Wessex Poems and Other Verses (Penguin Clothbound Poetry)

Convenient, portable, exquisite, collection.

Poetry was Thomas Hardy's true literary love, but lack of early success led him to take up prose, and he eventually became one of the world's best and most successful novelists. However, he continued writing poems, and when controversies surrounding his novels became too much for his peace of mind, he decided to begin publishing them. 1898's Wessex Tales was his first collection and got generally strong reviews, formally establishing him as a poet. Later collections were more ambitious - thematically deeper and far more diverse in form -, but the first book remains in many ways one of his best. This is unsurprising in that it was not a first book in the usual sense; Hardy was fifty-eight, and the poems were written and perfected over more than thirty years. It is essentially a "Best Of" for what he had written, as many poems were held back. As the title indicates, many are set in Wessex, the part-real, part-dream country based on Hardy's native Southwest England and made world famous in his fiction. They thus have significant appeal to fans of the novels, especially as they deal with classic Hardy themes like unrequited love, fate, chance, humanity's insignificance, and the universe's indifference. Some poems have a youthful vitality missing from later work; though less great than the latter by any reasonable standard, these relatively unpolished works have a charm all their own that fans will distinctly appreciate. The collection opens with "The Temporary The All," the awkward writing of which ironically makes it probably Hardy's least accessible poem, though it is notable for immediately establishing central themes. Anyone intimidated by it should not give up, as there are many classic poems demonstrating Hardy's clarity, concision, and emotional directness. Indeed, some of my favorites are here, including "Hap," "A Confession To A Friend In Trouble," "Neutral Tones," "Her Dilemma," the "She To Him" sequence, "The Impercipient," and "`I Look Into My Glass.'" These and many others are essential to anyone interested in Hardy's poetry. However, it is important to remember that Hardy continued writing poems over the next thirty years, publishing seven collections not counting long dramatic work. More importantly, in contrast to nearly all artists, his work remained consistent. Collected editions are thus ideal, especially as many are available, including some for little or no more than this single book. Only those who for some reason want Wessex Poems as a standalone should bother with anything else, great as this is in itself.

A lot of important poems in here, including the oft-anthologized sonnet "Hap." And--it's free as a Kindle classic, so why not?

I own Thomas Hardy’s poems in the form of a single-volume edition of his Collected Poetry, but as this contains nearly a thousand poems I thought it would be more interesting to review each of his individual collections published during the second half of his career. Although he had written poetry since his youth, he did not publish any in volume form until 1898, when he was 58 years old, and two years after the publication of his last novel, “Jude the Obscure”. ”Wessex Poems” was that first volume; its title reflects the fact that in his novels Hardy had revived the term “Wessex”, previously only used to refer to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of that name, as a description of contemporary south-west England. Although “Wessex Poems” was first published as a single volume in 1898, many of the poems contained in it were written much earlier. These early poems are generally identified by the date printed at the foot. The poems can be divided into two categories, longer narrative poems telling a story in verse and shorter lyrics. Several of the narrative poems are set during the Napoleonic Wars, a period which fascinated Hardy even though he was not born until a quarter-century after the Battle of Waterloo. In “San Sebastian” an old veteran of the Peninsular War is haunted by guilt about having raped a girl while he was in Spain, especially as he now has a daughter of the same age and can see something of the girl in her features. In “The Peasant’s Confession” a Belgian peasant confesses that he misled the French army at Waterloo by giving them false information to ensure that they did not march through his fields and damage his crops. On his deathbed, however, he feels guilty about what he did, and wonders whether Napoleon might have won the battle had he been more honest. Those narrative poems which are set in Wessex often read like a Hardy novel in miniature. In “Her Death and After” the narrator is called to the death-bed of a former sweetheart who left him for another man. She is dying in childbirth, but her husband is not there as their marriage has been an unhappy one. After her death the narrator claims (falsely) that the woman’s child was his; the husband, who has since remarried, rejects the child and allows the narrator to care for it. “The Dance at the Phoenix” is about a woman who in her youth was a wild girl- and the lover of many soldiers in the local regiment. Although she has settled down into a respectable marriage, and is now quite elderly, she is determined to have one last wild dance at the regimental ball given at the Phoenix Inn. In “The Bride-Night Fire” a girl is forced to marry an older man against her will, but is widowed on her wedding-night when her husband dies in a fire, and she can be reunited with her young sweetheart. This is one of Hardy’s few poems written in Wessex dialect. (“Valenciennes”, a narrative poem about another Napoleonic War battle, is another). He provides his reader with a glossary of dialect terms; strangely enough one of these is “fall” (in the sense of autumn), suggesting that although this usage is today well-known because of American influence, it would not have been familiar to speakers of standard British English in 1898. Hardy’s lyric poems in this volume are often marked by a sombre or pessimistic tone. Many of them, to judge by the dates assigned to them, were written as early as the 1860s or 1870s, when Hardy would have been a young man in his twenties or thirties, but few if any of them have the freshness, idealism or optimism one normally associates with youth. As always with Hardy, however, it is difficult to determine how far such poems are autobiographical or reflect his own feelings, although something like “Thoughts of Phena at News of Her Death” is presumably written from personal experience. (The “Phena” of the poem is Tryphena Sparks, Hardy’s cousin and possibly his lover. In the poem he regrets that he seems to have lost touch with her and knows little of what sort of person she was in her later days. “The Impercipient” is written from the viewpoint of an atheist at a cathedral service who cannot understand why he cannot share the faith of those around him. Although the pessimistic views expressed here are not uncommon in Hardy, the title of his poem suggests that he may not have intended any identification between himself and the speaker. The word “impercipient”, after all, does not mean one who sees through the illusions of others. It means one who fails to see something that is really there. The sequence of sonnets entailed “She to Him” are clearly not autobiographical, as they are all written from the point of view of a woman, in each case a woman who has been, or who fears being, abandoned or rejected by a male lover, a fate which often affects the female characters in Hardy’s stories. Of course, unhappy love is not something which only afflicts women, and the male narrators in these poems also frequently suffer from unrequited love, abandonment or bereavement. In the sonnet “Revulsion” the poet ponders whether one should fall in love and concludes that it is better not to do so because he fears the pain of love. Sometimes the unhappiness of these narrators is due to something more fundamental than an unhappy love affair. There is frequently a sense that, to adapt Hamlet’s words, the world is out of joint and that, to adapt WS Gilbert’s, a human’s lot is not a happy one. In “Neutral Tones” the poet recalls his last parting from a lover on a dull winter’s day, a scene which comes back to haunt him with every disappointment in his life. In “Hap” he bemoans not only his misfortunes, but also the fact that those misfortunes are due to unlucky chance and not to the decrees of some malevolent deity, something which he could bear with greater resolution. “The Temporary the All”, written in an imitation of Greek Sapphic metre, is about a man who believes he is settling for second best in his choice of a friend, a lover and his plans for his life, only to find that his imagined ideal never materialises. Although this was Hardy’s first volume of poetry, he had already served a long apprenticeship of over thirty years as a poet before publishing it, and it does not read like the work of an absolute beginner. Many of the poems, in fact, are technically very accomplished. It is not, however, a collection likely to inspire great affection in the reader, largely because its subject-matter is so often depressing.

Essential reading for those who like poetry, and Thomas Hardy. These are his early verses; his best poems came much later.

Non conoscevo Hardy come poeta e ho trovato di notevole interesse i suoi versi, specialmente i lavori meno lunghi. L'edizione gratuita è decorosa e senza errori di scannerizzazione.

purchased for my daughter who is at Uni. She says it's a good read for those into poetry

great poetry

Not read yet but he's supposed to be good isn't he? Hope it's more upbeat than Jude the Obscure