Thomas Hardy - Search and Destroy

haven't read any of the novels since my teens/early twenties, but reading some of his short stories recently added a new dimension to my appreciation... need to get deeper into the poetry at some point.

& finding out not long ago that furze = gorse has changed my mental image of hardy country somewhat.

the heath in Return of the Native is the main protagonist iirc

had to do madding crowd at school, so i've got a natural aversion to hardy.

Tess is amazing, not least because Hardy doesn't present her as a wronged woman: she's a wronged woman with a sexual appetite.

i failed o level english lit. we did 1984, Macbeth and Far From The Madding Crowd. i am currently rereading the latter. there is so much in it i'm sure i would've remembered even after 30+ years - hitching a ride on the dog. the coffin tampering. the grave drenching. the drowning. but no. i can only assume i didn't bother reading it all at the time.

i loved Tess, liked Jude, thought Two on a Tower was a bit ridiculous with all its revelations, Native was ok. but the language of Madding Crowd, some of the sentence structures, i'm struggling with. i can see how 16 year old me would've been unimpressed.

(ah, Two On A Tower was initially published in serial form. so the suspiciously frequent revelations were cliffhangers.)

The Woodlanders is the underrated gem (and I think Hardy's own favourite).

I reread it this week. Quite a few passages show him at his gnarled best: anthropomorphized descriptions of wind rustling through old beech and oak trees, with Matty South and Winterbourne understanding their language w/out Hardy making too fine a point of it (wonder if Tolkien cited him as an influence).

> D: Novels such as The Laodicean.

i'm quite enjoying this. half way through, wondering where it's going to go.

(it was dictated on his death bed (he got better))

spent January reading sf and blood meridian. had already planned on reading Mayor of Casterbridge but wasn't sure if i'd be in the mood for it last night when i started. but bang, gripped immediately.

Read Greenwood Tree late last year and the same thing happened. will spend February finishing off Mayor and the two short story collections, which will mean I've read everything in that first category they mention on Wikipedia, "Novels of character and environment"

easily one of my favorite poems:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

Wow. Of a piece with that one Rilke poem.

His self-taught rhythms are uniquely his.

oh yeah i love that. what’s the title?

"The Voice."

the dying fall in the last line...

It’s in the extremely handy Penguin Book of English Verse, edited by Paul/P.J. Keegan