten favourite Hardy poems, but ended up with nearer to a hundred and a great reluctance to discard any of them. But I think in any shortlist I made ‘Castle Boterel’ would have to figure high, with its honest solipsism, its vision of human love pitted against the vastness of geological time, and its achingly sad last stanza.

At Castle Boterel

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony’s load
When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led, —
Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is — that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.

Thomas Hardy, March 1913

A Church Romance
(Mellstock: circa 1835)

She turned in the high pew, until her sight
Swept the west gallery, and caught its row
Of music-men with viol, book and bow
Against the sinking sad tower-window light.

She turned again; and in her pride’s despite
One strenuous viol’s inspirer seemed to throw
A message from his string to her below,
Which said: ‘I claim thee as my own forthright!’

Thus their hearts’ bond began, in due time signed.
And long years thence, when Age had scared Romance,
At some old attitude of his or glance
That gallery-scene would break upon her mind,
With him as minstrel, ardent, young, and trim,
Bowing ‘New Sabbath’ or ‘Mount Ephraim’.

Thomas Hardy

You can see why Philip Larkin admired Hardy so much: could there be a more perfect example than this poem of those ‘long perspectives’ that Larkin speaks of in ‘Reference Back’, that ‘link us to our losses’. Yet somehow ‘A Church Romance’ for all its regret for time past seems more committed to the possibility of real human love than Larkin’s own cautious almost-true almost-instinct: this bond was signed, and endured.