[Ttha-potm] "Four in the Morning" POTM for June 2008

[Bill Morgan]

This poem has been one of my second-tier favorites for a long time.  By
second-tier, I mean that it's not right up there with Hardy's greatest poems
(say, "Wessex Heights," "Concerning Agnes," "On the Esplanade," "The Going,"
"The Voice," etc.), but it's strongly conceived and well-made, and
thematically engaging.  Workmanlike if not exactly inspired.  

 

I enjoy the scene-setting of the first 7 lines or so, the peak of which is
in line 4, where earth, a deep-blue mystery, seems "not far from Paradise"
or, we learn a little later on, perhaps not far from the stars.  This
quasi-magical scene is in contrast to our daylight vision ("eyes of guile"
and "the grisly grin of things"-phrases I can't say I admire all that much:
in fact, I don't quite see how our eyes can possess or have guile).    

 

I take the whistling to be that of the other early-riser, since the poem
says "A whistling and" and not "A whistling of" the sound of the whetstone.
The other early riser whistles cheerfully as he goes about his work.  And
this brings us to the moral core of the poem, I think: the speaker is
correcting himself, even chiding himself for having risen "with irk" to go
about his pleasurable work-for being less than cheerful, whereas his fellow
riser is in a good mood, even though he's about to set off on a day of hard
labor.  In this respect this poem is like several others of Hardy's-"The
Last Chrysanthemum," for example, in which some kind of external stimulus
prompts the speaker to correct his or her perceptions.  There is a winning
humility in the gesture of correction.

 

About the subscription, Bockhampton:  Yes, of course it's possible to read
it as a signal to the reader to take the poem as a personal experience and
personal statement coming directly from Hardy.  But it can also be read as
Hardy's note to himself, reminding himself about the origins of the poem.
If we read it the first way, we are bound to see the narrator as some
version of Hardy himself.  If we read it the second way, we are under no
such constraints and can let the poem expand to take in many different
conception of speaker; all the subscription tells us is that the poet wanted
to remember where the original experience came from and that he's letting us
into a corner of his workshop from which we can see a little of how he
works.  



 

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