Hardy Eliot AO5

An August Midnight

Drummer Hodge - hopeful

‘A hopeful conclusion - ‘Young Hodge’ will ‘reign […] eternally’ amongst the stars’

Drummer Hodge - rage

‘A cry of rage from an angry poet who witnesses the suffering of men in a hostile universe’

The Darkling Thrush - John Carey

‘A new voice at the end of an era’

A Darkling Thrush - R. Carpenter

‘Sharp and clear in its imagery […] harsh and austere in its feelings’

To Lizbie Browne

‘Hardy truly loves women for their beauty and their mystery, but at the same time detests the power they have over him’

The Haunter - Donald Davie

‘Love triumphs over time’

The Voice - Howard Jacobson

‘[Hardy’s remorse] wasn’t strong enough to allow her to have her say’

At Castle Boterel - elegy

‘A perpetual elegy on the death of possibility’

At Castle Boterel - time

‘Brief human experience set against the melancholic operations of time’

Emma Poems - Claire Tomalin

‘The Emma Poems move between an old man’s sorrow and a young man’s bliss’

Heredity

Afterwards - quiet

‘A quietly optimistic poem’

The Oxen - Claire Tomlain

‘Muses on his lack of faith and his regret for it […] He cherishes the memory of belief’

Portrait of a Lady - emptiness

‘Emptiness and sterlity of the life of a cultured woman surrounded by ‘bric-a-brac’’

Portrait of a Lady - society

‘social malice […] the speaker is suspended between feelings of attraction and repulsion’

Portrait of a Lady - baffeling

‘wrote about women as baffeling, alien creatures’

Portrait / Prufrock - women

‘viewed women from a literary distance’

Prufrock - desire

‘[Prufrock represents] thwarted desires and modern disillusionment’

Prufrock - Seamus Perry - trap

‘infernal entrapment’

Prufrock - Perry - character symbol

‘an archetype for the ‘complex’ of over-scrupulous timidity’

Prufrock - Clifton

‘[A] failure of masculine identity’

Preludes - acceptance

‘An acceptance of the futility of life and an inability to halt time’

Preludes - despair

‘Sense of despair at the soulnessness of humanity against the backdrop of mass culture’

Preludes - J.C.C. Mays

‘A yearning after sugnificance while significance is withheld’

The Hollow Men - Cooper

‘[Eliot feared] the horror of an existance void of meaning’

The Hollow Men - Eliot

‘A spiritual disease' [is explored]’

Journey of the Magi - Seamus Perry

‘[His] transitional poem’

Journey of the Magi - R. Williams

'[Eliot wanted to present religious faith as] an inner shift so deep that you could hardly notice it’