On Hardy's Death-Conerned Poems

Hardy appeared in the literary stage first as a novelist, however, his first and last love was poetry. His first novel Desperate Remedies was published in 1871 and for the following six decades he never stopped writing. His career was divided into two periods. For the first twenty-five years, he devoted himself to novel writing. After his last novel Jude the Obscure was adversely criticized, he abandoned novel writing and turned whole-heartedly to poetry writing. During the last thirty years he altogether published eight volumes of poetry with the last one published after death. Of his about one thousand poems, many are concerned about death. He wrote them in various forms. In some poems, he imagined himself to be dead and viewed life as a ghost; in some other poems he let the dead people in a graveyard speak and express his own ideas and desires. Of course, the main part of this sort of poetry was elegies in memory of his dead friends and in particular, of his first wife Emma. No matter in what way these death poems were composed, they conveyed his feelings of loss; his meditation about the passing of time and the transience of life; and his regrets for opportunities missed, moments of joy and happiness not recognized as such until they were but memories. This paper is to discuss and analyze some of Hardy抯 death-concerned poems through which we can see why Hardy took interest in such kind of poetic themes.