HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE HO3012 3/18/03 "POEM "AFTERWARDS "QUESTION"
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Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 04:29:36 -0800 (PST)
From: michael clark <mikeaclark18@yahoo.com>
Subject: Thomas Hardy's Poem "Afterwards"
I am stumped on this poem. I am looking for some kind of an analysis or explanation as to what this poem is actually about. I do sense this poem is about death but that is all I can get from it. Can anyone provide an explanation as to what this poem is about or lead me in the right direction to find an analysis or explanation of it? I would appreciate any help you can offer or provide.
Thank You,
Michael A. Clark
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From: "Cathcart" <cartb4horse@gmx.net>
Subject: Re: Thomas Hardy's Poem "Afterwards"
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 14:04:56 +0100
Dear Michael I did a Google search with the key words 'Hardy' and 'Afterwards' and got plenty of good results like this one... http://www.essaybank.co.uk/free_coursework/42.html It is a good poem - not everyone can see new spun silk in the glad green leaves of May. There are two types of neighbors for Hardy, apparently, those who say 'He was a man who noticed such things' and those who don't. I guess by posting this question you get to join the more exclusive of the clubs. Regards Chris Cathcart
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Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 05:31:24 -0800 (PST)
From: michael clark <mikeaclark18@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Thomas Hardy's Poem "Afterwards"
Chris,
Thank you for the information. I'm going to have to look this up. I've been wracking my brains out for the last two weeks trying to find out what this poem is actually about.
Thanks again,
Michael
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From: "Patrick Roper" <patrick@prassociates.co.uk>
Subject: RE: Thomas Hardy's Poem "Afterwards"
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 16:52:30 -0000
Chris Cathcart said: It is a good poem - not everyone can see new spun silk in the glad green leaves of May. There are two types of neighbors for Hardy, apparently, those who say 'He was a man who noticed such things' and those who don't. I guess by posting this question you get to join the more exclusive of the clubs. And by noticing things he left such enormous resonance. Last summer, at dusk, on an upland heath I saw "the soundless blink of a dewfall-hawk" for the first time in my life and remembered the lines >from Hardy and that he was a man who noticed such things. The birds today are normally called 'nightjars' in England and there is a related American species called, I think, the frogmouth. To my mind there is also another kind of subtext. In Hardy's day I think most country people whould have known about bursting leaves, dewfall-hawks, hedgehogs and so on but there was a growing urban population cut off from, and indifferent to, such things. I imagine Hardy felt rather sad about that. As Chris Cathcart says not every one can see these countryside manifestations, but that could be either because they don't look, or because they are not in a position to see.. I work as a consultant ecologist and one of the burning issues in this field in England today is the restoration of heathland. How often I see Thomas Hardy, the man who noticed things, quoted in support of these endeavours. Patrick Roper
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Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 09:33:38 -0800
From: Betty Cortus <hardycor@owl.csusm.edu>
Subject: RE: Thomas Hardy's Poem "Afterwards"
About "Afterwards":
The fact that Hardy would want to be remembered after his death as someone
who "noticed" and appreciated some of the small miracles of nature,
rather than be to lauded as the great man of letters he actually was, is
disarming in its modesty to my mind.
Betty Cortus
hardycor@owl.csusm.edu
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Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 10:30:31 -0800 (PST)
From: michael clark <mikeaclark18@yahoo.com>
Subject: RE: Thomas Hardy's Poem "Afterwards"
Thank you Patrick for your reply. It is much appreciated.
Michael
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Subject: RE: Thomas Hardy's Poem "Afterwards"
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 14:07:36 -0600
From: "Mink, Joanna" <joanna.mink@mnsu.edu>
In response to Betty's comment (below), this modesty is one of the
reasons I like "A Poet"
(CP 336):
Come to his graveside, pause and say:
'Whatever his message - glad or grim -
Two bright-souled women clave to him;'
Stand and say that while day decays;
It will be word enough of praise.
JoAnna S. Mink
Professor of English
Minnesota State University, Mankato
Mankato, MN 56001
joanna.mink@mnsu.edu
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Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 18:47:53 -0500
From: Rosemarie Morgan <rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu>
Subject: RE: Thomas Hardy's Poem "Afterwards"
How delightful to be interrupted, en passant, in this Coleridgean way!
And Yes! how modest and unassuming the voice -- the gentleness of the going,
the soundlessness of "crossing the shades." No Tunes of Glory here but
simply
a "breeze" to cut a pause in the distant tolling of the bell; no "raging"
against the night but (ironically, for one who "notices things"), an unnoticed
and unnoticeable passing through the back door.
Two aspects intrigue me. First -- the suggestion of resurrection in the last
stanza. Following upon a series of voices and utterances the last call will
"rise again" -- gaining, as Patrick has suggested, "enormous resonance." And
the second point follows from the first: what if we trace the Latin origin of
"postern" back to posterus? Now the word "postern" holds connotations of
"coming after."
Hardy has travelled this road of temporal reversal elsewhere; here it would be
that the "Present has latched" its "coming after" --implying a pre-existent
"present" or "past-present" condition.
Cheers,
Rosemarie
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Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 01:17:18 -0800 (PST)
From: michael clark <mikeaclark18@yahoo.com>
Subject: RE: Thomas Hardy's Poem "Afterwards"
To Everyone!
My sincere appreciation to everyone who had responded to my inquiry to Hardy's poem "Afterwards." I now have a better understanding of what the poem is about. Again, your responses are very much appreciated.
Thank you,
Michael
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Subject: Hardy and Afterwards.
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 17:42:56 -0000
From: "Mark Asquith" <mark@uk.lloydgeorge.com>
Dear All,
It has been quite wonderful to read your recent correspondence, especially the speculative froth of Miss Morgan. By a 'Coleridgean' interruption, i assume she means the importunities of the ancient mariner, who inflicted his insanities on others with little regard to their less pompous and clearer eyed view of life. I will try not to bore so barmily!
I am as much an admirer of Hardy as anyone, so was slightly concerned by a few of the points raised. At least as far as they relate to my 'personal interpretation' of the blatant facts.
First - The attempt to read any suggestion of 'the ressurection' or 'past-present' eternity into a poem written by one of the nineteenth century's most famous atheists (intent on celebrating what is here not hereafter) should require more proof than a metaphor derived from a closing garden gate.
Second - Although i have more sympathy with the illusion, Hardy was not modest. His poetry is a triumph of form: it is always inventive, musical and observant. He is especially brilliant at detailing nature, and it was his greatest love as Patrick rightly stresses. But he was an egotistical, selfish, casually cruel man with a mean spirit, saved only from being boring by his understanding of nature and technical brilliance. The way he treated any of his wives, and the pathetic romanticism that led him to believe himself in love with one dead or past rather than by his side is enough. But forgetting his life, he is one of his own main concerns in his work. The apparent objectivity of the narrator in his books distracts you from the romanticised portraits of himself and his loves in them (eg, Jude). This is clearer in his poems. If you go through them he is far more present as an 'I' or a 'he'(one need only look at the last line of each stanza in Afterwards) than one first ima!
gines. However he is so cloaked in his own wistfulness and gentle, musical whining that one finds it hard to know what, substantially, he stands for. He was not, however, modest. Nature cannot observe you back, nor can it tell you how unpleasant you have become. Perhaps that is why he never moved to the city. The wish that his country neighbours might think well of him after he has died, but the admission that they would only do so as nature lover rather than a man is revealing enough.
Beautiful music, and I enjoy walking in Somerset and Dorset more thanks to him, but he was not a believer and he was not modest.
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Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 16:04:27 -0500
From: Rosemarie Morgan <rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu>
Subject: Re: Hardy and Afterwards.
Apologies to Mark for not making my point clearly. With "resurrection" I
was referring to the last stanza (not the first) in which the cessation of
sound (sound invokes one of the senses) is "cut...in its outrollings" but
is subsequently revived and "rise[s] again" (a familiar "resurrection"
phrase albeit subverted in this poem). Taking this in rhythmic conjunction
with the first stanza --the rhyme scheme returns from last to first with
the singing suffix -- I find the circular motion intriguingly defiant of
temporality. It was but a fleeting thought and I was curious about it,
that's all. Also, I used "resurrection" --as most readers familiar with
Hardy's poetry might understand the idea -- to have nothing to do with
monotheistic belief sytems but to be of the metamorphic kind that occurs in
so many of his poems of which "Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard,"
say, presents a fine example. And lastly, I didn't intend, nor would I ever
intend, to confuse life with art -- the man himself with the poem itself.
The beauty, truth and vision inherent in the latter remains the sole
subject of our celebration. It is enough.
Cheers,
Rosemarie
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