The Life of Thomas Hardy
sonian tradition. It forms one of the very few links that connect Hardy with some of the aspects of Victorianism in thought and art which flourished during his youth, and of which his writing is usually so independent. In its refrain, the iterated name, "Amabel" and in its sentimentality it reminds one somewhat of Tennyson's ballad of Oriana. These resemblances in form and content, however, prove to be rather superficial echoes, underneath which there is discoverable a strong dash of the real Hardy. In the opening stanza, for instance,
Her custom-straitened views,
And asked, "Can there indwell
My Amabel?"
one can find the refrain and the sentimentality, but also such an uncommon verb as indwell, a foreshadowing of the free compounding process later used by Hardy in the word-formations of The Dynasts, and an "enlightened" scorn for "custom-straitened views." The lament is not, as in Tennyson, for the death of the poet's beloved, but for the dying out of the passion itself through the effects of changing circumstances and the action of "Time, the tyrant fell," although it causes the poet to wish "to creep to some housetop and weep" in typical mid-century fashion. The fourth and fifth stanzas are of interest as the first illustration of another dominant Hardy-theme:
I sang ere warmth did wane?
Who thinks its numbers spell
His Amabel?"
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