A Thinking Man

The Walk 

You did not walk with me

Of late to the hill-top tree

By the gated ways,

As in earlier days;

You were weak and lame,

So you never came,

And I went alone, and I did not mind,

Not thinking of you as left behind.

 

I walked up there to-day

Just in the former way;

Surveyed around

The familiar ground

By myself again:

What difference, then?

Only that underlying sense

Of the look of a room on returning thence.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy has always been one of my favourite poets.  Initially there were three reasons for this. First, as a teenager, he was one of the few poets I could understand.  He seemed accessible to an adolescent boy from a non-bookish background making tentative initial forays into English literature. Secondly, he wrote a lot about painful love and this appealed to my overwhelming sense of teenage angst.  I was constantly being ‘dumped’ by beautiful young women.  Thirdly, my English teacher openly wept while reading one of his poems (During Wind and Rain) in class.  I learned that English literature, and in particular the poems of Thomas Hardy, could, if understood and read with passion, send shivers down your spine and make grown men cry.

Over a quarter of a century later I enjoy his work even more.  Now that the teenage angst has gone, the emotion reaches deeper.  And after a long time studying both language and literature, I now feel more at ease in analysing why he can have the effect that he does.

There is often a pattern to some of his poems.  He recalls something routine in a matter-of-fact way (usually something to do with his deceased first wife, Emma) and then hits you between the eyes with the emotional impact of the loss in the closing lines.  

In a previous posting I described how he used verbs to convey the powerful impact of his loss (see The Misty Woman).  Here I want to briefly explore his use of noun phrases to achieve a similar effect.

His basic technique is to lull the reader into a sense of balance and then to linguistically shatter that balance.  There is balance in the pronouns - Thomas and his wife have an exact equal share (four references to ‘you’ and four to ‘I’ or ‘me’).  Throughout the poem he carefully builds up a repeating pattern with the longer noun phrases.  Up to a certain point they are all four syllables long, with the head nouns all being pre-modified - ‘the hill-top tree’, ‘the gated ways’, ‘earlier days’, ‘the former way’. As readers we come to expect the rhythm of this pattern.

Of course, as the poem progresses, the regular becomes irregular and the balanced man becomes linguistically unbalanced. The routine familiarity of the first verse starts to fall apart in the second. Lines 2, 3, and 4 fo the second verse are where there is the very first indication that things are starting to break up.  The three regular noun phrases of those lines in the first verse (’the hill-top tree’, ‘the gated ways’, ‘earlier days’) are not matched by three regular noun phrases in the second verse.  We have two noun phrases (’the former way’, ‘the familiar ground’) and a clause (’surveyed around’). The syllable count of these lines is also different indicating that the predicted rhythm is breaking.

As the second verse comes to an end the emotion is hightened and this is reflected in the shattering of the linguistic pattern.  The speaker has described his walk without his wife as usual, and, as usual, comes home.  He asks, ‘What difference, then?’  On the surface, the difference is that his wife is not there.  But Hardy makes this difference much more powerful.  It is deep and pervasive and emotional (’that underlying sense’).  Also, the human being has been replaced by the impersonal accusing environment. ‘She wasn’t there’ is expressed as ‘the look of a room’.

And this difference is conveyed through the structure of the language.  The regular is broken to accommodate the feeling.  The balance cannot be held anymore as the emotion breaks through.  In place of the short pronouns (’I', ‘me’, ‘you’) and the short, pre-modified noun phrases (’the hill-top tree’, ‘the gated ways’, ‘earlier days’, ’the former way’, ‘the familiar ground’), we are now given one enormous noun phrase where the head word ’sense’ has both pre-modification (’that underlying …’) and complicated post-modification (’of the look of a room’).  It is unique in the poem.  It stands apart and in a subtle way highlights the fact that the feeling is out of the routine and ordinary.

The short, routine walk has brought Hardy face to face with an inhuman and overwhelming glare that he will have to live with.

Tags: Emma Hardy, emotion, English literature, Hardy, head word, literary criticism, noun phrase, nouns, poem, poet, poetry, post-modification, pre-modification, pronoun, stylistics, syllable, The Walk, Thomas Hardy, verbs