[Ttha-potm] re: Childhood among the ferns

[David DeVries]

Dear All,

“Man’s estate” in close proximity to the rain the boy tries to escape
brings to my mind Feste’s concluding song.  Hardy’s own earlier evocation
of Feste in “During Wind and Rain” is about as devastating a gaze at man’s
estate and the rain as there is: all the splendid adult
activity—“brightest things that are theirs”—resolved to “down their carved
names the rain-drop ploughs.”   I’m intrigued that the boy’s desired
escape is an escape from “man’s estate,” not, though, an escape from
death: “I could live on here thus till death”—that last phrase, in the
‘fiction’ of the poem, is spoken in the past by the boy and indicates to
me the same kind of realistic core to the boy’s fantasy he demonstrates in
the third stanza: he knows very well he is being rained upon even while
“[m]aking pretence I was not rained upon” even as he knows that eventually
he will die.  And while I take Rosemarie’s point that the poem is not cast
in the boy’s voice, it is a retrospective adult poet re-inhabiting a boy’s
experience, the boy is given direct speech in addition to a sequence of
verbs (sat, conned, making pretence, said) and descriptive details
constructed in such a way as to give us (or at least me) a pretty fair
sense of the experience of being the boy under the ferns and watching
carefully the water drops and so forth.

I wonder if the biographical hints threaten to lead away from the poem? 
Bailey in his Handbook asserts as fact that the poem is a poetic
autobiographical analogue to the passage in the Life Bill has excerpted
(“The poem is autobiographical, developing a memory recorded in The Early
Life” 590), and Bailey also cites the passage from Jude as another
analogue.  There are, though, fairly telling differences between the two
prose passages and this poem.  The prose passages both situate their
protagonists in bright sunshine and have them draw straw hats over their
heads.  The poem has the boy taking to the ferns for shelter from the rain
on a cloudy day.  The prose boy, so to speak, is a much more self-absorbed
character than the poem’s boy.  Where the autobiographical prose boy
reflects “on his experiences of the world so far as he had got,” the boy
in the poem very carefully notes and trains his and our attention on his
surroundings (especially in my favorite stanza of the poem, the second);
and engages his imagination “making pretence”; in other words, he
attempts, like a poet, after all, to reshape reality.  And it’s worth
noting that he felt pride when he “conned his spray-roofed house”—he
(and/or the poet) remade the natural world into a domicile through
language—the fronds become wholly his building materials: “green rafters.”
 And, at least in the sequence of the poem, nature seems to respond
because as soon as the boy fully acknowledges the use of his imagination,
the sun bursts out and he’s rewarded with “a sweet breath”: “Making
pretence I was not rained upon. / The sun then burst
”

As for whether the poem is a bitter-tasting reminiscence of lost youth or
something else, I’d incline to something else.  If the poem has an
autobiographical sense I think it gestures toward what Hardy was able to
achieve.  He couldn’t escape growing into man’s estate, but he was able to
create these small moments, these ‘spray-roofed houses’ in which, to
borrow from Wallace Stevens, “we rest and for small reason think the world
imagined is the ultimate good.”  Obviously the rain it raineth every day,
but the wonder of Hardy’s verse is that it acknowledges the rain, even
admits that we are rained upon while we ‘make pretence’ we are dry, and,
if we’ve paid attention, reminds us that there are compensations,
consolations to be gathered from the moments between the rainfalls.  Like,
for instance, the final stanza, to which in my earlier readings of the
poem I had not paid enough attention.

At first I did think there was a falling off in the last stanza, a kind of
petulance that seemed disappointing after the first four stanzas.  But,
I’m not so sure I’m disappointed the more I think about it.  He got the
echo from Feste with “man’s estate” and needed a rhyme so came up with
that verb that so troubles others on this list.  Whether “perambulate” was
intended to conjure Sundays in the park and all the trappings of bourgeois
child-rearing or not, that it does conjure those images is as intriguing
as it is poetically useful.  The culture of nannies and so forth Rosemarie
described for us presents a fashioning of the world that is an alternative
to the subtler, less comprehensively intrusive remaking Hardy’s boy
performs in this poem, or, if you wish, that Hardy performs in writing the
poem and remaking the world.  The “afar-noised World” always dominates and
the single word “this” in the final line suggests that the boy in the
space of uttering his querulous why has been transported directly into
that world.  But we have the luxury for as long as we can take the time
and energy to do so to return to the “tall-stemmed ferns spread out
luxuriantly.”  And the way that so many on this list have felt the poem’s
power as a way to return them to their own experiences of youthful moments
in the green world is an index of how well Hardy has succeeded in rescuing
for us moments out of the noise.

Thank you for all the fascinating discussions.

David N. DeVries