Works of Thomas Hardy discussion

"You see those mothers squabbling there?"
Remarks the man of the cemetery.
"One says in tears, "Tis mine lies here!'
Another, 'Nay, mine, you Pharisee!'
Another, 'How dare you move my flowers
And put your own on this grave of ours!'
But all their children were laid therein
At different times, like sprats in a tin.

"And then the main drain had to cross,
And we moved the lot some nights ago,
And packed them away in the general foss
With hundreds more. But their folks don't know,
And as well cry over a new-laid drain
As anything else, to ease your pain!"

Death and the fear of it has probably been responsible for more Art than any other subject. I have chosen for the next 4 poems, Hardy’s musing on Death and some of it’s more common appurtenances. I have looked through the Complete poems and found 21 poems that mention either Graveyard, churchyard or Burial in the title. Of course there are others that deal with Hardy's musing on Death that just don’t mention it in the Title.

“In the Cemetery” is a poem I have enjoyed for a long time. It’s original in many respects and employs ‘Black Humor’ to a subject that rarely embraces it. The poem is straightforward but does invoke some subtleties. The women who come to mourn their children are not aware of the public works project that has moved their loved ones. A snafu like this if it occurred today would have resulted in lucrative law suites. But in this poem, the “man of the cemetery” seems to be confident that this deed will never surface. The notion of progress and the business aspect of the cemetery business is in conflict with the age old reverence for the dead.

A few words did deserve some pause. I didn’t understand why the term “Pharisee.” was used by one of the mourning women. It doesn’t seem to reflect the New testament usage of the word.“Foss” is defined as a ditch or a moat, usually man-made. “Sprats” are a tiny fish that swim in large shoals, they’re being packed in a tin would be like today's term ‘packed like sardines.’

This poem is part of "Satire of Circumstances in Fifteen Glimpses." We see these mothers in a sad circumstance that they are unaware of. Their children's graves have been moved so their fighting about the flowers is pointless. But their emotions are real because they will never stop grieving for their children.

Connie: I had the same thoughts about the Mothers' misplaced anger towards each other but failed to include it in my comments. My favorite poem of the Graveyards genre is Tony Harrison's "V." It is about a man who visits the grave of his relatives in the city he has grown up in but has since left. The cemetery was built over a mine hole and will eventually collapse. Harrison addresses the physical, economic and moral degeneration of this mining town. It is also a parody of the most famous graveyard poem of all times - Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a County Churchyard.." Spoiler alert - This poem will not be everyone's cup of tea, but is nonetheless brilliant!

Ooooh - I did not know this poem, but surely it must have been when Thomas Hardy was involved in moving all the graves from one site to another, some time during the 1860s.

Thomas Hardy was employed at that time as a young architect in the office of Arthur Blomfield, in Covent Garden, London. The bishop of London employed the firm to disinter a large number of graves from Old St Pancras cemetery. The Midland Railway was being extended through the area, and rails would be placed all the way to make what is now the Kings Cross–St Pancras station complex. They worked overnight.

It was Thomas Hardy's job to help perform the mass exhumation and arrange for a decent reburial elsewhere.

"we moved the lot some nights ago,
And packed them away in the general foss
With hundreds more."

He moved dozens of headstones from the churchyard, and placed them at the base of a young elm tree, while engineering works were being undertaken on the new railway line.



Last year, (2023) the famous "Hardy Tree" toppled. The church’s website called the tree a “monument to the railway encroachments of the 19th century.” It had become a prominent image of life among death.

It's no wonder Thomas Hardy's thoughts wandered to the ghoulish, and the probable reactions of the mourners.

Thanks Don! Great theme for us to look forward to. Now linked.

Jean. Your comments really help us understand the full import of the poem.

This poem was cited by Paul Fussell in his The Great War and Modern Memory as an example of Hardy’s clairvoyance about what we might expect with a world war. And as Fussell pointed out, when we think of the war after World War 1, the shock of mass graves, tragically, is not a shock any longer.

John: Thanks for your interesting comments. I’ve had that book on my to-read list for years, maybe your comments will inspire me to actually read it. We’ve surpassed the brutality of WW1 so much that it is hardly a thing anymore!

Anyone have a thought on why Hardy uses ‘Pharisee?’

Donald, I will give your Pharisee question some thought. I highly recommend Fussell's book. It is both elegiac and beautiful, and remains one of my favorite books.

John: Thanks I will take a look at it!

One of the definitions of Pharisee is a self-righteous person, a hypocrite. When the woman moves the flowers, it's like she's saying my grief is more important than yours. Sometimes coffins were buried in a vertical manner when a graveyard ran out of room.

Thanks for the interesting information and photo, Jean.

Connie: that explanation for ‘hypocrite’ is what Mark Twain would call ‘a stretcher.’ I’m not buying that explanation! Nice try, though!

LOL! Hardy worked for Christian churches as an architect. In the Biblical sense, a Pharisee was someone that was very concerned with obscure rules, as compared to Jesus whose message was to love and treat others the way we would want to be treated.

Hardy had to find a word that rhymed with cemetery, and that's what he came up with!

John: Upon your recommendation, I ordered the Fussell book from my local library. I also saw another of his non-literary books that interest me, The Boys' Crusade:

https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Crusade-N...

The book is about how young draftees were rushed through training and sent to the worst possible combat situation - the Battle of the Bulge. My Uncle was a participant, as was the novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

Donald wrote: "John: Upon your recommendation, I ordered the Fussell book from my local library. I also saw another of his non-literary books that interest me, The Boys' Crusade:

https://www.amazon.com/Boys-Crus..."

I think you will enjoy both of those books. He is a masterful prose writer. And with The Great War book, he brings a gift of insight and empathy.

My Great Uncle, who was the older brother of my Great Aunt who lived in Wayne, served in Patton’s Third Army in Europe. We don’t know the details of his service, but he was a combat infantryman and probably was at the Bulge. In the end, the Army took care of him. He died of lung cancer at the VA hospital — East Orange, I believe — in 1969.

John: Ditto, with Patton's army. My Uncle was a forward artillery observer, so it's quite a miracle that he survived, , since the MOS was one of the most dangerous. When my Aunt died all my Uncle's military records devolved to me. My Uncle told me a funny story about his encounter with General Pillow in a French village. The men in my Uncle's unit were grabbing anything they could in the term of supplies. All they could find were women's' clothes and underwear. So these men wore clothes like women when General Pillow approaches my Uncle and asked why his men were dressed in women's' clothes. My Uncle then started a rant about how the Quartermaster was failing his men. I guess you would have had to been there! (Never could find much information on General Pillow on the internet.)

Connie: I think what Hardy meant by using the word Pharisee is probably lost to us as the term evolved. (Hardy's lifetime saw a great interest in archaeology of the 'HolyLands' and in biblical textual analysis, so maybe the term evolved because of that.) To me it always meant hypocrisy.

As to 'cemetery,' it's not a very hard word to rhyme:

https://www.rhymezone.com/r/rhyme.cgi...

Do you write poetry, Donald? I don't, but it's good to know that a website with rhymes exists if I ever try it.

Connie: I do scribble every now and then. I'm pretty confident that cemetery would give me no trouble at all, nor, do I believe it would have presented much of a problem for Hardy. I doubt if this was a case of over-reaching for a rhyme!

Donald wrote: "John: Ditto, with Patton's army. My Uncle was a forward artillery observer, so it's quite a miracle that he survived, , since the MOS was one of the most dangerous. When my Aunt died all my Uncle's..."

That is a great story, Donald. My family has only bits and pieces of my uncle’s service. He was also older than the average enlisted person. He was born in 1910, so when he started with the Army in 1943, he was in his 30s. He went over with Patton’s Third I think about a month or so after D-Day and finished the war in Germany. We used to say that Uncle Al was the only family member to swim across European rivers in the winter, and there were kernels of truth to that story. He was a no nonsense man.

Donald wrote: "Connie: I do scribble every now and then. I'm pretty confident that cemetery would give me no trouble at all, nor, do I believe it would have presented much of a problem for Hardy. I doubt if this ..."

I was just joking about him finding a rhyme, Donald. A poet of his caliber would have no trouble. He also knew the Bible very well so it was a purposely chosen word.

John: A correction - I got my Civil War history mixed up with WW2. It was not General Pillow, it was General Patch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...

Pillow was a CW General. Patch had a pretty impressive resume, even chasing Poncho Villa into Mexico.

After witnessing all the carnage and gore, my Uncle came home to become a Mortician!!!

Connie: The word was most certainly purposely chosen, the question is still, why?

I've found the Gutenberg edition of Satires of Circumstances: Lyrics and Reveries with Miscellaneous Pieces, (thanks for the title of the collection Connie). It looks as if the first publication was 1914.

Given that significant year, it is interesting to look at the others in the collection. We have read a couple of these, if anyone would like to check our list and read our discussions. (They have all been well on topic except for perhaps an odd related digression.)

Here it is, with links: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2863/...

John: The book’s already in hand; my library doesn’t fool around!

Donald wrote: "John: The book’s already in hand; my library doesn’t fool around!"

Wow, that’s great. The first chapter, which is what I call The Thomas Hardy Chapter, sets the overall tone and theme of the book. And it is wonderful expository writing about some of Hardy’s poems. Fussell makes the point that irony is a central tenet of The Great War, and Hardy is, as he writes, the master of irony.

John: Yup, I have already browsed the entire book, and I did see
The Hardy stuff.

Donald wrote: "Connie: I think what Hardy meant by using the word Pharisee is probably lost to us as the term evolved. (Hardy's lifetime saw a great interest in archaeology of the 'HolyLands' and in biblical text..."

When I read this line I thought that Pharisee was a very complicated word to use. Would these women of their station in life know it? It rang false, in what is a very moving poem.

Thanks so much everyone for your contributions to this discussion. I'm learning so terribly much, even beyond Thomas Hardy.

And especially thanks, Jean, for the photo of the Hardy tree. That one image really brings to reality what happened and what has happened around the world as a result of war, genocide and of course, modern rebuilding.

Pamela: I don’t think there’s enough information in the text of the poem to make any judgement about the women in question. I would think that even if they were illiterate, that the story of the Pharisees was so widespread that they would have known them. Still I don’t know why Hardy used the word!

I’ve been out of town, so I am just now reading through this marvelous discussion. Thank you Donald for leading us through these themed poems.

Thank you Jean for the info about Kings Cross- St Pancras. That’s such a large complex. It gave me a new perspective of what a vast undertaking that was to disinter people.

Thank you Donald and John for sharing your family’s military history. I also have family in the Battle of the Bulge, my grandfather. He was wounded by a piece of shrapnel. It lodged in his neck, and the doctors could never remove it bc it was close to the spine. As a consequence he lived with migraines the rest of his life. But at least he was alive and I got to know him.

About the use of the word “Pharisee”, I think Hardy chose it because it’s an insult. Even today, among Christians, calling someone a Pharisee is an insult. So using that word shows the vitriol the mothers are feeling.

Bridget: Your explanation of what ‘Pharisee’ meant is as good as any that have been discussed. It’s a hard nut to crack. Thanks.