ABSTRACT
In both the form and content of his poetry, Thomas Hardy consistently challenged the prevailing anthropocentricism of Victorian culture, and his primary target was the series of zoological links and institutional disjunctions that characterized “the animal.” As he grappled with and wrote about post-Darwinian ethics, he also began memorializing family pets through hand-carved tombstones and elegiac poetry. Both the form and content of these elegies emphasize the individuality of each animal and acknowledge the deaths of these “lesser” creatures as occasions for remembrance, reflection, and insight. The pets are not merely household objects or symbols but also self-aware beings who call our attention to the tension between past and present, memory and forgetting, presence and absence, consolation and grief.
