Today’s Poem: The Rejected Member’s Wife

She will no more stand / In the sunshine there

William Hogarth, Humours of an Election, III: The Polling, 1755 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Rejected Member’s Wife

by Thomas Hardy

We shall see her no more
     On the balcony,
Smiling, while hurt, at the roar
     As of surging sea
From the stormy sturdy band
     Who have doomed her lord’s cause,
Though she waves her little hand
     As it were applause.

Here will be candidates yet,
     And candidates’ wives,
Fervid with zeal to set
     Their ideals on our lives:
Here will come market-men
     On the market-days,
Here will clash now and then
     More such party assays.                                         ◦ assays = weighings, attempts

And the balcony will fill
     When such times are renewed,
And the throng in the street will thrill
     With to-day’s mettled mood;                                ◦ mettled = spirited, courageous
But she will no more stand
     In the sunshine there,
With that wave of her white-gloved hand,
     And that chestnut hair.
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After the publication of his final novel, Jude the Obscure, in 1895, Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) devoted himself to poetry. His Wessex Poems, appearing in 1898, often drew on the same Dorset landscape that formed the backdrop for his novels, and over the next three decades he would produce seven more collections of poetry.

But we can nonetheless forget just how much verse Hardy wrote — roughly a thousand poems, ranging “A Light Snow-Fall after Frost” to “The Convergence of the Twain,” which we have already featured here at Poems Ancient and Modern. To browse his work is always to discover a Hardy poem not previously known.

Thomas Hardy in 1910 (Wikimedia Commons)

And yet, there are repeated themes that can be discerned in his work, threads that run through multiple poems. A telling example is his propensity to take some detail of a scene, some small private observation that bothers him, and place it at the center — elevating it to the real meaning of what he sees.

That pattern shows in Today’s Poem, “The Rejected Member’s Wife.” Hardy published the poem in 1906, in the January 27 issue of The Spectator, after the defeat of William Brymer, the sitting Tory member of Parliament for South Dorset, in the Liberal wave of the recent election. The results were announced at Shire Hall in Dorchester, where Hardy served as an occasional Justice of the Peace from 1884 to 1919.

The defeat of a preferred candidate might have prompted bitter thoughts about the politics of the era. It might have produced sardonic Juvenal-like pronouncements about the vulgarity of a life lived in politics, submitting oneself to the voting mob. It might have drawn Hardy into presenting some ideas about political theory and his views on proper governance.

Instead, he noticed the gloved hand of the defeated candidate’s wife. And it cut him with a strange wound that he took as the true meaning of the moment. There will be other elections, but that particular striking woman, that real human being smiling bravely, will not return:

. . . she will no more stand
     In the sunshine there,
With that wave of her white-gloved hand,
     And that chestnut hair.

The poem has three eight-line stanzas, rhymed abab-cdcd, all in trimeter, with three beats in each line. But it’s a tricky trimeter, with, for example, conjunctions and prepositions at the beginning of lines often — but not always — stressed to make three beats. But, then, trimeter is always tricky, and the work of the poet is to avoid having the short lines sound choppy or sing-songy. And so Hardy slips in anapests and inversions to escape the lure into a sound-alike meter in the lines: And the thròng in the strèet will thrìll / With to-dày’s mètt-led mòod.

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