{"id":180,"date":"2019-05-07T04:52:50","date_gmt":"2019-05-07T04:52:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engp04.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=180"},"modified":"2019-05-07T12:37:08","modified_gmt":"2019-05-07T12:37:08","slug":"g-m-hopkins-and-thomas-hardy","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/engp04\/chapter\/g-m-hopkins-and-thomas-hardy\/","title":{"rendered":"G. M. Hopkins and Thomas Hardy"},"content":{"raw":"
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Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844 \u2013 1889) and Thomas Hardy (1840 \u2013 1928) are two very important Victorian writers who, though belonging to an age that had moved beyond romanticism, carried a sense of the romantic while trying to comprehend the real yet mystical appeal of nature. Hardy is better known as a novelist than a poet; Hopkins is better known as a Jesuit priest than a poet. If one were to ask \u201cwhat is common between them?\u201d the answer would be; both had a passionate desire to understand the power of nature and its influence on human beings. Hardy\u2019s disappointment with human will led him to his belief in fate; he experimented with naturalism seeking an alternative theology in nature. Hopkins, in spite of his theological training, was caught in a bind between aesthetic truth and the truth offered by Christian theology. If Hardy attempted to find in nature an alternative to God, Hopkins tried to find God in every aspect of nature. This module will try to explore the literary styles of these two Victorian poets by examining major preoccupations in their poetry.<\/p>\r\n

Poetry of G.M Hopkins<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Born on 28th July 1844 to Anglican parents, Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism in 1866 under the influence of John Henry Newman who he met at Oxford. His tutors at Oxford were Walter Pater and Benjamin Jowett. He was greatly influenced by the \u201caesthetic theories of Pater and John Ruskin and the poetry of devout Anglicans George Herbert and Christina Rossetti.\u201d His spiritual search landed him in the religious order of Jesuits in 1868. Initially, he believed that his poetic interests may run into conflict with commitment as a Jesuit priest. Interestingly, except for a few less known poems scattered here and there in journals, his poems never got published in his own lifetime. He used send his poems to Robert Bridges, his friend at Oxford, who \u201carranged for their publication in 1918.\u201d Among the better known poems of Hopkins are Windhover\u00a0(1877), The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875), The Caged Skylark (1877), God\u2019s Grandeur (1877), Pied Beauty (1877) et al.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Hopkins invented his own style of poetry by experimenting with sounds and rhythm. He created his own terms of poetic style with \u2018inscape,\u2019 \u2018instress\u2019 and \u2018sprung rhythm.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

Inscape and Instress<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Hopkins used these terms, which are by no means easy to understand, in his journals. Inscape is supposed to mean \u201cthe unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things,\u201d and \u201cinstress\u201d is supposed to be \u201cthe force of being which holds the inscape together.\u201d Glenn Everett opines that the concept of inscape has much to share with \u201cWordsworth\u2019s \u2018spots of time,\u2019 Emerson\u2019s \u2018moments\u2019 and Joyce\u2019s \u2018epiphanies\u2019.\u201d If one looks at inscape and instress from the point of view of logic, they seem more like differentiation and integration in calculus; both mutually contradictory and complementary at the same time.<\/p>\r\n

Sprung rhythm<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Sprung rhythm was Hopkins experiment with metrical pattern of English poetry. He used the term to refer to \u201ca complex and very technically involved system of metrics which he derived partly from his knowledge of Welsh poetry.\u201d Consider these lines from the poem Pied Beauty<\/em>, for example:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;<\/p>\r\n

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;<\/p>\r\n

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Landscape plotted and pieced\u2014fold, fallow, and plough;<\/p>\r\n

And \u00e1ll tr\u00e1des, their gear and tackle and trim.<\/p>\r\n

Here, he uses a stress-timed rhythm rather than a syllable-<\/p>\r\n \r\n

timed rhythm making it sound more<\/p>\r\n

like a conversation; also perhaps like rap music.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nUnderstanding Hopkins\u2019 Poetry: God, Nature and Hopkins<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Born in Stratford near London, Hopkins spent most of his childhood days in Oakhill, Hampstead. The green surroundings of his growing up years had a lasting influence on him so that; nature became a recurring motif in many of his important poems. Bob Blaisdell quotes Norman White to reiterate this point: \u201cHopkins had the advantages of the countryside and the largest city in the world. He could go to the galleries, special exhibitions, museums, churches, meetings, open-air spectacles, the London parks, and theatres. As a country boy he became accustomed to trees and open skies\u201d (Blaisdell vii). After joining the Jesuits, however, he decided to burn his old drafts \u201cwithout being asked to do so\u201d (ix) and devoted himself more to his new religion.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

His priestly profession continued to pull him in a different direction, even as the memories of Oakhill; full of \u201cfields of oak, hawthorn and elder trees, and wild rose and woodbine, where the family walked and sketched\u201d (101), haunted him for the rest of his life. While at the University in Oxford, Hopkins frequently walked \u201caround the Thames valley\u201d to fill \u201cempty afternoons,\u201d \u201cenjoying the countryside on an array of possible routes\u201d (101). Nevertheless, much of his walking also \u201cinvolved visiting churches and manor houses\u201d (102). Like most of his Victorian contemporaries, Hopkins was obsessed with minute aspects of the external world that led him to a \u201cconception of nature and society that anticipated ecological theory\u201d (105). His interest in art, John Parham suggests, helped him develop \u201cA Ruskinian aesthetic of nature\u201d (105) and his\u00a0interest in architecture led him to conservatism of his religious and political beliefs\u201d (105). The latter also shaped his understanding of how \u201cVictorian society was re-shaping its natural and human environments\u201d (105).<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Dennis Sobolev in his article titled \u201cBeing and Contemplation,\u201d observes that \u201cThe tripartite relation between God, man and nature is the cornerstone of both Hopkins\u2019s philosophy and his poetics\u201d (Sobolev 37). He goes on to add that \u201cthe exact structure of this relation still awaits slow and detailed analysis\u201d (37) though, many scholars have dwelt upon the subject for a long time. According to him, Hopkins believed that poetry should avoid general \u201ctrans-existential\u201d (38) descriptions, on the contrary, the world should be described \u201cin its uniqueness and singularity, with close attention to the details of its shapes and colors\u201d (38). Hopkins\u2019 interest in the \u201csingularity of the world\u201d (38) is a characteristic feature of his poetry and thought. Sobolev observes that both his poetry and \u201cthe verbal landscapes of the journal\u201d(38) exemplify Hopkins\u2019 desire to catch \u201cas he says in \u2018The Windhover\u2019, the most exact vision of the world in all its transient singularity\u201d (38).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

A deeply insightful criticism of Hopkins\u2019 poetic practice comes from none other than the famous Cambridge critic; a leading figure of new criticism, I.A Richards. Joseph Pizza remarks that the inherent problem of reading and understanding Hopkins poetry stems from what \u201cI.A Richards termed the \u2018belief problem\u2019\u201d (Pizza 47). Pizza, justifiably so, agrees with Richards that the \u201ccentral difficulty\u201d (47) of Hopkins\u2019 poetry was the deep schism he saw between \u201cpriestly convictions and poetic ambitions\u2019 (47). For Richards, the emotive form of poetic language was of different kind than \u201cthe referential beliefs of science and religion\u201d (47). Richards would prefer to keep poetry in a referential frame different from the two prominent, though problematic, domains of the 20th century; whereas Hopkins, writing in the previous century, tried to bring all\u00a0three under a single frame. For the deeply religious Hopkins, aesthetics, religion, nature and science had to coexist altogether under a single, unitary God.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nThe Wreck of the Deutschland: An Analysis<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Hopkins moved to \u201cSt Beunos\u2019 in North Wales\u201d in 1874 to continue his priesthood studies; he loved the natural environment surrounding Beunos\u2019, and here he also set out to master the \u201cmusicality of the welsh language\u201d( Blaisdell ix) which later became \u201ccharacteristic of his \u2018chiming\u2019 verse\u201d (ix). He was encouraged to give a new lease of life to his poetic talent and in the midst of studies he ventured to write his first long poem Deutschland<\/em>.<\/p>\r\n

What prompted Hopkins to write Deutschland?<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

On 4th December 1875, a passenger ship SS Deutschland set sail from Germany to New York via Southampton with \u201c123 emigrants,\u201d which included five Franciscan nuns \u201cexiled from Germany\u201d (ix). The ship ran into rough weather on 6th December and \u201cran aground on the Kentish Knock; a shoal off Harwich.\u201d The nuns were \u201camong the many who drowned\u201d (x) and Hopkins, overwhelmed by an ebbing sentiment of religiosity, began to meditate over the issue. Balisdell refers to Elizabeth Schneider\u2019s study to suggest that the main theme of the first part of the poem \u201cis his own conversion;\u201d of the second part, \u201chis hoped-for conversion of the whole of signal\u201d (x).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The theme of the poem makes it an elegy, though some would like to call it an ode. Peter Cash, analyzing the poem in English Association Bookmarks, suggests that \u201cHopkins encounters acute difficulties in understanding God\u2019s ways\u201d (Bookmarks 4) despite being a devout catholic, and struggles to resolve them in this poem. According to him, the poem is a \u201ctheodicy\u201d (trying to\u00a0prove the existence of god based on a \u201cprior natural theology\u201d) that sets out, like Milton in<\/span>Paradise Lost<\/em>, \u201cto justify the ways of god to man\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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The poem has two parts; the first part consists of ten stanzas of \u201clyrical self-analysis\u2019 (4) and the second part has twenty five stanzas where \u201cHopkins narrates events\u201d (4). The narrations of events, with no sequential or logical connections pose great difficulty for readers unfamiliar with the politico \u2013 religious context of the times. In the first part of the poem, Hopkins takes the reader \u201cinside his priest\u2019s cell\u201d and confesses \u201chis innermost thoughts\u201d (4). Cash proposes that \u2018it is helpful to imagine\u201d (4) Hopkins\u2019 \u201cconsternation\u201d upon reading \u201cThe Times <\/em>report\u201d on the wreck \u201cin his lonely cell\u201d (4). At first, He reacts with agony upon hearing that \u201cgod has permitted such a catastrophe,\u201d next, \u2018his agony intensifies\u201d on learning about the death of the five Franciscan nuns who had boarded the ship only to escape \u201cProtestant persecution in their homeland (the Falck Laws)\u201d (4) https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Falk_Laws . \u201cGod\u2019s harsh treatment of his own true followers\u201d seems to have unsettled the Roman Catholic convert Hopkins.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

His reflection upon the incident becomes an exegesis where he tries to understand the meaning\u00a0 of God. The first part begins with his doubt about god\u2019s ways; in the opening lines, he wonders how a merciful god can also be a \u201ctaker away\u201d of lives committed to religious service. Through the rest of the rest of stanzas, we find a further complication of the problem of faith, though finally it is resolved with the understanding that such sacrifice is necessitated by God\u2019s will. In Part the second, Hopkins embarks upon a description of the shipwreck. Stanza 12 that marks the opening of the second part begins as a factual description though, the rhetorical question why god didn\u2019t \u201creeve them in;\u201d save the souls of those he drowned, continues to trouble him. Nevertheless, as we proceed further, it becomes clear that Hopkins\u2019 desire is to see the wreck of\u00a0the ship more as a \u201cphysical manifestation of god\u2019s terrifying power and tender mercy\u201d (Cash 8- 9), than as a mere accident that turned fatal.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nThomas Hardy\u2019s Poetry<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Readers who are more familiar with Thomas Hardy\u2019s novels will certainly know about his approach to the mystery of the universe. The underlying tone of what most critics of his fiction referred to as devout pessimism continues to reverberate even in his poems. However, Hardy strongly \u201cobjected to being called a pessimist\u201d (Bailey 569) during his later years and preferred to call himself \u201can evolutionary meliorist\u201d (569). Meliorism is a philosophical term which means a \u201cbelief that the world can be made better by human effort.\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Hardy began writing poetry in the 1860\u2019s; he soon turned to writing novels and established himself a major Victorian novelist. However, the suffocating orthodoxy of Victorian religious institutions was too much for Hardy to bear; the public outrage against his novel Jude the Obscure <\/em>(1895) and the charge of obscenity disappointed him so much that he decided to stop writing novels the same year. Public controversy over the novel was matched by \u201cprivate hostility as he became \u201cestranged from his increasingly evangelical wife Emma,\u201d who felt betrayed by the novels \u201cbitter reflections on marriage and religion.\u201d \u201cThe bulk of his poetry was thus produced between his fifty-fifth birthday and his death at the age of 87.\u201d At the age 58 \u201che published his first collection of poetry, Wessex Poems (1898).\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Hardy\u2019s most moving poems were however written after \u201chis wife Emma\u2019s death in 1912.\u201d Once he established himself as a poet, he refused to admit that his \u201cpoetic career was secondary in any sense.\u201d He even claimed later that he was only returning to what was \u201chis original <\/em>impulse.\u201d Although many critics suggested that he should have stuck to his original trade of novel writing,\u00a0there is enough evidence to show \u201chow seriously Hardy took his second career.\u201d His disappointment with reviews of his poetry, and his use of poems on significant public events such as \u201cthe Boer War, the turn of the century, the death of the Queen, even the Titanic disaster; his research into prosody in the British Museum,\u201d all suggest that Hardy was as much passionate about poetry as with fiction.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Bailey identifies three phases in the development of Hardy\u2019s poetry. According to him, the first phase reflects Hardy\u2019s views of the world that echo his reading of \u201cDarwin, Huxley, Spencer, and J. S. Mill\u201d (570). Hardy read Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution \u201cabout 1862\u201d and began reading Schopenhauer \u201cabout 1866\u201d; this period approximately marks the first phase of his development. Poems of this phase express \u201cthe pessimistic view that insensate natural law rules the world\u201d (570). The second phase \u201cextends from about 1886\u201d until the completion of The Dynasts<\/em>, which Hardy himself called \u201can epic-Drama\u201d in verse of the Napoleonic wars, in 1908\u201d (570). Bailey suggests that the poems of this phase reflect his philosophic speculations borrowed from the \u201cmetaphysics of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard Von Hartmann\u201d (570). He tended to personify natural law as \u201cuniversal will\u201d along the lines of Schopenhauer, or as \u201cunconscious mind, postulated by Von Hartmann\u201d (570). However, in the third phase that Bailey identifies as beginning after 1908, Hardy\u2019s works clearly stand testimony to an \u201cinterpretation of natural law that he called evolutionary meliorism\u201d (570).<\/p>\r\n

Phase the First of Hardy\u2019s Poems: Agnostic Pessimism<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Hardy didn\u2019t turn an agnostic overnight; he was as religious as anybody else, \u201che had taught Sunday school,\u201d learned Greek on his own to read \u201cold testament in the original\u201d (570). However, when he moved to London in 1862 to work in architect\u2019s office, he read many books\u00a0that \u201cundermined his faith\u201d (570-571); the most destructive of them all was Darwin\u2019s <\/span>Origin of Species<\/em>. By mid-1860\u2019s he has given up faith in god. Renouncing faith in a society steeped in dogma was not easy; he grieved the loss in the poem \u201cIn Tenebris\u201d (1895-96)\u201d that his eyes \u201chave not the vision in them to discern what to [others] is so clear\u201d (571).Here he seems to regret his inability to believe, just as in another poem \u201cImpercipient\u201d (1898), he cries out to those who labeled him a \u201cwillful agnostic\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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\u201c0, doth a bird deprived of wings\/ Go earth-bound wilfully!\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Nevertheless, despite such desire to believe, Hardy rejected faith both in god and \u201cin any discoverable purpose in the Universe\u201d.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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His early poems express deepest pessimism as seen in his novels. The poem \u201cDiscouragement\u201d dated \u201c1863-67\u201d attacks \u201chuman folly and social convention rather than injustice in natural law\u201d (571) in the same way his first novel The Poor Man and the Lady <\/em>did. In the poem, \u201cNaturing Nature, operates in the processes of birth, the pivots of mutation\u201d (571). Hardy\u2019s thought, as Bailey rightly suggests is that human beings mate for \u201ccaprice, social convention, and bodily appetite,\u201d (571-572). But, Mother Nature \u201cstriving towards perfection\u201d (572), finds:<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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\u201cHer loves dependent on a feature's trim,<\/p>\r\n

A whole life's circumstance on hap of birth,<\/p>\r\n

A Soul\u2019s direction on a body\u2019s whim\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

The poet is struck with \u201cvisions ghast and grim\u201d as he observes the Mother being defeated, \u201cracked and wrung by her unfaithful lord.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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The same thought is reinforced in \u201cAt a Bridal\u201d (1866), where Hardy questions if nature has any purpose in uniting \u201can idealist young man,\u201d desiring to father \u201ca stolid line.\u201d And, Nature\u2019s answer would be \u201cThat she does not care\/ If the race all such sovereign types unknows.\u201d Mother Nature would not guide her creatures through whom the whole process of reproduction operates, though she \u201cmight improve the race\u201d (572). In the poem \u201cHeiress and Architect\u201d written in 1867, the architect answer all the queries of \u201can heiress of life\u201d in a mode that sounds like the denial of a denial. When the heiress says \u201cshe wishes to live gaily and generously,\u201d the architect says \u201cthe soul thrives on pain,\u201d to her \u201cplan for a lover\u2019s paradise,\u201d he \u201cobjects that love fades,\u201d and about \u201cmeditative seclusion,\u201d he states that \u201clife is short and she will die\u201d (572).<\/p>\r\n

Phase the Second: Hardy\u2019s Refuge in the Metaphysics of Schopenhauer<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Bailey proposes that the second phase of Hardy\u2019s poetics is largely influenced by the metaphysics of \u201cArthur Schopenhauer\u2019s The World as Will and Idea <\/em>and later Eduard Von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious<\/em>\u201d (573). Most of Hardy\u2019s poems between 1886 and 1893 are \u201cnot dated,\u201d probably because he wrote very few poems during these busy years when he was engrossed in reading. Almost all poems that treat the will \u201cassume it to be a mental force, an unconscious mind\u201d (574). Hartmann believed that the unconscious is \u201cimmanent in all creatures\u201d (574), nevertheless, as consciousness begins to prevail throughout the universe, \u201cthe unconscious will may become conscious\u201d (574). Hardy\u2019s \u201cmetaphysical meliorism\u201d that eventually developed into his \u201cevolutionary meliorism\u201d has its germ in the philosophical speculations of these two German philosophers.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

In the poem \u201cIn a Wood\u201d dated 1887, Hardy presents a city dweller \u201cweary of city strife\u201d (576), retreating to the woods in search of \u2018sylvan peace.\u2019 However, he decides to return to humankind\u00a0when he observes \u201cthe Darwinian struggle among vines and trees: ivy chokes, drippings from one tree poison another, and cankers\u201d all suggesting \u201cblack despair\u201d (576). Terribly disillusioned by what he had imagined as the benevolence of nature, he turns back to where \u201cnow and then, are found\/ Life-loyalties\u201d (576). \u201cLife-loyalties\u201d suggests Hardy\u2019s observation that only humans, by virtue of being higher creatures are capable of ethical responses.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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In another poem \u201cThe Lacking Sense,\u201d Hardy asks Time (Ancient Mind) why Nature\u2019s works\u00a0 are \u201cjoyless to her creation\u201d and \u201cwhy natural law causes \u2018cramps, black humours, wan decay, and baleful blights\u2019\u201d (576). Time replies with \u201c\u2026sightless are those orbs of hers?-which bar to her omniscience Brings those fearful unfulfilments\u2026,\u201d suggesting that nature is blind \u201cthough it seeks to be perfect\u201d (576). Thus, nature \u201cunwittingly\u2026 wounds the lives she loves\u201d (576).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

In the poem \u201cDoom and She,\u201d Mother Nature who is the \u201cWorld Weaver\u201d talks with Doom \u201ca symbol of process\u201d (577). The Mother \u201cis unlit with sight\u201d (blind) while Doom is \u201cvacant of feeling\u201d (unfeeling), however the Mother becoming conscious says:<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Methinks I catch a groan,<\/p>\r\n

Or multitudinous moan,<\/p>\r\n

As though I had schemed a world of strife,<\/p>\r\n

Working by touch alone<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Doom answers the doubt of the Mother with the questions \u201cwhat is Grief? \/ And what are Right, and Wrong, \/ And Feeling . . . ?\u201d (577) and also wonders why \u201cweak\u201d is worse than \u201cstrong.\u201d The poem begins with speculation and ends with more questions and doubts as the Mother, without answering Doom \u201cbroods in sad surmise\u201d (577).<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Bailey suggests that Hardy found among Hartmann\u2019s speculations the idea that \u201cgrowth of consciousness in the Will might bring about remorse and discreation, or cosmic suicide\u201d (577). In an exceptional poem \u201cBefore Life and After\u201d (1909), Hardy debates the \u201cbirth of consciousness and therefore pain\u201d (577) in a process that was \u201cpreviously mechanical\u201d (577). That was when \u201cthe disease of feeling germed, \/ And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong\u201d (577). He hopes for an end to this disease \u201cEre nescience shall be reaffirmed\u201d (nescience means ignorance) but wonders \u201cHow long, how long?\u201d (577).<\/p>\r\n

Phase the Third: Hardy\u2019s Scientific Meliorism<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Bailey argues that in the third phase of his development, \u201cHardy based his meliorism on science\u201d (577). Interpreting the process of evolution better than he did in 1860\u2019s, he arrived at his evolutionary meliorism. In this phase, Hardy continued to use symbols of \u201cmetaphysical images he developed in the period of The Dynasts<\/em>\u201d (582). In the poem \u201cAn August Midnight\u201d (1899), on observing \u201clonglegs, a moth, a bumblebee, and a fly on his writing table\u201d (582), Hardy ponders why in spite of being \u201cGod\u2019s humblest they!\u201d these tiny creatures, \u201cThey know Earth's secrets that know not I\u201d (582).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Hardy introspects on \u201canother aspect of the same thought\u201d in the famous short poem \u201cThe Darkling Thrush\u201d (1900). \u201cAn aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,\/ In blast- beruffled plume\u201d breaks suddenly into \u201ca full-hearted evensong\/ Of joy illimited\u201d on a bleak December evening when the \u201cThe ancient pulse of germ and birth\/ Was shrunken hard and dry\u201d (582). The poet who saw in the weather \u201clittle cause for caroling,\u201d the outburst of the thrush which appeared as if \u201cthere trembled through\/ His happy good-night air\/ Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew\/ And I was unaware\u201d (583). The same theme recurs in \u201cThe Last Chrysanthemum\u201d (1901) where the\u00a0flower seems to deliberately delay \u201cits lovely blossom till summer has gone\u201d (583); it blooms \u201c\u2018in witlessness\u2019 in the tempests of winter\u201d (583).<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

These three poems reiterate the \u201cecological aspect of evolution\u201d (583); how plants and animals, through minute \u201cdifferentiation and adaptation\u201d (583) fit themselves to \u201cthe conditions of life\u201d (583). The poems written during this phase show Hardy\u2019s changed perspective on evolution. In an early reaction to evolutionary theory as expressed in the poems \u201cDiscouragement\u201d and \u201cAt a Bridal\u201d of 1860\u2019s, Hardy imagined that man would \u201cthrow away\u201d (583) the opportunity nature provides him. However, years later, in his final phase, Hardy placed his hope \u201con man alone\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n

(583) and believed that eventually \u201chuman intelligence may find the upward way\u201d (583) in the natural process of ecological evolution. He states this idea in \u201cA Commonplace Day\u201d (1901) where he supposes that \u201chere and there, in humble ways and places, men are making choices to improve the human lot\u201d (583).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Bailey sums up Hardy\u2019s preconditions for the world\u2019s amendment as a three-tier approach: as a first step man must begin with a \u201cdarkened view of life as a basis for amendment;\u201d second, he should accept the fact that \u201cthe forces of nature are indifferent to human hope\u2026man must rely upon himself,\u201d lastly and most surprisingly, \u201cman must have a religion to guide his ethical choices\u201d (584). Hardy stated the last point in his \u201c\u2018Apology\u2019 to Late Lyrics and Earlier<\/em>\u201d shortly after his discussion of evolutionary meliorism. It must be clarified here that by religion, Hardy did not mean \u201ca religion of revelation and miracles\u201d (586); on the contrary, what he meant is suggested in two significant poems \u201cGod\u2019s Funeral\u201d dated 1908-10 and \u201cThe Graveyard of Dead Creeds\u201d published in 1925.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
you can view video on G. M. Hopkins and Thomas Hardy<\/strong><\/td>\r\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table>\r\nReference<\/strong>\r\n