‘Song of Hope’: not a title we’d necessarily associate with Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), who elsewhere even coined the word ‘unhope’ to convey his own deep despair (in his poem ‘In Tenebris’). But ‘Song of Hope’ is the title of a Thomas Hardy poem, which we reproduce below, followed by a […]
On one of Hardy’s best-known poems – analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was a prolific poet, with his Complete Poems running to 1,000 pages. Yet he’s not generally known for being a satirical poet. ‘The Ruined Maid’, one of his earliest and best-known poems, is a rare […]
‘Wessex Heights’ shows more clearly than most why Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) has been seen as a ‘belated Romantic’: there is something of Wordsworth and Coleridge in ‘Wessex Heights’, a classic poem about the English countryside which sees Hardy standing from this high vantage point and surveying the area of Dorset […]
On a great war poem by Thomas Hardy – analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle Thomas Hardy: war poet? His name doesn’t leap to mind as, say, Wilfred Owen’s or Siegfried Sassoon’s does. But Thomas Hardy wrote some of the greatest war poems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: […]
A close reading of Hardy’s poem by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘At an Inn’ was published in Thomas Hardy’s first collection of poetry, Wessex Poems (1898). The poem, in summary, tells of Hardy’s visit to an inn with a woman who is mistaken for his lover by the servants working at […]