The Life of Thomas Hardy
Mason, written in memory of his old architectural master, John Hicks of Dorchester, although it is merely a re-telling of an old legend and has no connection with Hicks other than its treatment of an architectural theme. But by far the most important, significant, and intrinsically valuable poetry of this kind is to be discovered in the Poems of 1912-13.
Late in 1912 Mrs. Hardy died most unexpectedly and after an extremely brief illness—"without ceremony," as the title of one of the poems expresses it. After the first shock of bereavement had spent its force, the poet proceeded to console himself by seeking refuge from the world of fact and retiring to the world of art, where his spirit might be refreshed by an indulgence in the untrammeled expression of its woes. The result was a series of poems that stand as his supreme achievement in the vein of pure lyric. Full of life, pity, and genuine feeling, they are more deeply and sincerely emotional, although more sober in tone, as a rule, than the purely imaginary situations elsewhere treated. Occasionally a particularly wistful or pathetic touch will recall the Wordsworth of the "Lucy" poems, hut as a whole these veteris vestigia flammae are as distinctively individual as anything that this most individual poet has ever done. Without being logically connected together to form a symmetrical or compact unit, they present a fairly consistent record of a mood of bereavement, uncomforted by any hope of personal survival or reunion after death, but softened by reminiscences of past hours of blissful felicity.
The most imaginative of these poems, and the one that
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