I am hosting the Poetry Bash of the Centuries for this NaPoWriMo Challenge. In the spirit of the party, this poem is a tongue and cheek look at Thomas Hardy, based on his notorious reputation for relationships with younger women throughout his life. I could find nothing in his history to tell me who Amabel might be, and used his poem lamenting her death as my inspiration for this piece. No disrespect to Amabel or Thomas Hardy intended. This one is just a bit of party fun, we all know how people like to speculate and gossip. Keep reading for actual insight into his poetry and his life.

Thomas Hardy wrote 947 Poems and is considered one of the most prolific writers of his time. I chose "Amabel" for my inspiration:

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928).
From Wessex Poems and Other Verses. 1898.

Amabel

I MARKED her ruined hues,
Her custom-straitened views,
And asked, "Can there indwell
My Amabel?"

I looked upon her gown,
Once rose, now earthen brown;
The change was like the knell
Of Amabel.

Her step's mechanic ways
Had lost the life of May's;
Her laugh, once sweet in swell,
Spoilt Amabel.

I mused: "Who sings the strain
I sang ere warmth did wane?
Who thinks its numbers spell
His Amabel?"--

Knowing that, though Love cease,
Love's race shows undecrease;
All find in dorp or dell
An Amabel.

--I felt that I could creep
To some housetop, and weep,
That Time the tyrant fell
Ruled Amabel!

I said (the while I sighed
That love like ours had died),
"Fond things I'll no more tell
To Amabel,"

"But leave her to her fate,
And fling across the gate,
'Till the Last Trump, farewell,
O Amabel!'"


(Excerpts from Thomas Hardy's biography, www.poetryfoundation.org)

Hardy was notorious for his relationships with younger women throughout his life, and he married Florence Dugdale, a woman almost 40 years his junior, shortly after Emma's death. (Emma was his first wife, to which he seemed to carry much guilt after her death, over acting indifferent to her much of their marriage.)

Hardy's long career spanned the Victorian and the modern eras. He described himself in "In Tenebris II" as a poet "who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst" and during his nearly 88 years he lived through too many upheavals - including World War I - to have become optimistic with age. Nor did he seem by nature to be cheerful: much of the criticism around his work concerns its existentially bleak outlook, and, especially during Hardy's own time, sexual themes. Incredibly prolific, Hardy wrote fourteen novels, three volumes of short stories, and several poems between the years 1871 and 1897. Hardy's great novels, including Tess of the D' Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), were all published during this period. They both received negative reviews, which may have led Hardy to abandoning fiction to write poetry.

Though frequently described as gloomy and bitter, Hardy's poems pay attention to the transcendent possibilities of sound, line, and breath - the musical aspects of language. As Irving Howe noted in Thomas Hardy, any "critic can, and often does, see all that is wrong with Hardy's poetry but whatever it was that makes for his strange greatness is hard to describe." Hardy's poetry, perhaps even more so than his novels, has found new audiences and appreciation as contemporary scholars and critics attempt to understand his work in the context of Modernism. But Hardy has always presented scholars and critics with a contradictory body of work; as Jean Brooks suggests in Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure, because Hardy's "place in literature has always been controversial, constant reassessment is essential to keep the balance between modern and historical perspective." Virginia Woolf, a visitor to Max Gate, noted some of Hardy's enduring power as a writer: "Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man's lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul."

When Hardy died in 1928, his ashes were deposited in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey and his heart, having been removed before cremation, was interred in the graveyard at Stinsford Church where his parents, grandparents, and his first wife were buried.

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