Today’s Poem: A Light Snow-Fall After Frost

Thomas Hardy on the unreliability of vision

A Man Walking in the Snow (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s poem by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)  is taken from the 1925 Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles, the last book Hardy would publish in his lifetime. If this poem represents Hardy’s late-life work, it’s worth noting that all Hardy’s poetry represents late-life work. He was fifty-eight when his first book of poems, the 1898 Wessex Poems, appeared, marking a turn from the novel-writing that had constituted the first phase of his long career. Yet even this very late poem looks back in spirit to the Romanticism of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), still alive and yet to become British poet laureate when Hardy was born. At the same time, it has its feet in the literary modernism whose godfather Hardy had become.