[Hardy-l] On Rereading "The Shadow on the Stone."

[Betty Cortus]

In Ken Tucker's Review of Christian Wiman's new book  Ambition and  
Survival: Becoming a Poet, which appeared in the October 7 issue of  
The New York Times Book Review this year, the following passage  
caught my eye:

"Wiman is best at taking apart a poem he enjoys, explaining the  
clockwork beauty of its images and ideas without destroying the  
thing,  His essays on George Mackay Brown and Thomas Hardy stand out  
in this regard; I was struck by the poignance of this observation  
about what goes on beneath the surface of Hardy's 'Shadow on the Stone':
'Some knowledge must be partial in order to be knowledge, the poem  
tells us, and there are experiences we can have only if we never  
quite have them.'"

This drew me back to a rereading, and new appreciation, of a poem I  
hadn't looked at in a long time.  The speaker's impulse to look back  
behind him and glimpse the image of the woman he had  "long learned  
to lack"  must be  suppressed, or face the disillusion of knowing the  
vision is not really there.   I sense echoes of the Opheus/Euridice  
myth in this poem.  Looking back can only dissolve the dream, and she  
will be lost to him again.

A beautiful brooding poem!
Betty
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://coyote.csusm.edu/pipermail/hardy-l/attachments/20071103/4083e103/attachment.html