Ferment (1863-1870)
manipulation of sounds for producing effects of languor and passion being an evident inheritance from the young Keats, one of the few great English lyrists who do not seem to have held the slightest interest for Hardy. The author of the verse that has been here analysed never could have written it with a view to creating a certain kind of measured music that would delight the ear as mere sound when read aloud. The musical effects of his poetry can be sensed by an attuned ear, but they are never felt as the primary purpose of the composition. They are a natural outgrowth of the underlying situation or meditation treated.
It will be observed that the poems of 1865-1870, taken as a whole, present a generally complete and entirely Hardyan attitude towards the world—through the employment of typical Hardy-situations, ideas, images and expressions. The poet has considered the universe and has found it to be lawless; he has thought of a Higher Power, and he has discovered it to be—malignant, or indifferent, or unconscious; he has experienced human emotions and has concluded that good impulses are transitory and that passion is a snare. There is here developed and unified to some degree the whole system of thought presented through the notion of Time, Chance and Circumstance, Destiny, Pessimism, and Pity for humanity, that has become recognizable as characteristic of Hardy's mind through its employment as the intellectual basis for the Wessex novels. The early poems, however, present "Hardy" in much more condensed and characteristic form than either of the first two novels, Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree, which im-
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