Stood Up
The fiction and poetry of British writer Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) often projects a bleak, dour attitude toward experience, not unlike the attitudes represented in the works of A.E. Housman and Robinson Jeffers. Of course, those who favor a Hardy/Housman/Jeffers worldview might quibble with the word “bleak” and suggest replacing it with “accurate.” Even so, “dour” seems an especially good word to situate near Hardy, partly because it apparently shares etymological DNA with “duress” and “endure.”
Hardy could be a delicate writer, too—delicate in the way a jeweler, or a diplomatic envoy during a crisis, is paid to be. Consider the love poem, of sorts, “A Broken Appointment”:
A Broken Appointment
You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake
Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,
You did not come.
You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
--I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me?
(The first and last lines of each stanza are supposed to be indented and centered in relation to the rest of their stanzas, but the blog won't let me save the text that way.)
I find so much to like in this poem. Uncommonly, it explores a common experience, that of waiting for someone we care about and whom we want to believe cares about us, only to realize the person has chosen not to show up.
I admit the syntax in stanza one is front-loaded; that is, we must wait quite a while for that verb, “grieved.” Why did he grieve, however? The answer is delicate, discerning. He grieved not because he longed for the person, or because he was wounded by rudeness or abandonment, but because he realized the person’s character ("make," as in "makeup" or "constitution") lacked “high compassion.” The person lacks something that Hardy attempts to capture in a word that welds together two words: “lovingkindness”; the person’s character seems not to include a crucial type of kindness.
Delicately, Hardy writes “You love not me,” instead of “You love me not.” I take “You love me not” to place the emphasis on the speaker’s not being loved. “You love not me” is more detached, less self-centered; it states that the person expected at that appointed hour does not love the one waiting but no doubt loves another or others. In this chosen phrasing, I hear an echo of "that's the way it goes," of "c'est la vie." The phrasing also suggests that this situation is not a surprise to the one waiting. Incidentally, after we have waited for 13 lines, we learn for sure the person is “a woman.”
The poem appears to conclude with a rhetorical question, a kind of question we often ask when we are hurt or angry. A well worn example is, “What were you thinking?!” The one in the poem is more delicate. Indeed, I’m not sure if it expresses, rhetorically, disappointment and anger, or whether, in fact, it may not be entirely rhetorical. That is, perhaps the speaker actually wants to know whether the woman may not have found some worth in showing up and soothing him, the worth one finds in doing the right thing. That the question might function dually pleases me.
The speaker seems not to have expected an expression of love or an indication of loyalty. Basically, he just wanted her to show up, bringing with her a kind word.
I need not but will point out the deftly handled form: iambic pentameter, book-ended in both stanzas by iambic dimeter; an intricate scheme of rhyming; a tone of voice—at least insofar as I interpret the tone—that is, certainly, formal but also conversational. But who talks like that? That’s a fair question. A person who has worked out an elaborate but firm notion of good character may talk like that, and perhaps also an educated person born in 1840 and still alive a decade after the Great War.
Finally, I must mention "the hope-hour," from the penultimate line in stanza one. Haven't we all experienced "the hope-hour," in which, like the people stuck in Casablanca, we "wait . . . and wait. . . and wait"?
