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

[David Havird]

> Well, frankly, I'm not sure what it means to say that "we" see with "eyes
> of
> guile" by day.  You've shifted the meaning at least a little by changing
> the
> preposition to "for," (e.g., eyes for guile), but I'm not persuaded that's
> warranted. ... If the eyes are
> "of
> guile," how can they lead us to see clearly?


I take your point, Bill.

What Hardy seems to be doing in that first stanza-and-a-half is depicting
the (fallen) world as edenic--well, not exactly, but "not far" from
it--"not far from Paradise."  After all, the world is in the process of
being recreated at 4 AM--and we ourselves, it would seem, participate in
that process.  Later--in broad daylight--our sense of things (which
involves our sense of sight) will be one with the postlapsarian world,
which is characterized by guile.  Something like that?

Hardy's poem calls to mind Philip Larkin's "Sad Steps," also set a 4 AM. 
The poet isn't getting up--he's "groping back to bed after a piss"--which
might have been irksome.  Come to think about it, his return to bed may be
a return to "pleasure"--by which I mean simply the pleasure of sleeping
longer.  Anyway, he sees the moon--Larkin's description of the sky at 4 AM
is a lot more equivocal than Hardy's, a lot more--as a "lozenge of love." 
This he associates with youth, which lies now in the speaker's distant
(prelapsarian) past.

David

-- 
David Havird
Professor of English
Department of English
Centenary College of Louisiana
Shreveport, LA 71134-1188
http://personal.centenary.edu/~dhavird/
Tel: 318.8695085
Fax: 318.8695411