Thomas Hardy is best remembered as an accomplished and insightful novelist, but over the last years of his life, the author of Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D’urbervilles was passionately devoted to the writing of poetry.
His original use of folksong structures and rustic settings certainly set him apart from similarly inclined poets. Nonetheless, his efforts did not receive the critical recognition they were due until some decades after his death. Often mystical and always witty, Hardy mastered tricky lyrical forms as well as Rudyard Kipling and divulged spiritual truths as compellingly as Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Assured by his prodigious technical prowess, Hardy found it easier than most to write on a wide variety of subjects in an extensive assortment of styles. From God and war to love and nature, Hardy expressed his private feelings with peculiar perspicuity via an unorthodox vocabulary.
This week’s poem entitled “Birds at Winter Nightfall” is a triolet published in 1928. Triolets are poems of eight lines, traditionally of eight syllables each, rhyming abaaabab. As snow falls upon a garden scene, Hardy sings of the hibernal habits of west country birds.
The repetition of the words “faster”, “flakes” and “fly” preceding and following the phrase “around the house” is intended to create a sense of exhilaration.
We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did and that you all have a very merry Christmas.
Birds at Winter Nightfall (triolet) by Thomas Hardy (1928)
Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone
From holly and cotoneaster
Around the house.
The flakes fly!–faster
Shutting indoors that crumb-outcaster
We used to see upon the lawn
Around the house. The flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone!
Publication year is very likely wrong, as 1928 is the year of Hardy's death. Other sources say 1902.