See, just as my son predicted, we’re back with more old dead poets, this time English poet Thomas Hardy. Today’s poem sort of pairs-up with Dave Moore’s piece from last time. Dave directly addressed youth in his song in the context of the cycle of generations, with the newer ones sure they’ve figured out something the old generation hasn’t—which is sort of true, at least enough to allow them the audacity to change things.
Hardy, in this fall poem written late in his life, isn’t so sure, but then Hardy never is. In the Hardy poems I’ve presented he’s very aware of the cycles of things, and he barely accepts that those eternal circles could have any inclined plane to their returning paths.
That’s a prodigious cookie duster you got there Mr. Hardy.
Here’s the full text of Hardy’s “At Day-Close in November” if you’d like to follow along as I discuss how I experienced it.
Since we’ve done so many autumn poems this year, we can see Hardy checking in with some perennial fall poem tropes: shorter days, birds leaving, colored and falling leaves. Hardy, whose late career overlapped the Imagists, is immediate and unfussy with his images in a modern manner. The one personified natural image in it: the waving evergreens like waltzers, is still not too far from one used by pioneering Imagist Richard Aldington. Note to, there’s not a single interior emotional term used here. To sense what the poet/speaker is feeling we need to take in the images and events.
The second stanza increases the originality, even while using colored and falling leaves. The light-yellow beach tree leaves floating in the air are like relics of the sun in a gray noontime. And as some old guys will recognize Hardy is saying they are also like inter-ocular “floaters,” tiny clouds that develop in the fluid of some aging eyes and drift across vision. The final two lines tell us that the poet/speaker is old enough that he planted trees in his youth that are now tall enough to block the sky in places. There’s some parallelism here: the leaves, like specks in his vision, block some of the sky like the trees he planted in youth do also. The former is transitory, moving, changing, the later seemingly less so.
The last stanza adds some children, who also are moving through the scene. Here the poem does resort to a internal term, though not an emotional one: the children we’re told “conceive” that those tall trees must have always been there (something the poet/speaker knows is not so—I set those damn trees in the ground myself is the implied thought). So those trees are not permanent things, and so like the leaves, like clouds in an old man’s eye after all.
I at first encountered the last line as puzzling, even awkward sounding. There seems to be two versions of the text. The one I found first and used has the last line as: “That none will in time be seen.” Others seem to have it as “A time when none will be seen.” The second version is less awkward and has a parallelism with it’s preceding line “A time when no tall trees grew here.” I had trouble singing that first version, I might have used the second one if I’d seen it before the performance. But now I’m thinking that the awkwardness, even the sense that the poem has ended on a “What’d he say?” note, may have value.
This line’s “none” has a hazy antecedent. I think we’re to first think it’s the children, who are unaware of the transient nature of themselves (something the poet/speaker knows and they don’t). But in the sentence it appears in, the statement can be referring to the trees (which the poet/speaker knows weren’t there until he planted them) that are not permanent.
In what ways are the trees not permanent? Well the poet/speaker is old, he may expect he will not see either those children or the trees he planted for many more autumns. Nor are the trees permanent to the children, rambling through in play. They will grow up, perhaps not stay there, or be at work inside and not outside in the fall air by the trees. I know little about Hardy’s particular English countryside, but is he even foreseeing a modern future where the trees will be cut down for progress? And by extension, is Hardy, taking as is his wont the long view, saying that any work he did in his long life will be forgotten by those children?
Musically, Benjamin Britten has set this poem to music. I listened to two performances which reminded me the problems I sometimes have with art song settings of poetry as a listener: a complex melody makes it hard to inhabit the words with humanity and feeling, and therefore obscures their meaning and makes everything empty decoration. I persisted and found a couple where the singers somewhat overcame these issues with Britten’s setting. Here’s the best one I’ve found so far.
Of the performances I’ve heard so far, Mark Wilde is best able to illuminate the words through Britten’s filigree.
Now of course I don’t mean to knock the skills of Britten as a composer. I could claim that I write music that has a wider variety in some sense, but let’s be serious: I don’t have 1% of Britten’s musical knowledge, or the knowledge of any other reasonably well-known “serious” composer. And as a singer I have trouble rendering even simpler melodies and for this reason I don’t try to write art-song style settings because I have no one handy to sing them.
So, what’d I do instead with my music for this Hardy poem? A rock band with three cranked-up Telecasters wailing away. I suggest you listen to it loud too. The player gadget is below.
Frank Hudson 