The Complete Poems

by Thomas Hardy, J. Gibson (Editor)

Thomas Hardy's first love was always poetry. It was not until 1898, when he was fifty-eight years old, having already established his reputation with fourteen novels and over forty short stories, that his first book of poetry, Wessex Poems was published. For the final thirty years of his life he abandoned fiction and devoted himself entirely to poetry. It is a tribute to his remarkable powers of creativity that he is now not only regarded as one of the most important English novelists but is also recognised as a poet of major stature and ever increasing popularity. The Complete Poems , edited by James Gibson, includes all of Hardy's prolific output of more than nine hundred poems, complemented by a detailed notes section. Collected in this single volume are his eight books of verse, all the uncollected poems, 'Domicilium' and the songs from The Dynasts. This new edition contains an additional poem, The Sound of Her.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Victorian, Literature, 19th Century, British Literature, Fiction

1039 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.

The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most know Hardy as a novelist and a tragedian. But every novelist I’ve ever read or known also has their poet side. So with Hardy. You won’t be disappointed. I love the wistfulness and melancholy of this particular poem.

🐂 The Oxen 🐂
by Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

HAPPY POETRY MONTH!

april is national poetry month,
so here come thirty floats!
the cynics here will call this plan
a shameless grab for votes.
and maybe there’s some truth to that—
i do love validation,
but charitably consider it
a rhyme-y celebration.
i don’t intend to flood your feed—
i’ll just post one a day.
endure four weeks of reruns
and then it will be may!

**************************

Neutral Tones

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.

is it because i am a girl and am having a bad day and am therefore susceptible to wildly windmilling mood swings that coming across this poem again in the hardy bio i am reading today made me cry a little? i had forgotten all about this poem. i was always more of an In Tenebris girl, myself: quiet contemplation of death and cherishing memories blah blah blah. but i remember this poem now. and i remember when i studied it in my modernism class in undergrad, there was a typo in the copy we were reading, and it said "chidden by" instead of "chidden of" god. and—oh—what a wonderful time we all had as pretentious english major kiddies weighing what one would mean over the other, and how it affected not only that particular poem, but the following poems in the collection. money well spent, dad! if i recall correctly, the very next class we spent the whole time on one passage from portrait of the artist—the one in the church?? with the sins "dripping from his lips" as he kneels before the priest that ends with the word "overcome??" i learned a lot about subtext in that class, boy. i seem to have gotten off point, if i was ever on. hardy's poetry is beautiful, that's all. the satires of circumstance part has all the funny ones, but the rest are so gently sad and quiet. never overwrought, just quiet musings on some sad things. i'm having one of those weeks...i think i will go have another cleansing cry...

come to my blog!

[Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Thomas Hardy is best known as one of British literature's greatest writers of fiction, and waited until 1898 (when he was 58 years old) to publish his first book-length collection of poetry, Wessex Poems, he greatly loved that medium, and had actually been writing in it since the 1860s. In the last 30 years of his life, he turned entirely to writing poetry, ultimately publishing eight collections during his lifetime (including a Collected Poems first published in 1919, that went through different editions as he added to his corpus), with a ninth one, Winter Words, published posthumously. The collection reviewed here includes not only all the poetry from the earlier ones (except the Collected Poems), but also all of the previously uncollected verse written by the author, for a total of 947 poems, of which I read 946. (They're helpfully numbered in the text, for easy reference.)

Editor James Gibson (his qualifications aren't stated, but he's clearly a very serious Hardy scholar) contributes a short but helpful Introduction, which provides the above and some additional information, but mostly explains some of the challenges of dating and establishing a text for the poems. Hardy was a perfectionist who sometimes worked on a single poem for decades; and as his extant manuscripts reveal, he revised his poetry a lot, sometimes even after a given poem was published. Gibson's endnotes (which take up about 16 1/2 pages; after a general list of abbreviations, they're numbered by the poem they refer to) are mostly about textual variations. However, he refrained from producing a text-critical edition as such (while expressing the hope that someone else would!); the poems themselves appear straightforwardly, each as one finished text given without variant readings. (I appreciate this, as I'm not into textual criticism as a forced part of my poetry or fiction reading experiences!) He also provides indexes of titles and of first lines. The poems themselves are arranged chronologically in publication order, starting with “Domicilium” (the sub-sections in some of the incorporated collections are taken from the original books, as are the prefaces and the few footnotes, which are all Hardy's own) and finally the previously uncollected verse.

Before this book, I'd read all of Hardy's major novels and some of his short stories; but my acquaintance with his poetry, or of critical appraisal of it, was limited to the few poems contained in British literature textbooks I read as a high school student or homeschooling parent, plus some reading and discussion of a few other poems in the excellent Goodreads group Works of Thomas Hardy. But those discussions piqued my interest enough to embark on a read of this collection. Having now read it, I can say that Hardy is definitely a “traditional” poet, in that he writes structured rather than “free” verse, usually rhymed though sometimes employing blank verse, but always metered. (He can employ a variety of rhyme schemes.) His poetry is well-crafted, usually accessible (there are occasional lines where I can't decipher his meaning, but that's my fault, not the poem's; the author's intention is to be understood) and frequently addresses serious themes. Many of his poems are short and pithy (which often are my favorite kind, at least for lyric poetry); but he can also write poems that are several pages long. In the latter cases, though, he (usually!) has something to communicate that's worth communicating in several pages. A lifelong rural Dorset resident, his poetry often has a strong sense of place and of connection to and appreciation of the places, natural world, and people (superscriptions of poems to actual individuals, usually identified by their initials, are frequent) of the area. Some poems also have a palpable connection to music, sometimes linked to the folk ballads Hardy grew up with.

A number of his poems are narrative poems that tell stories. (Given that fiction is my favorite literary form, I have a basic liking for being told stories; so other things being equal, narrative poems are often my own favorite type of verse.) One suspects that many of these are based on actual events the author heard in his childhood as handed-down local lore. All of the stories fascinate (though many of them are grim, such as “San Sebastian,” which should come with a rape-reference trigger warning). But a large part of their fascination comes from the fact that they often tend to feature ordinary people in morally and emotionally complex and stressful situations where any behavioral choice is going to involve shades of gray, and Hardy approaches all of these situations with profound compassion and respect for everyone (or at least, most of those) involved. These poems can pack some of the same emotional wallop found in Romantic fiction (another type of literature I quite like), but also evoke serious thought and moral reflection. Some outstanding examples are “The Burghers,” “Her Death and After,” and “The Peasant's Confession,” but others can certainly be cited as well.

A number of poems focus either on the Boer War or World War I, with a dominant theme of sorrow and compassion for the (often ultimate) sacrifice the soldiers and their families are being asked to make, and often a clear-eyed message that there's no legitimate reason that entitles the country to demand such a sacrifice from them. Here there aren't many drum-beating calls to patriotism, and no demonizing of the enemy; the sentiment is mostly one of pacifism. That's perhaps expressed the most explicitly in “The Sick Battle-God;” but the most poignant poems of this group are the many that focus on people rather than on an abstract idea. (Ironically, some of the narrative and other poems set during or referring back to the Napoleonic Wars or other past wars, such as “The Casterbridge Captains” or “The Bridge of Lodi,” express a more traditional admiration of martial prowess. Subconsciously, perhaps, Hardy doesn't mind war so much when it's well in the past and experienced only as a glamorized subject for pleasantly remembered and nostalgic stirring songs and old folk's stories around the fire back in his Dorset childhood; but he sees it as a much uglier matter when it's a present reality that's suddenly threatening the lives of tangible people in his here and now.)

Frequently, the lines in particular poems are ostensibly spoken by another persona, not the poet, so we can't always infer that "I" = Hardy; sometimes it clearly doesn't, and at other times the identification is debatable. For instance, a fair number of poems revolve around romantic love and are supposedly spoken by people who are or were lovers (generally unhappily). The basic interpretive question here is whether these represent imaginary (albeit often realistic) viewpoints presented simply for their dramatic effect, or whether they're autobiographical expressions of Hardy's own early-life romantic experiences. Where the speakers are female, we're clearly dealing with the former sort of thing. In “Ditty,” where the superscription “E.L.G.” is identified by Gibson in one of his notes to refer to Hardy's first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, we're just as clearly dealing with the expression of feelings about a real relationship. (In some other cases, I'd hesitate to make a judgment one way or the other.) Emma's death in 1912 exerted a marked effect on the subsequent poems, many of which express the author's grief at her passing and his remorse for not appreciating her enough in life. This blends in with an increasing stress on death as a theme that's noticeable in the later poetry, sometimes with the idea that it renders life and love meaningless and sometimes with the idea that it's a welcome rest from misery.

In one of his prefaces, he states that his first-person poems "are to be regarded, in the main, as dramatic monologues by different characters." By definition, dramatic monologues express the thoughts of characters other than the poet. Use of the dramatic monologue in Victorian poetry is often associated with Browning; but Hardy also demonstrated a considerable fondness for the technique and a real facility with it. I was particularly struck here by the frequency with which his dramatic monologues have female speakers, and the degree to which he enters into the female viewpoint, particularly and often into the viewpoint of women pregnant out of wedlock. (Their plight is also a prominent theme in other poems that are from a male or third-person perspective.) In his time, these women tended to be stigmatized as moral pariahs, while the fathers of the same children experienced far less social and economic consequences. Hardy does not come across as a "gender feminist" in the current mode (his poems "A Sunday Morning Tragedy" --the title is serious, not ironic-- and “The Ballad of Love's Skeleton,”for instance, would never be printed in any "respectable" establishment publication today, although the former especially is one of the most honest, powerful, and thought-provoking pieces of verse I've read from his pen); but he clearly has a genuine sympathy and compassion for these women, and no use for the sexual double standard. (That's abundantly clear from his novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, as well; and his poem "Tess's Lament," spoken by the title character of that novel, is worth noting in this context as well.) From the standpoint of equalitarian feminists such as myself, his work is definitely feminist-friendly. The literary conceit he uses in “Channel Firing” and some other poems --the consciousnesses (spirits?) of the buried dead speaking as if they were alive-- is the same one the early 20th-century American poet Edgar Lee Masters used throughout his Spoon River Anthology and The New Spoon River. I couldn't help but wonder if Hardy was one of Masters' influences.

Another poem that I'd encountered before (and a favorite), is "The Respectable Burgher" (which has the superscription "On 'The Higher Criticism'" [of the Bible]). Technically, "higher criticism," in literary studies, simply means study of authorship, date, circumstances of writing, etc., as opposed to "lower," or strictly textual, criticism. But where in the 1700s and early 1800s, rationalistic Deism had existed as an openly rival religion distinct from Christianity (albeit not an organized nor relatively very numerous one), in Hardy's generation it had been re-branded as "liberal Christianity" and as such came to dominate higher education. Establishment "higher criticism," in the popular mind, thus became inseparably associated with an agenda of trying to "de-bunk" or discredit the historicity and authority of the Bible. Hardy's title character in this poem declares that, since the "Reverend Doctors" who supposedly speak for the church "now declare" that virtually nothing in the Bible is true or to be taken at face value, he sees no point in going to church. Again, this isn't to be taken as Hardy necessarily stating his own view; he wouldn't have thought of himself as a "Burgher" (businessman). But it definitely expresses a pithy and accurate assessment of why many in the middle-class of his day would lose interest in a church that no longer even claimed to have a supernatural message.

Both "The Lost Pyx," (which relates a medieval Dorset legend as if it were true, but only as a literary conceit) and “The Oxen,” also favorites of mine, refer to folk legends of animals kneeling in response to the incarnation of Christ, in the former poem as manifested in the consecrated communion bread in the titular pyx, and in the latter one referencing the legend that farm animals kneel in their stalls on Christmas night. Both poems show him in what we might call his "wistful agnostic" mood. He's simply recounting the one here as a "mystic tale" --but he enters into it very fully and sympathetically, as one who is perhaps (as he says in "The Oxen") "hoping it might be so." That idea is also expressed in a few other poems, most explicitly in “The Impercipient.” The short “A Christmas Ghost-Story” actually evinces a respect for Christ and his teaching, though the ostensible speaker is the “phantom” of a slain soldier, not the poet himself.

On the other hand, the long poem “Panthera” (of which I only read a small part, and don't plan to bother reading in its entirety) and “Galilee” are both based on the idea that Jesus was conceived through Mary's indulgence in illicit sex. The former adopts, as a literary conceit –though, again, that device doesn't mean the author is literally asserting its truth-- the slur, first asserted by the second-century pagan apologist Celsus and subsequently repeated by some Talmudic and medieval Jewish writers, that Jesus was sired by a Roman soldier named Pantera, a common name or nickname in the Roman army. (Ironically, it was also later spread by the Nazis as part of their anti-Semitic propaganda, though in fairness to Hardy he didn't personally hold Nazi-like or anti-Semitic views.) Obviously, if it had a factual basis, it would have been asserted already in the first century, and virtually no serious scholars of any persuasion endorse it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberiu... . Poems like “God's Funeral” and “A Philosophical Fantasy” reject traditional theism, though the latter toys with the idea that the universe has some sort of impersonal creative entity that might be growing towards consciousness and (hopefully) benevolence.

Inferring the totality of Hardy's beliefs from specific single poems is a dicey enterprise, since as he noted in his own preface to his second collection, they were written over a period of time and under the influence of various moods and circumstances, adding that “...the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change.”) My prior impression of Hardy was that he was an existentially pessimistic atheist (albeit one with a basically moral outlook), who abandoned whatever religious beliefs he had as a young man under the influence of Darwinism. The latter influence was certainly there, and his view of religion was certainly skeptical. There's also no doubt that he had a lively awareness of the tragic quality that often characterizes human life, and he clearly saw the problem of theodicy (that is, the seeming clash between the concept of a good God and the existence of suffering and evil) as insoluble. Having now read virtually all of his poems, I'd now say that it's fairer to say that he oscillated, depending on his moods, between atheism and wistful agnostic mode, but with more of a ratchet towards the former, which got more marked as he grew older. (Poems written in his darker, more depressed and more skeptical moods tend not to communicate with me as well as others.)

Half a dozen short selections in Poems of the Past and Present are Hardy's translations of poems by classical or Continental authors. Personally, I found these mostly moderately enjoyable, but not as interesting as the expressions of the author's own poetic voice.

Recently, while rereading Hardy's short story "An Imaginative Woman," in which one important male character is a published poet, I ran across this forgotten paragraph:
"Trewe's verse contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent minor poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant rather than finished. Neither symboliste nor decadent, he was a pessimist in so far as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition. Being little attracted by excellences of form and rhythm apart from content, he sometimes, when feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets in the loosely rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right- minded reviewer said he ought not to have done."
Although I haven't been able to document that Hardy was criticized by reviewers for his own use, at times, of the Elizabethan sonnet (though I wouldn't doubt that they might have!), from what I've read so far, every other descriptor of character Robert Trewe's poetry here applies to Hardy's own. So I think we're justified in thinking that Trewe is deliberately modeled, in some particulars, on Hardy himself, and that the above quote expresses the author's description of his own poetry.

In assessing the overall merit of Hardy's poetic corpus, I'm partly guided by the principle expressed by James Russell Lowell, that literature is fundamentally about expressing “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” Our judgments by that yardstick may legitimately vary, depending on what we see as good, true and beautiful. To the degree that Hardy's poetry is a poetry of religious skepticism and existential pessimism, I don't see it as true; and my rating reflects that. But it also expresses the conviction that, overall, there is much more to Hardy's poetic work than that. There's much of human sympathy and compassion, honest observation of life and experience, genuine expression of valid feelings, all of it embodied in an artistic vision that's real and rooted in the shared common life and cultural heritage of a human community, and beautifully communicated in a poetic voice that's as technically proficient as that of Tennyson or Longfellow. As such, it's a lifetime poetic achievement which has stood the test of time, and a worthy contribution to the great tradition of English-language poetry. It demands no mean investment of time to read it in its entirety, but I'm not sorry to have made the investment.

[Brian Fagan · Rating 1 out of 5]

A word about my rating: my ratings are based on my enjoyment and not about perceived quality. I read Hardy's poetry because I enjoy his novels so much. I always enjoy novels and selected nonfiction more than poetry. Hardy felt very strongly about poetry. He considered it the premier literary form. He wrote novels to make a living. Once he was settled financially, he went back to poetry for the last 30 years of his life. He became one of Britain's most famous poets of his time.

The tone of his poems varies from joyous to somber to even macabre and morbid. Introductions he wrote to sections of the book reveal that he was aware (and somewhat surprised) that a large portion of his readership considered his work to be pessimistic. If you are familiar with his prose, you know that it was often dark and tragic, and that Hardy deeply respected the often cruel hand of fate.

The topics that I noticed he continued to return to in his poetry include memory, admiration, coincidence, death, irony, love - particularly transitory love, the magic of place and connections of place to persons, the passage of time, and ghosts. I was also fascinated to see that he wrote quite a few poems from the perspective of a woman.

Among my favorites is this poem, entitled Best Times:

We went a day's excursion to the stream,
Basked by the bank, and bent to the ripple-gleam,
And I did not know
That life would show,
However it might flower, no finer glow.

I walked in the Sunday sunshine by the road
That wound towards the wicket of your abode,
And I did not think
That life would shrink
To nothing ere it shed a rosier pink.

Unlooked for I arrived on a rainy night,
And you hailed me at the door by the swaying light,
And I full forgot
That life might not
Again be touching that ecstatic height.

And that calm eve when you walked up the stair,
After a gaiety prolonged and rare,
No thought soever
That you might never
Walk down again, struck me as I stood there.

[Captain Sir Roddy, R.N. (Ret.) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just completed the variorum edition of Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, edited by James Gibson (Palgrave, 2001). I actually read every single poem in this massive tome, and all I can say is that it is breathtakingly amazing. I have only read the complete poetic works of two other poets--Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti; and Thomas Hardy is certainly their equal, not only in output, but in quality, and Voice.

Hardy's poetry spans a period of time from the 1860s to his death in 1928. It is somewhat paradoxical, but Hardy is considered a great novelist of the Victorian period, but probably didn't really hit his stride with his poetry until into the 20th century. I loved his story-telling poems, and they are quite numerous. According to Hardy biographers, he made a point of collecting the folktales and ballads that he heard as a child. He then spun this raw material into some of the finest lyrical poems that I've ever read.

Hardy is truly a master at delving into the raw human emotions associated with birth, growing up, life, Love, marriage, and even death. Throughout his poetry, Hardy's poetic voice speaks to the human connection with the Nature of his beloved 'Wessex' countryside; as well as the human suffering that occurs as a result of injustice and intolerance. I was also frankly surprised that there isn't a sense of Hardy 'preaching' in any of his poems; like his fiction, Hardy just tells the story with his poem, and he leaves it to the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Here's one brief example of the power, pathos and drama of Hardy's poetry--

By the Barrows
NOT far from Mellstock--so tradition saith--
Where barrows, bulging as they bosoms were
Of Multimammia stretched supinely there,
Catch night and noon the tempest's wanton breath,

A battle, desperate doubtless unto death,
Was one time fought. The outlook, lone and bare,
The towering hawk and passing raven share,
And all the upland round is called 'The He'th'.

Here once a woman, in our modern age,
Fought singlehandedly to shield a child--
One not her own--from a man's senseless rage.
And to my mind no patriots' bones there piled
So consecrate the silence as her deed
Of stoic and devoted self-unheed.

For many reasons, this sonnet always reminds me of Hardy's beautiful novel, The Return of the Native. Read it aloud to yourself, and experience the full beauty and power of the rhyming and metre of the poem. It is safe to say that I will be revisiting this wonderful volume of Hardy's poetry frequently for the rest of my days.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hardy the Novelist I have known as far back as I can recall but Hardy the Poet has only been known to me for about 6 years. I picked up (saved) a 1928 edition of collected poems out of a recycling bin which I now cherish and which is constantly at my elbow. The Complete Poems (paperback) I acquired in order to take it on the road, and for it to be well handled and take the abuse (not intended) which my cherished fragile hard-back 1928 edition may not tolerate. I now consider Hardy (like D.H. Lawrence) to be a better poet than novelist. I really still enjoy his novelist, but Hardy IMHO as a poet brings a pathos and insight that is rare and genuine to the verse. Some critics consider his poems dated and too Victorian but I dare anyone to read “She (At His Funeral)” and say it is dated and irrelevant.

[Markus · Rating 5 out of 5]

955 beautiful poems, mostly a heartbreak, the poet has succeded to write on every thinkable shade of
love, romance, comedy, tragedy and drama of life.
Incredibly witty and intelligent, I only regret my own feeble memory beeing unable to keep these poems in my mind. It would be nice to call them up at will and speak them out in the right mood and company.
I will keep this book now next to Emily Dickinsons poems, giving it the rank of shared favorites.
A must read for poetry lovers.

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hardy was a prolific writer. I found many gems and some dross. After renewing this book from the library 6 times I’ve decided to buy my own copy.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hardy, Hardy, Hardy... a brilliant novelist, but as a poet, he was uneven at best. He has moments of lyric brilliance in such poems as "The Darkling Thrush", but far too often, his poems have an air of the trivial. They are pretty - sometimes beautiful - rarely moving though, and even less often is there a hint of depth.

Worth reading for the best poems though.

[Dustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry like art is subjective to the eye of the beholder. Even in the midst of difficult text the subtle human experience of trudging through the past can bring on melancholy of our own lives and recent past.

[Rosa Ramôa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A felicidade não depende do que nos falta, mas do bom uso do que temos". (Thomas Hardy)

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well it has taken me eight months to get through, but it was definitely worth it. Philip Larkin thought Thomas Hardy the greatest of the Twentieth Century poets, and reading through the complete poems you see the similarities between the two. Both were experts in form and both managed that very difficult task of combining form, rhyme and meter with interesting and complex ideas. The range of Hardy's forms is quite astonishing. Here is someone who evidently played with poetry for fun (and with just under 1000 published poems clearly didn't get bored). Yes, a good 75% must be on the same theme of thwarted love (as with the novels) but even within these there is variety.

I suppose my main reason for reading the collected poems were to discover new and enjoyable poems. I discovered a few, but as so often is the case, the best ones are those that your attention has already been drawn to. I'm pleased that I persevered, however.

[Joelle Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joelle Still Reads Her Bookcase #10

Hardy always claimed that he was a poet who was forced to write novels in order to make a living. If you read these poems you can understand that sentiment! His later books, such as "Tess of the D'ubervilles" and "Jude the Obscure," reflect a mature and weary Hardy. So too do these poems go through transitions, particularly the ones written during and after WWI. Hardy was an animal lover, a man who sympathized with adultery - he himself had numerous emotional affairs and then a mistress - and also bemoaned the day's modern mores. Clearly he was not a long-suffering Victorian descrying birth out of wedlock, and the general decay of society. Some poems are funny; some poems are mocking and almost cruel. All reveal different sides about this enigmatic author, who felt that he had stifled his soul every time he wrote a book. This work is Hardy cutting loose all chains to his soul, and refusing to ever conform again.

[Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Hardy novels, and I was not disappointed by his poetry. Sure, there are quite a few that were not five stars, but there were quite a few that were six stars, to use Spinal Tap scoring.

Hardy is the master of the plot twist and social commentary. His novels shock the conscience that tragic events do occur and society at best reinforces the tragedy (at worst it causes and spreads its misfortune to other lives). His poems capture this element of his novels and bring more that only poetry can.

I found myself naturally memorizing lines simply because of their beauty. For example, The Bullfinches opening stanza:

Brother Bulleys, let us sing
From the dawn till evening! -
For we know not that we go not
When the day's pale pinions fold
Unto those who sang of old.

This stanza is a perfect example of Hardy's expertise with poetic rhythm, rhyme, image, etc. He sings here not only with the birds but also with all the poets of old.

[Chamodi Waidyathilaka · Rating 3 out of 5]

•He was sensitive to the future, having visited younger authors like William Butler Yeats, Siegfried Sassoon, and Virginia Woolf.
• His war poems addressed the horrors of his present, including the Boer War and World War I.
• Hardy's career spanned the Victorian and the modern eras, with his novels Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895).
• From 1898 until his death in 1928, Hardy published eight volumes of poetry, about one thousand poems in his lifetime.
• His lyric poetry is his most widely read, characterized by a pervasive fatalism and a deep connection to his life.
• The Emma poems, written after his wife's death in 1912, are some of the "finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry."

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A master of meter and rhyme combines his erudition and linguistic fluency to craft gorgeous poems to hunt the heart’s elusive quarry, curse the erosion of memory and the corrosion of time, decry the ravages of war and its wastage, and wag his eloquent tongue at a god who has turned a blind eye on the poet’s pain and let the Garden go to seed.

Favorite poems:
“Neutral Tones”
“Drummer Hodge”
“The Darkling Thrush”
“Bereft”
“Shut Out That Moon”
“New Year’s Eve”
“The Going”
Your Last Drive”
“A Poet”
“For Life I Had Never Cared Greatly”
“I Looked Up from My Writing”

[Jackson Cyril · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sorta like if Mendelssohn's "Songs without Words" were rendered into nineteenth-century English verse-- and generously sprinkled throughout with a helping of melancholy.

[LadyH39 · Rating 1 out of 5]

-love poetry so trying new poets
-wasn't for me
-don't enjoy the style
-difficult read
-will however try his books another time

[Jen Well-Steered · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of people I know hate Thomas Hardy, 'He's so bleak!' they say. But he's one of my favourite authors. Does that make me a pessimist?

[j.e.rodriguez · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The heart whose sweet reverberances are all time leaves to me."

[Cooper Ackerly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, imaginative, and philosophically rich (though not exactly the most cheerful Christmas read!).

[Jo's Backup Books · Rating 3 out of 5]

3*

[Audrey]

Main goal is to read The Voice

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last thirty years of Thomas Hardy's life was devoted to poetry. During this time after he had eschewed novel-writing he wrote hundreds of poems. These poems spanned a variety of styles including: satires, love poems, lyrics, reveries, and songs. The topics also spanned a great number including some focused on the Wessex countryside where he set his well-known novels. The result of all this poetic creation is a collection that rivals that of the greatest poets in the English-speaking world. I would recommend this volume to all who revere fine poetry.

The Six Boards

Six boards belong to me:
I do not know where they may be;
If growing green, or lying dry
In a cockloft nigh.

Some morning I shall claim them,
And who may then possess will aim them
To bring to me those boards I need
With thoughtful speed.

But though they hurry so
To yield me mine, I shall not know
How well my want they'll have supplied
When notified.

Those boards and I — how much
In common we, of feel and touch
Shall share thence on, — earth's far core-quakings,
Hill-shocks, tide-shakings —

Yea, hid where none will note,
The once live tree and man, remote
From mundane hurt as if on Venus, Mars,
Or furthest stars.

From Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, Collier-Macmillan, London, 1976, pp 820-21.

[Ambar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am living about less than 10 miles from Hardy's cottage. I made second visit and try to understand the life of Dorset's landscape. Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from Madding Crowd gave clear evidences that Hardy portray cottage's landscape into beautiful novel. The poem's book is also help me to understand many old english words -things that I am fascinated about.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved Thomas Hardy's poetry. Reading this for class was an enjoyable experience.

My favorites included: Neutral Tones,Under the waterfall and The Darkling Thrush. I like the melancholic aspects to his narrative and the imagery that he uses. Color is also important in Hardy's poetry.

Hardy is by far one of my favorite poets and this has inspired me to go on and read his novels.

[Kat Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the emotion in Hardy's poetry, you can feel his pain. He wrote mainly about his complicated marriage and I feel as if I lived through it with them. I have been reading his poetry for 20 years and it never gets dull. I couldn't name a favourite because it depends on my mood and what is happening in my life. My favourite poet without a doubt.

[Countess of Frogmere · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Hardy is unusual among writers because he was successful at both novels and at poetry. Additionally, he can be studied as a Victorian or as a Modern writer because he was so long-lived (1840-1928). My favorite poem is "Neutral Tones," about the apathy he and his first wife Emma felt towards their marriage.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

My rating is particularly aimed at the poems of 1912, which I love. They were written after the death of us first wife, with whom latterly he had a fraught relationship. When she died unexpectedly, he mourned the love they had lost before. Lovely.

[Daniel Petrides · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hardy was a poet above all else and with a corpus of work like this it is clear why he felt the urge to registered his passion after June. Check out the self in seeing and beyond the last lamp for two lesser known gems