[Ttha-potm] 'Heredity': Looks Familiar

[WILLIAM NEEDHAM]

Joyous news! According to the weekend papers the BBC is soon to launch a national  poetry recital competition that will be open to every child between seven and eleven.  The Sunday Times gives best coverage:famous names endorse the view that it can only be a GOOD THING. I add my humble one to theirs, but I'll let Monty Python prompt me to speak further: "...Learn by 'eart, that's nowt! When I were a lad..." 
 
Yes, and no doubt when Hardy was a lad too, everyone would have  to offer some little entertainment-- "do a turn"--at family "do"s. I missed, by a couple of decades, seeing my  great-aunt Ida, a cotton weaver from Lancashire, doing a clog dance on top of a buffet. Alas, I wasn't able to miss my mother's cousin, Ethel, who sang contralto and made me shudder as if I were to blame for something absolutely awful. For my part I got away with "The owl and the pussy cat" (always my grandfather's request) but, going on 8, I began to feel a bit of a cissie; so I switched to "Bishop Hatto".  A poem like this month's, renamed, say, "The Family Face"--now, that would have gone down a treat and it would have been great fun for me. 
 
It's my guess that Hardy is having a lot of fun here too. Burdened with no new ideas he can simply indulge himself; and he can allude--fondly, no doubt-- to his own favourites: 
"I change, but I cannot die." [Shelleys "The Cloud"]
"The years-heired..." [a play on Hamlet's "That flesh is heir to..."]
 
There may be others. But what engages me more than anything is the "I" which certainly follows Shelley's model in "The Cloud" of what one might perhaps term  'a mythopoetic personification'. It's an absolute boon to an actorly reciter who can vaunt and strut and tease and mimic. The snarling, sneering, prognathic lines 9 and 10 are absolutely killing !
 
Best wishes,
Bill


      
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