Thomas Hardy

[Des]

They're celebrating a Hardy anniversary this weekend. He's never been fashionable among the metropolitan chattering classes but I love his novels and poetry.

This is one of my favourite poems - not one of his celebrated love poems but something a little more philosophical. I love the way it subverts the simplistic view that Nature represents some kind of balance and repose in contrast to the cruel and chaotic affairs of man. As such, it reveals a touching faith in human nature which contradicts the view of some critics that Hardy was a miserable old misanthrope. Miserable, maybe. Misanthrope, almost certainly not.

In a Wood


Pale beech and pine-tree blue,
Set in one clay,
Bough to bough cannot you
Bide out your day?
When the rains skim and skip,
Why mar sweet comradeship,
Blighting with poison-drip
Neighborly spray?

Heart-halt and spirit-lame,
City-opprest,
Unto this wood I came
As to a nest;
Dreaming that sylvan peace
Offered the harrowed ease—
Nature a soft release
From men’s unrest.

But, having entered in,
Great growths and small
Show them to men akin—
Combatants all!
Sycamore shoulders oak,
Bines the slim sapling yoke,
Ivy-spun halters choke
Elms stout and tall.

Touches from ash, O wych,
Sting you like scorn!
You, too, brave hollies, twitch
Sidelong from thorn.
Even the rank poplars bear
Illy a rival’s air,
Cankering in black despair
If overborne.

Since, then, no grace I find
Taught me of trees,
Turn I back to my kind,
Worthy as these.
There at least smiles abound,
There discourse trills around,
There, now and then, are found
Life-loyalties.