ABSTRACT
while focusing attention upon The Dynasts we have purposely passed without comment a number of incidents in Hardy's life to which we must now return. On April 3, 1904, his mother died at the age of ninety-one. Hardy sent obituary notices to The Times and to the Dorset County Chronicle, and offered the Graphic a portrait of his mother, 'as I have written more for the Graphic than for any other illustrated paper'. 1 Shortly after this loss, he wrote a poem of five stanzas, 'After the Last Breath', 2 about his mother, and also a sonnet, 'A Church Romance', in which he described how his mother had first seen his father in Stinsford Church. 3
