[Ttha-potm] In defence of line 10

[carolyn mcgrath]

Kevin Taylor says, "Seems to me he could have omitted some or all of line 10,".

What a loss that would be. Apart from making the stanza length wonky and ruining the rhyme scheme, there would be a loss in meaning and irreparable damage to the riddle-like structure of the poem. Far from being a line to be omitted, line 10 is as key to the structure and meanings to be found within the poem as any other.

The first stanza opens with "I am the family face;" and the rest of the stanza provides further examples of what "Heredity" is, here and now, and how it operates across time and space: leaping 'over oblivion' to escape the chasm of individual death. The second stanza, similarly (but in reverse) opens with "The years-heired feature ...", a clause that isn't concluded until line 10's "- that am I". (Interestingly, 'heired' is a dialect equivalent of 'inherited', another word closely associated with Darwinism.) This structural feature, along with the rhyme scheme and the alliteration, runs across lines throughout the poem, contributing to the chain effect of heredity's continuity across time and space. It is, I think, the combination of these features that creates the confident or triumphal tone that has been detected. 

The word "durance" is significant in its links alliteratively with
"Despise" and "die", but also in the interaction of its various meanings in relation to "human span": 

durance (uncountable)
(obsolete) Duration. 
(obsolete) Endurance. 
(archaic) Imprisonment; forced confinement. 
Retrieved from "http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/durance"

If, like me, you hear the voice of the persona as that of "Heredity", then "human span" is but a short duration, when seen against eternity, that ends in death; it also alludes, as Kevin says, to a life of hardship; but it is also experienced by "Heredity" as a forced confinement. "Heredity" is that 'eternal thing' that 'heeds no call to die' but it can exists in one human span after another. In this sense, too, the truimphalism is undermined, as the energetic 'leaping from place to place' could also be viewed as an endless transfer from one prison cell to another. Life is contradictory, it would seem, even for 'eternal things'.

One further point, I love the fact that Hardy takes language as his inheritance and uses words deemed obsolete and archaic, or coins those he finds wanting, in order to leap 'over oblivion' himself to construct meaning.

cheers

Carolyn McGrath