Thomas Hardy’s novels are well-known and widely studied, and some of them, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), have become even more popular through film and TV-miniseries adaptations. Hardy is so rewarding as a novelist, that we tend to forget he’s an outstanding poet as well. He wrote close to 1000 lyrics.
Professor David Ferry probed each poet’s words, noting details, asking questions about them, keeping his students focused and vigilant, pointing to a surprise, a turn in syntax, an implication in an image overlooked first time through. I never heard him speak about Stevens’s “The Death of a Soldier,” but I imagine he would have discussed the brevity of the poem in relation to the large solemnity of the title, the short lines, the choice of a four-stanza structure, the relation of each stanza to the next, even the punctuation.
It’s a pleasure to reread and analyze this first quatrain of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, looking at it and listening to it, the puzzles it generates and the questions it raises, and I am tempted to proceed to the rest of the sonnet. But in this post, I have another purpose, and that’s to quote and pay tribute to William Empson’s interpretation of the line about “choirs” in chapter 1 of his 1930 masterpiece of literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity.
Students know lots of poems—songs from Disney films, lyrics written by Taylor Swift and other popular composers and performers, songs from Broadway musicals, hymns sung at church, Beatles tunes, rap and hip-hop…. But that’s not the same thing as the poetry that students are assigned to read and write about in college courses.
There’s a mistake I sometimes make in my close reading of literature. In the classroom work I’m doing, or in the essay I’m writing, I tend to interpret the words, lines, and sentences at the beginning and the middle from the vantage point of the end. I know where the poem or piece of prose has concluded, and I project what I have come to know into what I had earlier read.