Today’s Poem: A Light Snow-Fall After Frost
Thomas Hardy on the unreliability of vision
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.
“A Light Snow-Fall After Frost” records its speaker’s observation of two strange passersby, who silently herald the shift in the weather. In the course of the poem, as these travelers cross the speaker’s vision, a hard frost gives way to the onset of snow. Who are these apparitions? The first man, appearing “at last,” as though the speaker had been watching this empty road for hours, might almost be a figure out of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads: an old man, a vagabond in the gathering snow, his life a “rough pilgrimage.” But where the young Wordsworth, in 1798, would have made the man stop and speak, to deliver some chastening epiphanic folk wisdom, the Hardy of 1925 has the man simply walk by and, so it seems, take the frost with him.
Then comes the second man, a more overtly allegorical-seeming figure. This man, berry-ruddy and dressed in “faded green,” hints at the evergreen beauties the eye might seek out in a barren winter landscape. His appearance suggests a personification of the “holm-trees,” or holly oaks, bordering the road. At least, his presence calls attention to those trees, which until his appearing have gone unmentioned and unnoticed.
Cast in stanzas of mostly pentameter couplets, with the occasional disturbance of trimeter lines, and with variations in the rhyming pattern that leave some of its thoughts waiting for closure, “A Light Snow-Fall After Frost,” with its fanciful travelers, reads almost like a child’s rhyme. But just as it troubles its own formal patterns, its apparent lightness is cut through with darker strands.
The first man’s weathered look, suggesting his “life’s rough pilgrimage,” for example, again hints at a Wordsworthian grittiness, anchoring the man in a non-allegorical reality. The more supernatural apparition of the second man, meanwhile, as a kind of Jack-in-the-Green, is framed by two instances in which the poem reveals its deeper concern with perception and the unreliability of human seeing. A thoroughly modern skepticism undercuts the loveliness, the fantasy, the super-reality of the vision.
First, the speaker’s eye lingers on the cobwebs outside the window, always present but made visible, or noticeable, only by the frost, even in the moment when “the frost is on the wane.” As the speaker notes the cobwebs, the “second man comes by,” drawing the eye past them, to a fleeting glimpse of color and life. But in the second man’s wake, immediately the vision shifts to the road, which “was brown and now is starkly white” — and even someone watching without distraction would “fail defining quite” when the snow “transformed it so.”
A Light Snow-Fall After Frost
by Thomas Hardy
On the flat road a man at last appears: How much his whitening hairs Owe to the settling snow's mute anchorage, And how much to a life's rough pilgrimage, One cannot certify. The frost is on the wane, And cobwebs hanging close outside the pane Pose as festoons of thick white worsted there, Of their pale presence no eye being aware Till the rime made them plain. A second man comes by; His ruddy beard brings fire to the pallid scene: His coat is faded green; Hence seems it that his mien Wears something of the dye Of the berried holm-trees that he passes nigh. The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though But half an hour ago The road was brown, and now is starkly white, A watcher would have failed defining quite When it transformed it so.
Quick, we are old!
And perhaps the unreliability of visions.