Poem for the day
‘We sat at the window’
Thomas Hardy (Bournemouth, 1875)
We sat at the window looking out,
And the rain came down like silken strings
That Swithin’s day. Each gutter and spout
Babbled unchecked in the busy way
Of witless things:
Nothing to read, nothing to see
Seemed in that room for her and me
On Swithin’s day.
We sat at the window looking out,
And the rain came down like silken strings
That Swithin’s day. Each gutter and spout
Babbled unchecked in the busy way
Of witless things:
Nothing to read, nothing to see
Seemed in that room for her and me
On Swithin’s day.
I’ve been filling the gaps in my education recently. and Hardy is a topic I am chasing down. I think that a couple of the novels will get a guernsey, especially as I’ve read nothing of his since I was at school (although I loved Jude for some reason); but the real question is the poetry, which is always regarded as essential to an understanding of twentieth-century English verse. He corresponded and met with Yeats, Sassoon, Brooke and other war poets, as well as being a quoted influence on Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, and Philip Larkin. The genius is in the structure: he is immersed in the language of dialogue and folk song, but is unconstrained by convention in finding metres and forms that are suited to the voice of his poems, not the other way around.
I think it’s nonsense to see him in the context of modernism as his heart is in the countryside. He is committed to using his imagination to find a transcendent meaning in his everyday experience, to reveal — or to try to reveal — a meaning in the everyday observation. This poem is a perfect example
Never been to Bournemouth, and this poem would certainly discourage any future plans…
