Text 107

THE FISHER'S WIDOW

The boats go out and the boats come in

Under a wintry sky.

And the rain and the foam are white in the wind

And the gulls cry.

She sees the sea when the wind is wild

Swept by the windy rain

And her heart's a-weary of sea and land

As the long days wane.

She sees the torn sails fly in the foam

Broad on the sky line gray.

And the boats go out and the boats come in

But there's one away.

Another poet of considerably greater scope, in whose poems pessimism reigned, was Thomas Hardy (1840—1928). He is often thought as the last of the Victorians and the first of the moderns. In fact, he had already earned considerable, if not scandalous, fame as a novelist by the time he turned exclusively to poetry in the 1890s. He was writing verses all his life, though. Like many Victorian intellectuals, Hardy suffered from a loss of religious faith. He developed a gloomy and sombre philosophy of human destiny, showing human beings to be the victims of indifferent forces. These forces are largely mysterious: Man is a puppet whose strings are worked by hostile fates.

This idea is expressed with brutal frankness in his novels; the same can be said about his verses which expressed the irony of life − man's thwarted schemes, and the need for resignation in the face of a hostile fate. Hardy's conception of love is tragic. He depicts it is an unruly, instinctive power that holds men at its mercy. Individual love unfailingly ends up in separation and division. But not Love Universal!