All the best,

http://books.google.com/books?id=k4H4xfCiUd0C&pg=PA211&dq=final+fridays+conversation+frost&hl=en&sa=X&ei=I91JUaiMGZfk4AOF94HgAQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=final%20fridays%20conversation%20frost&f=false

Thanks for stopping by. I’ve not had time to do much with this web-log in the last couple of months. I’ll return, no doubt, come March.

First of all, conveying his thoughts in a sonnet format–even if he diverges from it somewhat, not radically–seems a conservative choice. As a reader, I felt played, by the artifice of the format, but the juxtaposition of so-called opposites–it’s so mannered. And I find the sanctimony you also detect and decry. Some frayed edges or real emotion–which he so loftily discourses on in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads–might’ve helped.

Don’t care for this poem. No sirree, I do not. Thank you for your thoughts.

Good to hear from you, and thanks. I’m doing well over here in Kyoto.

Reading “The Ordeal” to your son? I expect most young folk would find that quite an ordeal. But of course I’m delighted.

Best regards to you & your son,
Mark

Yes, how about those Corinthians!

It occurs to me that you’ve laid the groundwork for a tale that Hardy might well have written, if he set himself the task.

My notion is that, seeing as how the speaker of the poem is unreliable, and that the only evidence he offers of Judy’s insanity is her (locally unpopular) anti-natalism, we simply don’t know that Judy’s “insane,” and, in fact, have reason to suspect that she’s not. Aberrant and odd she may be, and to her townsfolk a genuine curiosity. But no verbal details in the poem tell us anything about her other than that she thinks it probably better never to have been (given that the world is so stony a shore). Following such protocols as I follow, we can’t say whether she was ever a mother, for example. We know her given name. We know she believes that coming into existence is a harm. And we know that the locals find that belief “mad,” and that they dismiss her by humoring her. (That is, they don’t regard her as a peril.) That’s all we know for sure.

But my protocols aren’t the only ones.

Hope to be up New England way come late August early September.

Yours,
Mark

And how about those Corinthians!

So Herschel had done the work. Of course.

The Karoo, I expect, is not rich in worms, but the veldt, with its Drummer Hodge-infused kopje-crest, should have worms enough to turn the trick for that southern tree.

If I ever knew Dr. Johnson’s cat was called Hodge, I’d forgotten it.

I suppose “Wessex” does relatively little work for TH, in the sense you mean. On the other hand, The Dead Drummer is probably most affecting when read amongst its ten partner poems in the opening section of “Poems of the Past and Present.” They bear on it.

By the way: a happy birthday to you, Henry. The Pirate & I expected to see you on a barstool in the Moon last night, but were bereft. The Immanent Will must have had other plans for you (or for us).

Yours,
Mark

I’d forgotten about this, and the extent of its influence on Brooke. It’s interesting how little work ‘Wessex’ does for Hardy, compared with ‘England’ for Brooke: the idea of home soil sustaining the transplanted stock – native airs and earths circulating in the lifeblood, as it were – is absent here. So the ‘growing into a southern tree’ introduces – in my eyes – a cognitive dissonance, working against the smoothness of the scansion in the final stanza. (Reinforces a dissonance, I should say: isn’t ‘dusty loam’ oxymoronic? Back to the worms. I wonder whether the ‘Green Imperialism’ literature, Richard Grove’s book for example, might not provide some context.) All is alienation. Despite, as you point out, the dead man’s being called Hodge.

The name also of Samuel Johnson’s cat, ‘who shall not be shot’.

John Herschel had naturalized the southern constellations – claimed them for Empire – as far back as the 1830s (from the observatory he set up on the Cape). But news had obviously not filtered through to Hodge.

Henry

I enjoyed working this one up. Lighting upon that old 17th century Dutch narrative about the Cape was a bit of luck. Interesting (though not surprising) to see how much the Cape figured in the histories TH relied on in writing “The Dynasts” (I ought to get round to that someday). Why do we (Americans anyhow) still call The Great War the first “world” war?

Thank you again. I’m looking forward to the book!

Yours,
Mark

Best,
Mark