1.            Thomas Hardy’s “The Voice”

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

First Piece: Hardy’s “The Voice” 

 Likely nobody would, without stretching the term very far, suggest that Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Voice” is a political poem, but it is a poem that can lead us to ask what might make a poem political and what the relation of poetry and politics might be. Take the penultimate stanza:

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Or is only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

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As a parlor trick modeled on the New Yorker Caption Contest, we might imagine this verse affixed beneath a favorite political photo from years past: the clever interpretation would posit the voice as the voice of the leader, or the voice of the people, missed then, regretted now, the listener ruefully making his way forward, the future an empty chamber to be filled with an echo of the past. 

But this is a superficial application of politics to poetry; the relationship cannot be so direct. It depends first on recognizing that the poem is not about politics, but that the poem has about it a generality of suggestion that exceeds its occasion. The poem, because it is about imagining what is absent, and imagining what might have been, can be said not to be about, but to have about it, an experience of unlived histories, without which political life cannot exist. 

Along with the poems of Swinburne, who wrote a few years earlier than Hardy, this poem has been praised for achieving pathos in a meter of anapests and dactyls (anapests were also being put to new nonsense-use in limericks in the Victorian era), and also for wresting polysyllabic rhymes from the comic associations that Gilbert and Sullivan, writing around the same time, would exploit. But Hardy cannot abolish the shadow of the preposterous from his rhyme of “listlessness” and “wan wistlessness”; it is a shadow that allows for the possibility of that the poet is partially unaware. It imagines vividly what it is not only to realize oneself to have been unaware in the past, but also recognizes, without the full recognition that would destroy the effect and make the entire performance impossible, how such a glance back at an earlier unawareness may be accompanied by a blindness to the present. 

When we come to the final stanza of the poem, its resolute cadence perseveres not only against the time that will erode memories further, but also doubles down in its insistence of personal tragedy:

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

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The spondaic crush of “Thus I” turns its back on the swing of anapests and dactyls heard in the previous stanzas, and the semi-colon that follows registers as a determination to cease that yields to the poet’s extraordinary will. But he does not only persevere despite being haunted; he perseveres in being haunted. The poet yearns not just for the woman who is calling but yearns for the calling of the woman does not want to escape her reproach (the doubleness is expressed in the opening line, “Woman much missed how you call to me, call to me,” where the repetition is an intensification of pathos but also a demand for more).

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In this poem, Hardy precipitates a complex of feelings that have no political occasion. In their barest skeletal structure, they are indebted to the Romantic poetry from a century prior. Hardy learns from Shelley that self-pity can be a generative force for poetry. But he also learns that self-pity is most truly a means of apprehending the world when it admits of the self-accusation that British poet Geoffrey Hill has called “the lifeblood of Romanticism.” The self-accusation here is not that pity itself is unwarranted, but that the occasion for the self-pity does not exonerate that self; that they are culpable in their own suffering. Hardy ends “The Voice” unsure whether he wants for the calling to cease, which is to say that he is unsure whether he wants to be forgiven; if he requires forgiveness from her, he will never have it, and if he can only have forgiveness from himself, it might be said to be something other than—opposed to—forgiveness. 

This becomes, then, a poem about the need for a particular virtuous stance towards oneself, and towards the past (a matter of justly apportioning blame to oneself, serving as both prosecutor and defendant, and, not entirely willingly, jury). The feelings can be set forth, but to set them right cannot be squaring them or resolving their contradictions; the only justice available within the poem is an acknowledgement of the conundrum of justice. 

It will be thought by some that I’ve taken too convenient a leap to this word, “justice,” that means one thing here and something else in the context of politics. But it is difficult to know what it would mean to discuss what is right and wrong in the world, in a poem, or in a state without at some point falling onto the class of words that we cluster together as “virtues.”  As an ethical framework, virtues can accommodate both the aesthetic and the political because it is nothing more or less than the shared vocabulary of value-recognition. There’s no arguing on utilitarian grounds that I ought to prefer a particular candidate, since I cannot know which of his policies he will enact or what unforeseen crises she will face; if politics were only a matter of rational calculation of outcomes, we would all be utilitarians and, in so far as cost-benefit calculation can be applied to all planning, maybe we are; and if politics were only a matter of institutional design, we might deliberate on Rawlsian lines; but the institutional design cannot be judged independently of the human behaviors it fosters or diminishes. But at some point, when it comes to arguing over whether we approve of some action, habit of conduct, or character, we end up resorting to a set of terms that we might as well call virtues. Aristotle’s anatomy in the Nicomachean Ethics does not need to be seen as exhaustive so much as exemplary, a demonstration of how the language of virtues is parsed without excessive generality; and we do not need to embrace Phillipa Foot’s natural “ought” in order to accept a rough position that we are, every day, in practice, confronted with situations that evoke or demand our judgment. Some of these are political, some of these—for some people at least, and not just titled critics—are artistic. 

Hardy’s poem opens:

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Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

.

“Fair” is serene, beautiful; it’s a word of sensual and aesthetic approval; but it is also, of course, a word of ethics and (nod to Rawls) political philosophy, as Elaine Scarry notes in her On Beauty and Being Just. The fairness of that first day is the fairness of the state of nature; a bliss that cannot be had except in retrospect, against which to measure all of what was owed and not given. The second stanza finds in the vivid recollection of their first meeting:

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

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This is the day itself, its fairness revealed “even to the original air blue gown,” where the gown was an origin of their union, but also, already, the symptom of what must be ephemeral, as insubstantial to touch as the air through which she now calls. But the crucial word, the word that savors of the fair and fairness alike, is “even to the original air-blue gown.” It is not a pun, exactly, but were the phrasing taken to imply “down to the original air-blue gown,” it would lack the sense of symmetry, balance, and equanimity of “even,” a word that suggests, though more cautiously than “fair,” the ethical and aesthetic at one and the same time. 

Until its final stanza, the poem is even: undecided between whether she is present or absent, but held in suspense between the two possibilities, as it held between haunting and yearning, between regret and desire, until, as if set out of balance by the excessive balance of “wistlessness” and “listlessness” it totters into a stubborn refusal to let go of the fantasy, fear of forgetting matched by inability to forgive; it ends not only on self-accusation but on self-resentment, a self-blame that seethes at its self-directed injustice but that cannot find relief from the echo of the past. The resolution of the poem is not submission to irresolution but an insistence on that there is no uncertainty,  the final stanza is not only a break from what has come before, but a breaking up of it. The final word “calling” and the final line, “and the woman calling,” do not admit doubt; the poem has determined to persevere as if the call could not be doubted. Doing so abandons what is “even” because it refuses to relinquish its memory of a “fair” day.

The poem is tragic because it can never satisfy or resolve its own demands for justice with the past; the speaker has set himself an impossible task, determining to fall always short of the “fair” day that cannot be recovered; the woman’s “calling” is neither vocation nor summoning, since what is absent and past cannot call one to it, in any meaningful sense. There is a moral here, a suggestion that we ought to move on from regrets if we are to live well. Some might take this to be a political moral, but really the moral, and the impossibility of reconciliation that the poem dramatizes and apprehends in its full contradictory range of feelings, is political because of that common substratum upon which poetry (or art, in general) and politics rest.

Both demand, in other words, a reconciliation of three aspects of the world, which are inherent in all human thinking and acting: what-is, what-might-be, and what-ought-to-be. No doubt we, all of us, must reconcile the tensions among these three every day, depending on the situations we face—and this very general condition of human conduct should be taken as a ground for seeing politics and poetry as joint endeavors in the work of living. 

This leaves me in a weakened position. Admitting that poetry and politics stand on common ground, the ground of life itself, it would be perverse the claim that Hardy’s “The Voice” is political. It would be like claiming that apples are oranges because both are fruits, or that Canada is the United States because they both share the same continental landmass. But the poem does show how it is that a poem’s imagination is compounded by judgments that are continuous, and very near, to the judgments of political life. Or we can put it more broadly: the continuity of poetry and politics is possible because the attempted (not necessarily successful or completel) reconciliation of ought, is, and might is an act of judgment common to the imaginative enterprises of both.

What the great Romantic poet-critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “the drama of reason” in a poem is this same drama of (almost always partial) reconciliation between the actual, the possible, and the right, which in turn is drama of (always partial) reconciliation between language, imagination, and judgment (though I would not insist on a one-to-one mapping of terms).The word “drama” is a crux: a poem both represents the action of reconciliation and is in and of itself that act of reconciliation. In its disposition on the page, as a made thing, Hardy’s poem is a formal reconciliation of the three, as much as it succeeds; at the same time, presenting a speaker uttering in time, coming to terms with the terms he has been dealt, it represents the effort of a reconciliation that cannot come to pass.

I have taxed the word “reconciliation,” maybe more than it can bear. But it is hopefully helpful for distinguishing between Hardy’s poem and poems that might be called, without stretching the word, “political.” A poem that is political announces itself as such by taking a political actuality, possibility, or ideal as a means, end, or obstruction in its drama; it has a major role. Hardy’s poem, by not inviting politics into its scene, nonetheless clarifies how the drama itself has implications for how we go about imagining and judging political realities; how even poetry that is not political may have a role in the drama that is not poetry, but politics.

-- By Owen Boynton