A Glimpse of Thomas Hardy's Poetic Talent in "During Wind and Rain"
While remembered mostly as a great novelist, Thomas Hardy is also outstanding in the field of poetry. "During Wind and Rain", a short poem written in 1917, is a good example of Thomas Hardy's poetic genius and technique. In this poem Hardy handles in a completely new way an old theme which is most frequently seen in English poerty -- the transience of human life and the terrible effect of flying time.
Hardy's way of structuring this poem is, first of all, new and unique. The whole poem is divided into four stanzas, each consisted of seven lines. The first and the third, and the second and the fourth stanzas are parallel in structure using some of the same words. Each stanza, instead of depicting the passing, kinetic process of life, presents a kind of tableaux. The four brief moments of perception are just like four pictures in an old family album, indicating the course of human life itself. Respectively the four scenes suggest four periods of the life -- childhood, junior, youth, and adulthood. With such an arrangement Hardy creates an impression that a person's lifetime is so short and fleeting that all one can seize and remember are just several unrelated fragments. Thus Hardy has successfully compressed the development of a lifetime into a short poem, while fully achieved the effect of "the transience of human life".
The composition of each stanza is new and unique, too. The first five line of each stanza are all descriptions of a certain scene, while the sixth line, which is some kind of a ballad refrain, suddenly changes to a sigh uttered by the speaker, "Ah, no; the years O!" or "Ah, no; the years, the years;" expressing sadness and despair; and in the last line the speaker is torn back to the cruel reality. The last line of the poem, especially, is a very surprising line, and a highly effective one. It is the climax of the poem, and serves as a key to the understanding of the whole poem. Not until now is the reader able to grasp what Hardy wants to express.
Hardy makes the setting of his poem a very specific one: a graveyard. After reading the poem one can have a vivid picture in mind, of a man standing alone in a desolate graveyard looking at the moss on names that are fading away on tombstones , which are ploughed by the rain. He keeps recalling the past scenes in the life of those dead people, but his recollection and meditation are interrupted by the reality from time to time.
Although Hardy gives a hint in the second stanza of retreating from the world ("And they build a shady seat..."), a hint in the fourth stanza of seizing the day to live more comfortably, and suggesting throughout the whole poem a desire to recapture the past and live it over, he does realize that reality is cruel. All human life is transient, in spite of the poet's fight to stop the effect of time. Just as what Hardy says in another poem, "All's past amend, Unchangeable. It must go."
原先找到的《送别》版本,效果不如上面的大提琴版:
During Wind And Rain
--by Thomas Hardy
They sing their dearest songs--
He, she, all of them--yea,
Treble and tenor and bass.
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!
They clear the creeping moss--
Elders and juniors--aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!
They are blithely breakfasting all--
Men and maidens--yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee....
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ripped from the wall.
They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them--aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs....
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.
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