Observing Objects as Mutability and Meaning in Thomas Hardy’s Human Shows (1925)

Adrian Grafe

doi:10.4000/fathom.1100

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Observing Objects as Mutability and Meaning in Thomas Hardy’s Human Shows (1925)

https://doi.org/10.4000/fathom.1100

Observing Objects as Mutability and Meaning in Thomas Hardy’s Human Shows (1925)

Sep 23, 2019
FATHOM
Adrian Grafe

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Abstract

How does Hardy represent objects in his poetry? What function(s) do they perform? Hardy uses the technique of personification but goes well beyond it. Thus “To a Sea-Cliff” begins as an address to place which finally has everything to do with drama and nothing to do with Nature as such. “The High-School Lawn” and “Green Slates” show Hardy lending objects voice, but the point of the poems lies not in rhetorical technique itself but in broader poetic creation, the recreation of emotion, and the evocation of deep time. Hardy anthropomorphises the animal kingdom in such a way as to suggest that the killing of sentient beings for human consumption, transforming them into “Bags of Meat”, is an ecological tragedy. These poems show the later Hardy as philosophical a poet as ever, an empirical one grounding his poetics, not merely in the object itself, but in what the object points to, and as an analogue for the realia of experience. If this argument were valid, it would add another dimension to the appreciation of Hardy’s thought, complementing the more familiar one highlighting his disillusion. The last poem in the collection, “Why Do I?”, leads us to conclude with a reflection inspired by Tim Ingold’s differentiation between objects and things: the poem is a weird, spectral ars poetica in which the “things” the persona says he “does” are actually, in the absence of any (other) referent, the poems that make up the collection and the activities that form the writing process.

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