Out Of Grief: Ambiguity In Hardy’s “Poems Of 1912-1913”

Thomas Hardy is a great poet as well as a great novelist in English literature, although his reputation as a poet was not recognized until very late. As a poet who lived across two centuries, he inherits romantic tradition, but also contributes to the development of modernist poetry.Among his nearly one thousand poems, the “Poems of 1912-1913”, a sequence of 21 elegiac poems written after the death of his wife Emma, are often regarded as his finest. Much research has been done on those poems, most focusing on the theme of Hardy’s psychological self-transcendence.While such studies have promoted understanding of Hardy’s poetry, full justice has yet to be done to the forms of the poems as art works of language. The present thesis looks into Hardy’s frequent use of ambiguity to analyze how, by play of words, he honestly faces his true feelings after Emma’s death and finally struggles out of his grief, finding his steadfast love for her. The thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter One makes a close reading on the two initial poems of the sequence, trying to expose the poet’s early mixed feelings of loss and anger: the uses of irony and puns here reveal his unsettled feeling towards Emma, a feeling of anger and aggression hidden within grief.Chapter Two points out that the ambiguity in some later poems contains less and less of the earlier aggressiveness towards Emma, instead there grows a self-remorse and a wish of reunion.Chapter Three sees Hardy’s ambiguity in the elegiac poems finally becomes free of conflict and hesitation. With the use of puns he merges Emma into the landscape, so as to make her immortal and omnipresent. Thus he successfully turns ambiguity into a happy means of disclosing pure love.