[hardy-l] Disagreement on "Lying Awake"

[Rosemarie Morgan]

So Glad to have your message, Julian, my good friend (long time ....  ? .).

You reminded me of the many adventures I had in my wild youth, in 
graveyards.  It was always a challenge- (we thought, in our deliberate 
hubris) to the mighty powers that be -- to make love in the churchyard. In 
the grass, on tombstones, beside vaults and under yew trees. There was such 
a compelling reason for taking the risk not least the romantic setting, the 
eeriness, the sense of so many souls in affinity -- and for some reason I 
can't quite explain, the churchyard was always ....welcoming.

But as for "Lying Awake" I think it has nothing to do with ghosts or 
graveyards.. These stereotypes (in reading Hardy) have become dreadfully 
commonplace. He was such a deep thinker. I feel we cheat him when we so 
readily assign his speakers to graves and ghosts. There are other mystical 
presences after all  and the "as if" or "I would" or "if I were" 
consciousness seems to me to extend into a world of such intense desire for 
creativity that I hear resonances of "Genesis" and of Kubrick's star world 
and even of Erich von Däniken's cosmology.

But each to her own ---
Best
Rosemarie

>    Contrary to many of the views expressed so far and perhaps exposing a 
> very naive point of view, I am finally compelled to opine that this poem 
> strikes me, as do so many other of Hardy's poems set in cemeteries, as 
> not at all macabre or even lugubrious.

>Your Jolly Admirer,
>Julian