It's been a beautiful day here and we have enjoyed our home county of Dorset by having a Thomas Hardy Day.
I love Hardy - always have. I think it stemed from studying him at school - well we would in Dorset wouldn't we!
For A level one of the 9 set books we had was Tess of The D'Urbervilles - still one of my all time top ten books (it featured in my top ten page a couple of months ago) and another was The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy. They were amazing books which I still enjoy now. (The others were not so good as it happens ... Washington Square which was OK, North and South which was OK, Hamlet, Julius Caesar (both OK) Chaucer's Wide of Bath's Tale and then two utter pups which I loathed ... Dombey and Son (I think the exam board worked on the premise of picking the dullest fattest Dickens they could find) and Middlemarch which I confess I never read other than the first 100 pages ... I managed to get a B based on Cole's notes!)
Anyway I digress. I love Hardy and as it was a lovely day we set off to Dorchester to visit Max Gate and Hardy's Cottage. We had been to Hardy's cottage before though had never been in, but had never been to Max Gate which the Trust have just opened this year and are working on.
Max Gate was the house that Hardy, an architect by trade, designed and his brother built. He lived there with both of his wives, Emma and Florence. Compared to the cottage we went to later, it was quite austere, but really really interesting to visit. They had a Tess exhibition on as it is the 100th anniversary this year.
I was fascinated to see the pet cemetery as one of my favourite poems (long before I was a cat owner actually) was written at Max Gate about his beloved cat Snowdove who was killed on the railway track. It was wonderful to see the marker where Snowdove ended and have the poem right there too.
Last Words to a Dumb Friend
Pet was never mourned as you,
Purrer of the spotless hue,
Plumy tail, and wistful gaze
While you humoured our queer ways,
Or outshrilled your morning call
Up the stairs and through the hall -
Foot suspended in its fall -
While, expectant, you would stand
Arched, to meet the stroking hand;
Till your way you chose to wend
Yonder, to your tragic end.
Never another pet for me!
Let your place all vacant be;
Better blankness day by day
Than companion torn away.
Better bid his memory fade,
Better blot each mark he made,
Selfishly escape distress
By contrived forgetfulness,
Than preserve his prints to make
Every morn and eve an ache.
From the chair whereon he sat
Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;
Rake his little pathways out
Mid the bushes roundabout;
Smooth away his talons’ mark
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.
Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for his life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
His existence ruled by ours,
Should - by crossing at a breath
Into safe and shielded death,
By the merely taking hence
Of his insignificance -
Loom as largened to the sense,
Shape as part, above man’s will,
Of the Imperturbable.
As a prisoner, flight debarred,
Exercising in a yard,
Still retain I, troubled, shaken,
Mean estate, by him forsaken;
And this home, which scarcely took
Impress from his little look,
By his faring to the Dim
Grows all eloquent of him.
Housemate, I can think you still
Bounding to the window-sill,
Over which I vaguely see
Your small mound beneath the tree,
Showing in the autumn shade
That you moulder where you played.
From there we went to Higher Bockhampton to the cottage where Hardy was born - an altogether more photogenic place.
Another of my favourite Hardy poems (gosh I have so many) was written here about the cottage and was perhaps the first poem he wrote that we still have today, written when he was a teenager.
Domicilium
It faces west, and round the back and sides
High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs,
And sweep against the roof. Wild honeysucks
Climb on the walls, and seem to sprout a wish
(If we may fancy wish of trees and plants)
To overtop the apple trees hard-by.
Red roses, lilacs, variegated box
Are there in plenty, and such hardy flowers
As flourish best untrained. Adjoining these
Are herbs and esculents; and farther still
A field; then cottages with trees, and last
The distant hills and sky.
Behind, the scene is wilder. Heath and furze
Are everything that seems to grow and thrive
Upon the uneven ground. A stunted thorn
Stands here and there, indeed; and from a pit
An oak uprises, Springing from a seed
Dropped by some bird a hundred years ago.
In days bygone--
Long gone--my father's mother, who is now
Blest with the blest, would take me out to walk.
At such a time I once inquired of her
How looked the spot when first she settled here.
The answer I remember. 'Fifty years
Have passed since then, my child, and change has marked
The face of all things. Yonder garden plots
And orchards were uncultivated slopes
O'ergrown with bramble bushes, furze and thorn:
That road a narrow path shut in by ferns,
Which, almost trees, obscured the passers-by.
Our house stood quite alone, and those tall firs
And beeches were not planted. Snakes and efts
Swarmed in the summer days, and nightly bats
Would fly about our bedrooms. Heathcroppers
Lived on the hills, and were our only friends;
So wild it was when we first settled here.'
And here are just a couple of photos I took today and liked.
and this which I think is a comma butterfly (took quite a few of him)
All in all it has been a lovely day.
And the cottage and the whole Hardy day is the subject of my LSNED
Today I am thankful for
- Great literature and poetry that enrich life so much
- Sunshine in Autumn
- The delicate beauty of nature
