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The poems declare themselves quite explicitly without any of this biographical information. Its interest lies in what it tells us about the relation between the threads of remembered feeling & detail from which Hardy wove these poems & the finished works of art. He wrote (L 378): ‘I have a faculty (possibly not uncommon) for burying an emotion in my heart or brain for forty years and exhuming it at the end of that time as fresh as when interred…. Query: where was that sentiment hiding itself during more than forty years?’ But it is possible that what he resurrected had been so shaped & coloured by his imagination during its long dormancy as to be very different from the original ‘sentiment’. Florence Hardy is reported as saying, with an irony unusual in her, ‘all the poems about [Emma] are a fiction but a fiction in which their author has now come to believe’ (W. Blunt, Cockerell, London, 1964, 223 n). She may not have been the most reliable judge, since her marriage certainly had to accept some competition from Emma’s memory, but it is no derogation of Hardy’s love or his art to say that these poems are mainly an interpretation of his feelings after Emma’s death, not a record of their marriage.
‘Quid Hic Agis?’ L 32 & 157 Title: 1 Kings 13 & 19 Kalendar: pious archaism (Mowbray’s Churchman’s Kalendar used it till 1967) ironically contrasted with ‘devouring time’
Hardy, like Eliot, attained in a second marriage late in life to a younger woman a happiness that had been denied him earlier. Mrs Henniker brought Florence Dugdale to visit the Hardys at Max Gate in 1904 when she was 26. She helped him with research in the British Museum for The Dynasts. Ten years later he married her at the age of 74 (L 363). L xxxv–viii were written by her. See V. Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (London, 1953, 89–94), for a descript on of their life together.
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© 1977 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Creighton, T.R.M. (1977). Love. In: Poems of Thomas Hardy. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15833-1_2
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