MORTAL PROJECTIONS: THOMAS HARDY'S DISSOLVING VIEWS OF GOD

Extract

OF THE GOD that appears in so many of Thomas Hardy's lyrics as so many shapes of one name, of the God that appears to defy common description because each of his many shapes is unique, this may be said: He easily entertains the supposition of his own disappearance. That this peculiar claim so closely echoes one made by Emerson about the disappearance of literature is intentional; in rendering the prospect of divine dissolution, Hardy reveals profound misgivings about the efficacy of poetry as a symbolic means for coming to terms with the painful and toilsome experience of living, and about the continued adequacy of poetic efforts to provide “a frame of acceptance” for suffering humanity (Burke, Attitudes 5)The original reads “Criticism must be transcendental, that is, must consider literature ephemeral & easily entertain the supposition of its entire disappearance” (qtd. in Poirier, Renewal 27).. That this claim probably elicits less surprise and uneasiness than ironic acknowledgement in readers already familiar with Hardy's lyrics, that it rings vaguely true even before they turn back to the poems themselves may indicate how inured these same readers have grown to even the most extravagant instances of Hardy's “unrelieved pessimism.”The phrase “unrelieved pessimism” appears in “The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy” (Blackmur 2). It may derive from Lytton Strachey's 1914 review of Hardy's Satires and Circumstances, Lyrics and Reveries: “The desolation is complete. And the gloom is not even relieved by a little elegance of diction” (225).