The Life of Thomas Hardy
in itself, in the life of characteristic Wessex folk. It is also practically the only poem that shows throughout the direct influence of the work and spirit of William Barnes, both in content and in form. The entire piece is in dialect, and not the dialect encountered in the novels, but the more exact Dorset speech found in Barnes. The Barnes-tricks of more exact phonetic spellings of dialect words are also used, and footnotes give the English equivalents of all the more unusual Dorset words. The metre is regular, the quantities are always correct, the mood is always calm, and no philosophy is advanced, or even hinted at. The poem might well have been written by Barnes himself in an inspired moment, but it shows considerably more narrative power than do any of his own humorous bits of verse. This completes the poems of 1866 in the volume of Wessex Poems.
There is but one of this date in Poems of the Past and Present: The Ruined Maid, which may be regarded either as a very sympathetic or as a half-flippant treatment of its subject, depending on the emphasis,—tragic, sardonic, or naïve,—with which the final lines of each stanza—the debauched town-girl's answers to the innocent queries of her former friend from the country—are read. At the close, the country girl says to her former playmate:
And a delicate face, and could strut about town!—
and she gets this answer:
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined, (said she.)
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