The Soil (. . . 1850)
The events portrayed are those most common in rural life: courtings, weddings and deaths; and in their portrayal dramatic fire and tension are nearly always absent. For their quaint and felicitous expression of a poet's real joy in the countryside, in the approach of spring, in familiar scenes and faces and in the cheerful winter's fireside, these poems really deserve to be widely known.
The broad dialect can be observed at its best in The Gre't Woah Tree That's in the Dell. Here the effect of beauty and pathos is admirably rendered by images at once simple and meaningful. A typical Hardy-motif is sounded in Minden House, which tells of a youth's falling in love with a farmer's daughter, and closes as follows:
The jay it had in store vor him. . . .
An' when he went thik road agean
His errand then wer Fanny Deane.
Here personified time is represented as a benign influence, a dispenser of good fortune to the youth. In Hardy's early verse, time is also personified, and acts in collaboration with "Chance" in bestowing fortune upon the poet—but never good fortune, as here. Hardy sees Time wearing a malignant, or at best a neutral, countenance; never a propitious one.
It is interesting to compare Hardy's Ditty for E. L. G. (Emma Lavinia Gifford, his first wife), written in 1870 and included in Wessex Poems, with Barnes's Maid o' Newton, whom the poet meets "by happy chance, or doom." Further than this the theme of the vagaries of
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