[Ttha-potm] How many sentences?

[David Havird]

Sorry to be dense, but have we ever settled on the source of the poet's
"irk"?

I appreciated Carolyn's analysis of the sentence structure.  My own sense,
which I think accords at least partly with hers, is that the first two
stanzas, composing a single sentence, represent the poet's romantic
musing, which could, theoretically, go on and on, like the similes in
Shelley's ode to the skylark.  So--thesis, which actually continues past
the first ellipses.  Then antithesis: "Yet, no."

The punctuation concluding the third stanza together with the dash
introducing the fourth is curious--the punctuation along with the past
tense "rose," which, as I remember, Carolyn addressed earlier.  Didn't she
say that "rose" takes us back to the beginning of the poem--which would
imply that the source of the irk lay/lies elsewhere than with the
whistling and "wheezed whettings"?  Are we to find paradox here: the
speaker, though he gets up early just because he wants to (just for the
pleasure of it), still feels ... well, what exactly does "irk" or "irked"
mean in the context?  "Vexed"?  "Weary"?  But the first two stanzas don't
hint at any irksome feelings that he may have had when he arose--or am I
wrong?

The colon at the end of the line would seem to suggest that what follows
provides the answer: the poet feels "irk" when discovering not only that
someone is up before him (when he was luxuriating in the thought that he
was the earliest riser) but also that this mower or whatever he is, who
must get up early, appears to have done so cheerfully.

I'm not sure how I'd express the synthesis that the last stanza, according
to Carolyn's analysis, would seem to represent.

Is it possible that the first line of the last stanza, with its past
tense, signals that the incident, autobiographical (as the "Bockhampton"
indicates), is retrospective?  In other words, "rose" doesn't take us back
in the poem but back to the time in Hardy's life when the remembered
incident occurred.  The last four lines, in present tense--could they then
represent not, perhaps, a return to the "present action" of the poem but
rather a moral of sorts, which typically does come in present tense?

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