I have a piece out on The London Magazine website, on Hannah Sullivan’s new collection Was It for This, where I talk a lot about her interest in particulars. As I was writing the review, I found myself thinking about a line from Thomas Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’. He was a man who used to notice such things.
Like a lot of other British poets, especially those who come after him in what used to be called the “mainstream” British tradition, Hardy is here interested in the value of small details, in particulars. So are lots of poets who aren’t in this tradition, sure. But some poetry seems to me to be interested in these details in a particular way. This is why I thought of him in relation to Sullivan.
There are lots of reasons why a poet might be interested in describing some particular thing. Let’s say, I don’t know, a discoloured piece of bark that looks a bit like a face. Why should you put this in a poem. Why should the reader care? I’ll lay out some possibilities:
The information about this bark is useful.
The face in the bark is a way of getting at some more profound metaphysical truth. It is a symbol of the nature of reality.
The experience itself teaches us a moral lesson. If I see a face in the tree bark, it proves that the world is in some sense alive, responsive to me, and I ought to be kinder to it.
The experience of seeing a face in the bark tells us something interesting about the psychology of the speaker or poet. She or he or they are the kind of person who sees a face where there isn’t one.
The experience is an example or instance of some capacity we might presumably share To see a face in a tree bark tells us not about individual psychology but about our need to project onto nature, our way of seeing.
The experience is an example or instance not of some human capacity, but of some kind of historical blinkers on experience. You see a face because you live in a particular kind of society that is anthropocentric.The experience is a revelation of the nature of our social world or political unconscious.
The experience of seeing a face in a tree is useful to create a particular kind of larger pattern that is merely pleasing.
Any and all experiences are valid and interesting in the sense that people are.
Most of these reasons to care for a particular detail in a poem are to do with caring about people. But there are lots of different ways to care about people. We can care about our moral duty towards them. We can find them interesting as psychological case studies. We can be interested in what makes them unfree and seek to liberate them.
These arguments are not exhaustive. They can’t be separated out neatly all the time, and they have potentially different relations to the intentions of the poet. It would be possible to advance any and all of them as the reason that Wordsworth tells us about the time he destroyed some hazel trees in the poem ‘Nutting’.
Nevertheless, the mainstream British poem’s love of the concrete tends inertially towards, I think, point 8. It is not that the poet, or his or her life is interesting, or that they are telling us about our capacity to see the world, or our inability to really see it. The particulars stand in for the value of an individual life.
The challenge, however, is that a lot goes into proving the value of an individual life. There’s a lot of background beliefs needed to treat individuals as valuable in some fundamentally commensurate way. In the Iliad, Achilles life is not equal to any random Trojan soldier; he exemplifies particular virtues. He matters more.
Most people living in modern liberal democracies claim to believe in the equal value of individuals. Many don’t. Others believe that the formal equality of bourgeois liberalism is itself a function of market exchange or racially bounded, etc. Such claims form the background of a critique of “mainstream lyric poetry”. There are some poets who in fact want their particulars not to stand in for the value of a life, but to escape from such a subjective frame, to offer us a way out of the individual perspective.
But if you do want to write bourgeois liberal democratic poetry (you do you, I say), how do you make it not feel like you are merely offering particulars and expecting the reader to supply the moral that individual life is valid and important? Like William Empson said, the the ‘bourgeois’ themselves do not like literature to have too much ‘bourgeois ideology’.
Well, to my mind, the most perfect poem of this self-justifying kind is Hardy’s ‘Afterwards’:
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?
If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight."
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should
come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."
If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at
the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things?”
I won’t write a whole thing about the poem. I just want to draw your attention to the final stanza. Hardy is speaking about his death. The church bell tolls for him. This tolling, however, is interrupted by a breeze. When the breeze lifts, the death knell returns as “a new bell’s boom”. The mourner then says that this is the kind of thing Hardy would notice.
This insignificant particular experience is paralleled to the value of the person, to Hardy as an individual. But that particular experience’s pathos is shown, in a way, to be parasitical on the traditional metaphysical beliefs of Christianity, even as what is valuable emerges from that metaphysical idea’s apparent dissolution. The church bell ’s noise is interrupted, blocked, by the natural world, the “crossing breeze”. Yet this blockage results in a kind of resurrection of the bell. It seems to be a new bell to the listener. The shape, or form of Christianity is preserved in the poem. What once went away comes back. Hardy himself, likewise comes back in his absence in the mind of the person who notices something that Hardy would notice.
Hardy’s poem turns the particular concrete experience into the substance of a new resurrection.
That is the poet’s power, to bring himself back in the minds of readers, imprinting his vivid impressions of the world back onto the world, so when you look at the world you see him. But the idea that Hardy could come back this way is not his, is not a given fact of existence. It is a parody of a religious idea. This may make ultimately make us feel that we have to reject even the secular resurrection offered here.
What’s great about Hardy’s poem, for me, is that he includes his struggle to throw out the idea that is bigger than the person and their personal death, and the idea creeping back in. The pathos of death is obviously at the heart of the poem, but it’s not taken for granted that an individual life matters, it is shown to us, in this stanza through the idea of Christianity. The particulars whose passing we mourn are not just particularity itself on one one side and the big absolute idea of death on the other. Each object is enmeshed in all kinds of ideas, just like people are. Hardy’s vividly idea-containing particular breeze is not like the individual, in being isolated or a monad; its complex entanglement with a metaphysical idea is really like the way many people feel about the value of their lives. The particular experience’s entanglement with others is, in the end, what matters most, not its singleness. In poetry, a particular object or experience might not be justified by some idea outside of itself, but part of its value, is that like people, it contains ideas that connect it to other people. Sometimes poets who don’t want their things to be subordinated to ideas forget that.
There is more, infinitely more, to be said about the necessity of death to the idea of the poem, to what makes particular experience shareable. But that might be something I have to return to another time.