In Blackmwore by the Stour.”
The girls all have something wifely about them. The wooer never forgets that the sweetheart may be the wife; he wishes her less care than her mother had, and looks forward to old age in her company. He is not a wild wooer. He is content to sit in a gathering and hear his Jane “put in a good word now and then,” and have a smile and a blush from her at the door on parting: having carried her pail he is satisfied to know that she would have bowed when she took it back had it not been too heavy. He wants a maid who is “good and true,” “good and fair,” and healthy, and to have always beside him the “welcome face and homely name.” Once he may have been ruffled by a mere beauty in a scarlet cloak, but probably he soon sets his heart on one who may bring him happiness with children, contentment with age, and perhaps help him to a little fortune in the thatched cottage “below the elems by the bridge.” The lovers, like the poet himself, go with heads a little bowed, as if in readiness for blows. It is in contrast with these rather stiff, darkened men and women, who have winter and poverty on their horizon, that the children in Barnes’s poetry are so blithe, his Spring days so buoyant, and his flowers and birds among the brightest and freshest in any of the poets.
But there is a greater than Duck or Barnes still among us, a wide-ranging poet, who is always a countryman of a somewhat lonely heart, Mr. Thomas Hardy. For I do notice something in his poetry which I hope I may with respect call rustic, and, what is much the same thing, old-fashioned. It enables him to mingle elements unexpectedly, so that, thinking of 1967 in the year 1867, he spoke not only of the new century having “new minds, new modes, new fools, new wise,” but concluded,—
“For I would only ask thereof
That thy worm should be my worm, Love”—
which is as antique as Donne’s Flea that wedded the lovers by combining blood from both of them within its body. The same rusticity manifests itself elsewhere as Elizabethanism, and the poet is something of a “liberal shepherd” in his willingness to give things their grosser names or to hint at them. He has a real taste for such comparisons as that made by a French officer looking at the English fleet at Trafalgar,—
“Their overcrowded sails
Bulge like blown bladders in a tripeman’s shop
The market-morning after slaughter-day.”