Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: animals, Christmas, oxen, poetry, thomas hardy
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel
“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
- Thomas Hardy
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
- Thomas Hardy
winter river
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: asylum seekers, claire tomalin, countryside, inequality, jude the obscure, migration, poverty, refugees, the time-torn man, thomas hardy
“Jude the Obscure speaks sense about the painful difficulties of life for the poor and intellectually aspiring who have lost their roots in any place and their faith in any god … The book also offers an interesting corrective to any idea that the countryside is inherently cheering or consoling, by giving an unrelieved view of the dark side of rural life. There are no lush meadows and rivers, no great medieval barns as in Far From the Madding Crowd. Jude is first seen in a bleak and dreary upland Berkshire village in which many of the cottages have been pulled down; even the ancient parish church has been replaced by an ugly modern one. In the process, the graves of the village forebears have also been destroyed, leaving the villagers without any record of the past. As a small boy Jude works for a farmer scaring birds in a vast upland field. ’How ugly it is here!’ he thinks; and he is sorry for the birds, and troubled by the law of nature that makes cruelty to one creature kindness to another. There are no Wordsworthian lessons or inspirations here. His dream of becoming a student at Oxford is unattainable. He is trapped into marriage, too young and without love, and the marriage fails … He becomes an itinerant stonemason, walking or taking trains from place to place, carrying a few possessions, never able to settle or make a secure life for himself, never finding true friends, turning to drink to forget his misery. In many ways his experience forecasts the brutality of life a century later, when economic migrants wander the earth, having lost their natural support systems of family and home, and encountering incomprehension, hardship, hostility and often early death.”
- Claire Tomalin Thomas Hardy, The Time-Torn Man
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: charles dickens, george eliot, michael henchard, novels, the mayor of casterbridge, thomas hardy
The man was of fine figure, swarthy and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular. He wore a short jacket of brown corduroy, newer than the remainder of his suit which was a fustian waistcoat with white horn buttons, breeches of the same, tanned leggings, and a straw hat overlaid with black glazed canvas. At his back he carried by a looped strap a rush basket, from which protruded at one end the crutch of a hay-knife, a wimble for hay-bonds being also visible in the aperture. His measured springless walk was the walk of the skilled countryman as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference, personal to himself, showing itself even in the regularly interchanging fustian folds, now in the left leg, now in the right, as he paced along.
This is from the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, describing Michael Henchard. Good novels teach me a great deal about people, the world, God. My desert island triumvirate would be Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and Charles Dickens – anyone want to make a case for others?
Here, Hardy notices how different people walk. I don’t think I’d paid proper attention to this before, other than seeing how pilgrims on very long walks get into their stride.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: greece, panormitis, patrick leigh fermor, pilgrimage, symi, thomas hardy
I’ve been lucky enough to be away for a couple of weeks holiday with my family in Greece. We stayed on the small, quiet island of Symi, tucked in between Rhodes and Turkey. After a tough year at work it has been wonderful to relax in heat and peacefulness. There will be some posts soon on my encounters with Symiot life, on a pilgrimage to the Monastery of the Taxiarchis at Panormitis, and from my (incongruous?) reading while I was there of Thomas Hardy and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s non-Greek books.
In the meantime, here are a few pictures:
| You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree By the gated ways, As in earlier days; You were weak and lame, So you never came, And I went alone, and I did not mind, Not thinking of you as left behind.
I walked up there to-day Just in the former way; Surveyed around The familiar ground By myself again: What difference, then? Only that underlying sense Of the look of a room on returning thence.
Thomas Hardy |
While I watch the Christmas blaze
Paint the room with ruddy rays,
Something makes my vision glide
To the frosty scene outside.
.
There to reach a rotting berry,
Toils a thrush – constrained to very
Dregs of food by sharp distress,
Taking such with thankfulness.
.
Why, O starving bird, when I
One day’s joy would justify,
And put misery out of view,
Do you make me notice you?
Thomas Hardy
