Today’s Poem: The Shadow on the Stone

There was nothing in my belief

Chase Merritt, The Garden Wall, before 1916 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Shadow on the Stone

by Thomas Hardy

I went by the Druid stone 
   That broods in the garden white and lone,   
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows   
   That at some moments fall thereon
   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,   
   And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders   
   Threw there when she was gardening.

      I thought her behind my back,
   Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,   
   Though how do you get into this old track?’   
   And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf   
   As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
   That there was nothing in my belief.

      Yet I wanted to look and see
   That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision   
   A shape which, somehow, there may be.’   
   So I went on softly from the glade,
   And left her behind me throwing her shade,   
As she were indeed an apparition—
   My head unturned lest my dream should fade. 
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Today’s Poem by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), written in the years following the death of the poet’s first wife Emma Gifford in 1912, calls to mind — especially in its last line — John Milton’s famous “Sonnet 23.” Both poems explore the personal terrain of bereavement. Yet, as Joseph Bottum observed in his discussion of this sonnet last year, in the course of their private, interior reflections both poems manage to articulate something about the whole nature of reality, of which death is an inescapable part. And while Milton the radical Puritan and Hardy the radical agnostic are poles apart in their assumptions about what, exactly, that reality entails, in these two poems their quite different conclusions curiously overlap.

Milton’s sonnet recounts the plot of a dream in which his dead wife returns to him as an apparition. But from the poem’s second line, the dream’s privacy is breached by an intruding metaphor from classical myth, in which a divine intervention returns the dead Alcestis from the grave to her “glad husband.” The sonnet’s second quatrain, drawing on the Mosaic laws regarding purification of women after childbirth, revises that first quatrain’s version of a longed-for resurrection. The Christian does not hope to have his grief salved in the capricious death-erasing way that the myth suggests; he hopes instead to meet his “late espoused saint” in heaven.

In the sestet following on those two quatrains that constitute the sonnet’s octave, the dream-wife appears veiled — though he recognizes her, he doesn’t look directly on her face, but only intuits the shining goodness of her heavenly “person.” The experience, as he recounts it, shimmers with the quality of a medieval dream-vision. It’s possible, though unlikely, that Milton knew the great dream-poem Pearl, the manuscript of which was housed in the library of Milton’s near-contemporary Sir Robert Cotton. But he was certainly familiar with other medieval poems, such as William Langland’s Piers Plowman. whose general trajectory is that a dreamer falls asleep, encounters some supernatural vision or revelation, and finally awakens, transformed and wiser, to the reality of the fallen world.

But just as Milton’s second quatrain revises the reality-account suggested by the first, his conclusion revises the reality-account suggested by those earlier dream-poems. The sleeper does not return to some amplified version of his own earthly existence, in which his fallen vision is informed by the higher vision he has experienced while asleep. Instead, he wakes to the empty darkness of his own bereaved and blind existence. The poem passes through transcendent hope, but it ends in a bleakness unmediated by that hope. Yes, he will see his beloved in heaven — but for the time being, while he inhabits time instead of eternity, he sees nothing at all.

Thomas Hardy (Wikimedia Commons)

Thomas Hardy, whose outlook Christian Wiman has characterized as a “crotchety fatalism,” provides Milton with an oddly congruent bedfellow-in-grief. Though “The Shadow on the Stone” describes a waking dream, this speaker’s vision shares some similarities with Milton’s, albeit inverted ones. Not a sonnet but a poem in three octaves rhymed aabaccdc, the pace of its tetrameter lines made gallopingly relentless with anapests, Hardy’s poem, like Milton’s, begins in a sense of loss made immediately larger by the poet’s reach for a figure belonging to a more ancient world.

In Hardy’s case, however, this ancient world is not the literary realm of classical myth that has lent its fund of images and allusions to literature of the Christian era. It is, instead, primordial Britain. The poem begins at the “Druid stone,” an image that points, in its sheer stoniness, as well as in its intimation of gruesome sacrifice, to an obdurate non-belief in any sort of resurrection. No saints here, and no Alcestis, but only a garden full of shadows that play on the face of the stone.

If biblical iconography and the echo of Plato suggest themselves here, both those languages, in an inversion of Milton’s use of the classical and the biblical, seem depleted. If this garden recalls Eden, its emptiness makes a mockery of former happiness. If the shadows evoke the Platonic cave, the silhouette into which they resolve — the “well-known head and shoulders” — exists nowhere in its Platonic Form. Where Milton’s speaker beholds a veiled image, with a true face beneath it waiting to be revealed, Hardy’s speaker experiences only the simultaneous conviction that his lost one stands behind him, and that this conviction is nothing but illusion.

The heartbreak of the second stanza’s closing couplet — “I would not turn my head to discover / That there was nothing in my belief” — is both a personal and an existential wrench. If he turns his head to confront the absence of which he is certain, this movement would entail, like Milton’s waking, the renewal of grief and the reign of death. Unlike Milton’s speaker, Hardy’s speaker believes in the absoluteness of death. If these shadows are a veil, the only certainty is that they conceal nothing, and that nothing waits to be revealed.

Yet he hesitates to assent to this belief. He steels himself not to look back: not to be a Lot’s wife, not to turn with longing to the past, but also not to verify, with his own eyes, beyond a doubt, that that past and the person who made it worth longing for are both irretrievably lost. Milton’s speaker has his thirteen lines of transcendent hope — if the dead don’t actually return, they live in heaven, awaiting a day of reunion — before he awakes. That waking signals not an annihilation of hope, but a deferment that feels like annihilation. Hardy’s speaker, by contrast, in refusing to puncture his waking dream, defers the return of his certain despair, a deferment that feels like, but is not, hope.

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