The month of March really should have been called January, after the double-faced Janus, looking both backward and forward. March looks back to winter, giving us frequent reminders of its cold and gloom, and forward to spring, offering tantalising glimpses of what is to come. It is the true hinge of the year, a threshold – to use a popular five-dollar word, it is 'liminal'.
Writing in March 1913, Thomas Hardy – the great poet of looking back – recalls a March day in 1870, and a cliff-top ride with the unfortunate woman who was to be his first wife. Now that she is dead and no longer obtruding on his life, Hardy finds himself experiencing a great surge of love for her – mixed, one hopes, with remorse and regret – out of which he writes some of his finest poetry. This one paints a beautiful picture of a 'clear-sunned March day' on a wild Cornish coast...
Beeny Cliff
O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free —
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.
II
The pale mews* plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.
III
A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.
IV
— Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?
V
Nay. Though still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is — elsewhere — whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will see it nevermore.
* Seagulls. Specifically the Common Gull.
What a wonderful, sad poet he is. He and Housman. Hardy’s “He Prefers Her Earthly” has always moved me very much and has struck me as one of the finest atheist expressions. Housman, Hardy and Stevens could make unbelievers of us all.
ReplyDeleteYes, at his best he is wonderful indeed – ditto Housman and Stevens. Not sure about unbelief – I've always thought of Stevens's Sunday Morning as a great religious poem, even if an agnostic/atheistic message can be extracted from it.
ReplyDeleteYes, Stevens and Hardy (particularly Stevens) have religious ambiguities and, of course, Stevens is said to have converted on his deathbed. That no-one is sure about that, or about his state of mind at the point, is fitting.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. I think we tend to take too narrow a view of what religion is, boiling it down to the philosophical question of God's existence. In the poetry of R.S. Thomas – obviously a great religious poet – God is nearly always absent.
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