[Hardy-l] A query

[Rosemarie Morgan]

Greetings all --

I am posting a (slightly modified) letter from Ilaria,  to call upon your 
collective wisdom. I think her questions will gain more responses from you 
than I can possibly offer her at this time. I am overwhelmed with work & I 
don't feel I could do justice to the very interesting points she raises.

Can anyone throw light of these matters?

With every good wish,
Rosemarie
______________________________
At foot of page: ROME THE VATICAN – SALA DELLE MUSE (1887)
________________________________
Dear Rosemarie,
today I am reading an essay you wrote for A Spacious Vision, “Mothering the 
Text”, and I thought immediately of this poem (even if I must confess that 
this poem gives me always many problems in understanding it as I wish). I 
found your essay deeply stimulating, and really acute in your double 
perspective (“nostos” with or without “algos”), and in your perfect 
analysis of Hardy’s “restoration” of past and geography in his idea of Wessex.

Question:  there might be also a sort of ethic (perhaps even Darwinian) 
side in his tendency.
Art, in many of Hardy’s poems, is a complex and original “imitation” and 
observation of Nature (please pardon my simplicity), while Nature is 
totally unaware of Art, and Natural Selection, as Darwin says, “is as 
immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are 
to those of Art”( C. Darwin, The Origin of Species, Oxford, 1996, p.52).

Question:  In “Rome The Vatican – Sala delle Muse”,  does Hardy wants to 
establish a contact between the artist and the relentless process of art, 
above all linked with subjective human memory;?

  if so, he is very unique (since the artist becomes the average man, and 
so, from this perspective, Hardy’s vision is wide and not narrowed in a 
recreated world d’élite) and he seems to suggest also that there is always 
a kind of instinctive perception of the time in art, and of the time in the 
place (which could also be seen in your “concentric universe: a world 
within a world within a world”, p. 43). This is our most innate tendency to 
survive and to contrast annihilation.

Question: will you agree if I say that this concentric universe is 
reflected in a concentric memory – which is able to preserve itself 
autonomously, anyway?

My interest is trying to understand this subtle frontier between Hardy’s 
care of past, and his constant need to delineate places and borders for 
past events; in doing so, he seems to establish a sort of metaphoric 
reality for past, and a deeply awareness for present time, whose forms and 
shapes stand to remember and signify human modest efforts to resist time.


Ilaria
  __________________________________
ROME
THE VATICAN – SALA DELLE MUSE
(1887)

I sat in the Muses' Hall at the mid of the 
day,
And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away,
And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun,
Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.

She was nor this nor that of those beings divine,
But each and the whole--an essence of all the Nine;
With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place,
A pensive smile on her sweet, small, marvellous face.

"Regarded so long, we render thee sad?" said she.
"Not you," sighed I, "but my own inconstancy!
I worship each and each; in the morning one,
And then, alas! another at sink of sun.

"To-day my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth
Of yesternight with Tune:  can one cleave to both?"
- "Be not perturbed," said she.  "Though apart in fame,
As I and my sisters are one, those, too, are the same.

- "But my loves go further--to Story, and Dance, and Hymn,
The lover of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim -
Is swayed like a river-weed as the ripples run!"
- "Nay, wight, thou sway'st not.  These are but phases of one;

"And that one is I; and I am projected from thee,
One that out of thy brain and heart thou causest to be -
Extern to thee nothing.  Grieve not, nor thyself becall,
Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love at all!