VictorianPoetry.docVIP

Victorian Poetry ? 1979 West Virginia University Press 安徽师范大学外国语学院 安徽芜湖 周福霞 Abstract Hardys Poems of 1912-13 are seen as a carefully integrated process rather than a poetic bundling-an elegy mythically conceived. Several traditional myths have specific relevance to the elegy, including Tristram and Iseult, Aeneas and Dido, Tithonus and Aurora; but the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice provides the most enveloping analogue. The poets use of a mythic subtext transforms the events of the elegy from personal history to public myth, the two modes of perception being joined at a psychological center in which a speaker/ protagonist, employing various language strategies, attempts to sort things out and come to know some liberty from a certain burden of the past. Like Orpheus and other mythic protagonists, the speaker makes his journey to the land of the dead and there learns, under the tutelage of his deceased beloved, to transcend time and recover a lost paradise, a spot of personal time of incomparable quality. The dramatic lyric After a Journey is the transformational center of the elegy, representing a stage in an imaginative process by which a response primarily stressful is turned toward a primarily affirmative response. The speaker is thereby enabled to accept a literally matter-of-fact mortality and to forgo a literally matter-of-fact immortality because he has learned how to group their story with other archetypal stories and to haFOR THE MOMENT AT LEAST, Im assuming that Thomas Hardys Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914), is his outstanding volume of poems. If you dont agree, please bear with me anyway. Im not about to attack all the others or even to argue the point--only to make a start of a sort based on three obvious qualitative observations. The most compelling observation is of the extraordinarily original power of the books second section, called Poems of 1912-13. As Sally M. Gall and I have tried to show in our book The Modern Poetic Sequence