The Thomas Hardy Society has just celebrated Hardy's "birthday weekend" (this year including the 120th anniversary of the publication of Tess of the D'Urbervilles). Poem of the week picks up its fiddle and continues the theme, to celebrate Hardy the poet.
"Under the Waterfall", written in 1914, is one of the less familiar love poems. It's not an overtly personal lyric, and the strong emotion is channelled by skippy tetrameter rhythms and simple paired rhymes. In fact, while Hardy doesn't proclaim it as such, "Under the Waterfall" is an eclogue. From the opening speech-marks, and casually demonstrative "like this", we understand there's a second presence in the room, listening eagerly to the teller of the tale.
If the classical pastoral tradition is echoed, the poem is no less informed by the 19th-century novel, the genre that Hardy so abundantly enriched before he turned back to poetry, his first love. Many of the details about the natural world have the subtlety and precision of good prose description, while displaying the shifts of register that occur naturally in speech, particularly in the speech of those who move between countryside and city, or cross social boundaries through their education, like Hardy himself. The narrator combines the unlettered fancy of a "real love-rhyme" with the geologically-informed reference to "turfless peaks." With a wonderful touch of realism (like Hardy, the speaker notices such things), the waterfall's measurements are estimated at "About three spans wide and two spans tall". The curious plural, "peaces", in "wars and peaces" suggests the kind of mistake an uneducated person might make, but then, in a more learned register, the lost wine-glass is described as "opalised" by its long immersion in the water. The lexicon of this speaker is truly archaeological in its layering.
Folk-song is present, too, especially in those little sets of dimeter lines, with their firm but tripping rhythm and emotional boldness. This is a multi-dimensional poem, for all the intense and single-minded focus on the story it tells: it's conversation and song, lyric and narrative, literary and plain-speaking. Hardy fuses these elements with wonderful sureness, and even creates a character in the process.
Although we don't learn the main speaker's gender until the end, I think most readers would associate the plunging of an arm into a basin of water with feminine domestic activities or personal ablutions. We might think ahead to Elizabeth Bishop's beautiful love poem, "The Shampoo", or to Paul Muldoon's "The Right Arm" where a little boy also "plunged" his arm – into a jar of sweets. There must be a thesis to be written on the literary symbolism of the human arm. Wyatt perhaps began it, with that dream-like visitant in "They Flee from Me", who catches him up in "arms long and small". Perhaps, in the image of "long bared arms", Hardy is remembering Wyatt.
His speaker loves her love story, and needs only a little prompt when her auditor finally gets to say a few lines: "And who gives this the only prime / Idea to you of a real love-rhyme …?" So she's off again, warming to her theme. After that brief, conversational "Well …" the imagery brightens, the syntax flows faster. Now the poem acquires its memory-branding descriptive richness: we're shown the tracery of leaves on a hot blue August sky, the oaks shading the picnicking lovers, the fruit and wine cooling beside the "runlet," the "hard, smooth" rock-face, and, of course, the "inciting incident" – the accidental dropping of the wine-glass. This central event is tellingly underplayed: the vessel simply "slipped and sank and was past recall".
There are no regrets – or a pretty convincing pretence of no regrets. The notion that the "chalice" remains intact, and that no lips but the lovers' have since touched the rim is a slightly fantastical but potent consolation. The glass, the pool, the basin are repositories of memory – the photographic memory of a speaker, who, roused by an everyday event and a friendly listener, can recall each detail of the long-ago epiphany. She can even see the scene in miniature in the floral decorations on the basin. I wonder if we are meant to suspect that, in her "thickening shroud of grey", she has become a little deranged.
Remembrance brings immeasurably bitter sorrow to the speaker in many of Hardy's great love poems. Here, on the other side of the coin, it is treasured. The memory is seen as vividly as if were fixed in a cleft in the rocks, and belonged to the present. This ordinary woman isn't interested in posterity, but in preserving the most significant event of her life, for herself, in defiance of time. For writers, too, this is surely the origin of that strange compulsion to turn away from experience, so as to change another experience into words.
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Under the Waterfall
"Whenever I plunge my arm, like this,
In a basin of water, I never miss
The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day
Fetched back from the thickening shroud of grey.
Hence the only prime
And real love-rhyme
That I know by heart
And that leaves no smart,
Is the purl of a little valley fall
About three spans wide and two spans tall
Over a table of solid rock
And into a scoop of the self-same block;
The purl of a runlet that never ceases
In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces;
With a hollow, boiling voice it speaks
And has spoken since hills were turfless peaks."
"And why gives this the only prime
Idea to you of a real love-rhyme?
And why does plunging your arm in a bowl
Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul?"
"Well, under the fall, in a crease of the stone,
Though where precisely none ever has known,
Jammed darkly, nothing to show how prized,
And by now with its smoothness opalised,
Is a drinking-glass:
For, down that pass,
My love and I
Walked under a sky
Of blue with a leaf-wove awning of green,
In the burn of August, to paint the scene,
And we placed our basket of fruit and wine
By the runlet's rim, where we sat to dine;
And when we had drunk from the glass together,
Arched by the oak-copse from the weather,
I held the vessel to rinse in the fall,
Where it slipped, and sank, and was past recall,
Though we stooped and plumbed the little abyss
With long bared arms. There the glass still is.
And, as said, if I thrust my arm below
Cold water in basin or bowl, a throe
From the past awakens a sense of that time,
And the glass we used, and the cascade's rhyme.
The basin seems the pool, and its edge
The hard smooth face of the brook-side ledge,
And the leafy pattern of china-ware
The hanging plants that were bathing there.
"By night, by day, when it shines or lours,
There lies intact that chalice of ours,
And its presence adds to the rhyme of love
Persistently sung by the fall above.
No lip has touched it since his and mine
In turn therefrom sipped lovers' wine."
THOMAS HARDY