impersonality of great poetry. We feel it as a sense of
background, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the
culmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is the
culmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seems
to record.

At the basis of great poetry lies an all-embracing realism, an adequacy
to all experience, a refusal of the merely personal in exultation or
dismay. Take the contrast between Rupert Brooke's deservedly famous
lines: 'There is some corner of a foreign field ...' and Mr Hardy's
'Drummer Hodge':--

'Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern heart and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.'

We know which is the truer. Which is the more beautiful? Is it not Mr
Hardy? And which (strange question) is the more consoling, the more
satisfying, the more acceptable? Is it not Mr Hardy? There is sorrow,
but it is the sorrow of the spheres. And this, not the apparent anger
and dismay of a self's discomfiture, is the quality of greatness in Mr
Hardy's poetry. The Mr Hardy of the love poems of 1912-13 is not a man
giving way to memory in poetry; he is a great poet uttering the cry of
the universe. A vast range of acknowledged experience returns to weight
each syllable; it is the quality of life that is vocal, gathered into a
moment of time with a vista of years:--

'Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
For the stars close their shutters and the
Dawn whitens hazily.
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours
The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!
I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy and our paths through flowers.'

[NOVEMBER, 1919.

We have read these poems of Thomas Hardy, read them not once, but many
times. Many of them have already become part of

Aspects of Literature

Notka biograficzna

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