Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The ‘Poems of 1912–13’ are a sequence of elegies which Thomas Hardy wrote after the sudden death of his first wife Emma on the morning of 27 November 1912. They describe her death, Hardy's reaction, and his visit to the scenes of their courtship in Cornwall the following March. The original sequence, published with other groups of poems in the first edition of Satires of Circumstance (1914), comprised eighteen poems. Five years later, in the Wessex Edition and Collected Poems (1919) Hardy altered the sequence, placing three poems which had previously been outside it at its end, as well as making a number of other small revisions cumulatively suggestive of a greater distance from the material. If Satires of Circumstance is arguably not, overall, Hardy's strongest volume of poems - most critics would award that prize to Moments of Vision, which followed in 1917 - the 21-poem arrangement which crystallized as the ‘Poems of 1912–13’ remains one of the greatest and most personal elegiac sequences written in English, offering a substantial revision of the elegiac tradition for the twentieth century, as well as a uniquely honest image of the poet struggling with his own grief and remorse.Emma Hardy died suddenly, though given how little he and his wife seemed to have had to do with each other by 1912, Thomas Hardy may well have been inattentive to signs of just how serious the illness ... log in or subscribe to read full text