The Dark Space Illumined: A Reading of Hardy's "Poems of 1912-13"

Hardy's "Poems of 1912-13" are seen as a carefully integrated process rather than a poetic bundling-an elegy mythically conceived. Several traditional myths have specific relevance to the elegy, including Tristram and Iseult, Aeneas and Dido, Tithonus and Aurora; but the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice provides the most enveloping analogue. The poet's use of a mythic subtext transforms the events of the elegy from personal history to public myth, the two modes of perception being joined at a psychological center in which a speaker/ protagonist, employing various language strategies, attempts to sort things out and come to "know some liberty" from a certain burden of the past. Like Orpheus and other mythic protagonists, the speaker makes his journey to the land of the dead and there learns, under the tutelage of his deceased beloved, to transcend time and recover a lost paradise, a spot of personal time of incomparable quality. The dramatic lyric "After a Journey" is the transformational center of the elegy, representing a stage in an imaginative process by which a response primarily stressful is turned toward a primarily affirmative response. The speaker is thereby enabled to accept a literally matter-of-fact mortality and to forgo a literally matter-of-fact immortality because he has learned how to group their story with other archetypal stories and to have renewed joy of an unadulterated past.