Thomas Hardy

Hardy did not suffer any terrible calamity as had many other writers, and the tenor of his early life is known to have been even and largely uneventful. Critics state that whatever it was within him that gave him this dark turn of mind, it is evident that he kept it hidden:

He always kept a polite and ironic mask before the world, and never, as some writers have done, let it drop so that the real man beneath might be seen and understood. Even his "official" biography serves the function of such a mask, for it was written by himself and typed under his direction by his second wife. . . and it is more interesting for what it conceals than for what it says (Carpenter 18).

Robert Gittings notes as well that Hardy's youth was seemingly without major incident, and yet at the same time he finds that it was a life of emotion and a deeply-felt sense of the pain of self-discovery:

The true story of Hardy's early work is therefore essential to the understanding of some of his finest work. This cannot, however, be reached by treating his creative work as pure autobiography, and guessing at the early li

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r known. The woman does not love him and never has. He has asked her to meet him and she has not come: You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. There is no indication that she said she would, only that he has hoped she would. The speaker is a very needy individual, requiring even the slightest indication from this woman that she knows he is alive. He may seek love from this absent woman, but he is willing to settle for "compassion" or "loving kindness." The fact that she has not come has caused him to grieve, which seems to elevate her absence to the level of the loss of a loved one through death without actually managing to accomplish this task. She is very much alive, which makes her absence more purposeful than that of the woman in the first poem. He is fully aware of this fact and aware that she has no loyalty to him, for loyalty comes with love: "I know and I knew it." He has waited for her until the waiting has made him numb. Indeed, it has also left him feeling sorry that she has not seen fit to show him more kindness. This is clear in the fist stanza when he says that he is unhappy not just because she has not shown up but also because he has now
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Approximate Word count = 1625
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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