ABSTRACT
The previous chapter traced music's association in Hardy's poetry with moments of lyrical inspiration that set up a syncopation between timeless moments of vision, and everyday chronology. The emphasis here is on music's power to effect turns and tricks of memory, and visitations from the ancestral past, that similarly interrupt the present. Certainly, it is hard to think of another poet who possesses Hardy's sentiment for the past in itself, or who so sedulously seeks it out and lives with it in poem after poem. He meditates on this in "The Ghost of the Past', where he writes of living with its visions, 'gentle echoes' and 'old rapturings':
The discussion begins by investigating how Hardy's sense of historical and social dislocation led to his placing in the past of the significances of community and love associated with music. There then follows an account of the specifics of how music has the power to reanimate periods and traditions from the distant past, as in the many poems that follow musical trails into the culture and history of Hardy's family and elsewhere. This leads to the more personal case of individual memory, where music is endlessly and variously employed by Hardy as a link between the different temporal dimensions of experience. As F. L. Lucas put it, '[h]e saw things instinctively in three tenses as in three dimensions.'1 In this connection, the third section explores some of those many poems where the individual's susceptibility to music is at one with its anachronistic power to resist chronology, and to surprise age or loss by affects which summon up a revitalized sense of past times and relationships. Music is a privileged tool of memory, capable of recapturing the ecstasies of the past. However, this is inevitably ambiguous, since current sadness is so obviously and inescapably mixed in with the recovered emotion.
