Show how Hardy responds to the death of his wife, the thoughts and feelings expressed and the variety of devices he employs.

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Show how Hardy responds to the death of his wife, the thoughts and feelings expressed and the variety of devices he employs.

        In the years after the death of his wife, Emma, in 1912, the main subject of Hardy’s poems was his wife and how he missed her and grieved her death. In his poems during this period he uses a lot of euphemism, so that he never actually tells the reader his wife has died. However, the strong sense of sadness and regret he feels comes through in every poem.

        The first poem Hardy wrote after the death of Emma was The Going in December 1912. This poem has a highly regular rhythm and rhyme, with the important words often rhyming at the end of the lines to draw attention to them. The title of the poem is a euphemism for death, and he continues with these throughout the poem, using phrases such as ‘vanishing’, ‘close your term here’ and ‘where I could not follow’. This poem is written as if Hardy is addressing Emma.

        In the first stanza, Hardy addresses and questions his dead wife, and gives a sense of what seems like anger and irritation towards her, that she gave him ‘no hint’ that she was going to die. He suggest she was ‘indifferent’ and didn’t care about leaving him, and this shows how he is grieving and maybe not thinking straight. He emphases her swift, quick death as she left ‘with wing of swallow’ but this imagery also suggests her beauty in his eyes and how much he will miss her. Now he regrets he cannot follow her and he knows he will not ‘gain one glimpse’ of her ‘ever anon’.

        The start of the second stanza reiterates how he did not know that Emma was going to die and again he shows his regret that he could never ‘bid good-bye’. His use of soft sounds indicates his wish that he could give the ‘softest call’ to say goodbye to her properly, and this is reinforced by his use of alliteration in the soft, wishful sounds of ‘utter a wish for a word, while’. These soft sounds are then quickly replaced by the harsh reality of the situation, as Hardy sees ‘morning harden upon the wall’. The rest of the stanza is concentrated on how much her death has affected him and more precisely how he did not know that it would affect him so much. The assonance in the gloomy sounds of ‘unmoved, unknowing’ reflects his mood at this point, and again the rhyme draws attention to the important words in the poem - ‘unknowing…..great going’ – that he did not know how much her death would grieve him.

        The third stanza, like the first, starts with a question aimed towards Emma. He asks her why she makes him ‘leave the house’ and why he sees visions of her. Again, there is a sense of irritation as if it is her fault for causing him this suffering. Hardy says that he imagines seeing her again and maybe that he is seeing hallucinations of her as he tells Emma., ‘I think for a breath it is you I see’. He tells us that then he realises it is not her, and becomes bitter and upset once again. The rhyming of ‘darkening darkness….yawning blankness’ emphasises to the reader the huge emptiness he feels now that his wife is dead, and how her memory is already gradually fading away from him, in the same way as the visions he experiences do as he gets closer. The exclamation mark at the end of the stanza makes it seem as if he is shouting in frustration, at how much the experience ‘sickens me!’.

        In the fourth stanza, Hardy changes into the past tense, and the poem becomes more cheerful as he remembers the time the two of them spent together. There is a large amount of imagery used in this stanza, which Hardy uses to show the beauty of his wife, and the strength of their relationship. The ‘red-veined rocks’ symbolise the passion and love he felt for Emma. He says she was the ‘swan-necked one’, a statement of her beauty and he describes her riding along the ‘beetling Beeny Crest’ with him, maybe a sign they were happy and free to do what they wanted to, and how this contrasts to his feelings now. In the last line of this stanza, Hardy changes his language from ‘me’ and ‘you’ to ‘us’, which shows how their relationship grew stronger and they grew to love each other and be together more in the good times – ‘when life unrolled us its very best’.

        Again, the fifth stanza starts with a question, but this time the impression is given that Hardy is talking to himself, and not addressing Emma. This stanza tells us how later on in their relationship Hardy and Emma did ‘not speak’. Hardy shows a huge amount of regret and sadness in this stanza, that he did not talk to her properly and that their relationship got weaker before she died. He then moves back to happier memories of the distant past, and describes them together in ‘bright spring weather’: a pathetic fallacy whereby the weather shows the mood at that time.

        In the final stanza of this poem Hardy appears to give up all hope and becomes resigned to the situation. He adopts a very conversational tone and uses caesura to show that he is talking, using colloquialisms such as ‘well, well!’. In the last lines of the poem Hardy feels as if he will ‘sink down soon’ into despair. These lines are directed at Emma, as he again tells her, but this time in stronger terms, that he did not know how her ‘swift fleeing……would undo me so’. He uses pause between the caesuras to increase the impact of each short statement.

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        In The Haunter, Hardy writes the poem as if it was his dead wife talking to him. He imagines Emma can see him and feel his emotions as a means of consoling himself. However, the main emotions which come out of this poem are Hardy’s guilt and regret and, although he adopts his wife’s voice, it is his emotions which come through strongly in the poem. He appears to be haunted by memories, which may be the reason for the title of the poem. Alternatively, it could be that he sees his wife as a ghost haunting him. Each stanza ...

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