HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H0050 5/17/00 "BIRDS SINGING OR HATCHING IN TESS QUESTION" ================================================================= From: Lutherhpfd@aol.com> Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 23:09:17 EDT Subject: Birds singing or hatching? On first reading Tess, in a Harpers edition dated 1895, I was struck by the opening phrase of The Ralley: "On a thyme-scented, bird-singing morning in May ...." "Bird-singing" seemed a felicitous description of a morning for Tess to start a new life. Only later did I learn that Hardy changed back to "bird-hatching," which brings to mind the peep-peep of little chicks, not, in Minnesota terms, the glorious song of a cardinal high in a tree. According to Grindle and Gatrell, "bird-hatching" was used in the manuscript, "bird-singing" in the 1891 edition, with the change back to "bird-hatching" in the English 1892 edition. My copy of the 1893 edition has "bird-singing," even though, according to Grindle and Gatrell (page 19), it was loosely based on the English 1892 one-volume edition. Hardy settled on "bird-hatching." Why? Did he ever comment on these changes? Are there other references to "bird-hatching" in Hardy? Luther A. Granquist Minneapolis, MN USA ========== Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 00:27:34 -0400 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: Birds singing or hatching? I wonder whether Hardy finally settled on "bird-hatching" as opposed to "bird-singing" for precisely the reasons you outline here, Luther-- to signify a completely new beginning? Tess is nothing if not purely existentialist: how many times would she stamp out her deterministic past, obliterate her lineage (genetic inheritance),and change the course of her life, but if Hardy had retained the "bird-singing morning" might it not reinvoke those enslaving days at Alec's country house where Tess is employed by his aged mother to teach her little caged birds, who have lost their song, to sing? Tess, as she strikes out for freedom and independence, finds herself breaking the necks of wounded birds to put them out of their suffering. She has come a long way-- well into self-knowledge and maturity by this time; the "hatching" in her new world therefore seems appropriate to her sense of regeneration of self, her transcendence of the past, her purposeful acts of self-creation. Incidentally, on a completely different tack, I was thrilled to learn recently, from James Whitehead, that Siegfried Sassoon took *Tess* and *Jude* into the battlefield with him (WW1) and huddled in the trenches, on one occasion, noted in his diary that amid the gunfire he was reading *Tess*: "Dawn at Talbothays," he simply writes. I find this unspeakably poignant and beautiful! Cheers, Rosemarie ========== From: "Patrick Roper" Subject: RE: Birds singing or hatching? Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 11:07:06 +0100 Rosemary Morgan's comment seems to me to be a very perceptive explanation and 'bird-hatching morning' is certainly a curious expression. May mornings in England are alive with the sound of bird song, but people are not normally conscious of the fledglings struggling out of their shells wet and ugly (by human standards). Another curious concept is of the morning being 'thyme-scented'. Wild thyme is not in flower in May and, even if it was, would not, I think, cast any appreciable smell on the air. Any scent of thyme would come from walking over carpets of it, thus releasing the aromatic oils from the leaves (much fainter in wild thyme than in culinary thyme). There are many things that do smell in May like hawthorn blosson and trodden young grass and TH would have been very well aware of this so, is there some special significance in his choice of thyme as well as of bird-hatching? If he had said 'time-scented, bird-hatching' there would be an implication that all the new life bursting forth in May is ephemeral and that even at its first appearance the clock is already ticking: all life inevitably has the scent of death about it. Patrick Roper ==========