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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).
two years pass...
> 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))
― koogs, Thursday, 11 July 2019 10:44 (four years ago) link
two years pass...
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"
― koogs, Sunday, 30 January 2022 13:28 (two years ago) link
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.