The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry by Samuel Hynes

Author:Samuel Hynes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1956-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

But it also carries other meanings in various poems: it may imply impermanence (“fleeting phantom-thought”) or unreality (“whether a phantom … or was it some wrecked heart indeed”); it may mean imagination (“‘tis but her phantom/Borne within my brain”) or memory (“I do but the phantom retain/Of the maiden of yore”). (Collected Poems, pp. 562, 12, 342, 210, 55).

Most of these examples carry meanings of phantom which a dictionary will support—unreality, imagination, impermanence—but they frequently carry a secondary, contradictory meaning as well, since the phantom may be either real or unreal, a ghost or an illusion or a memory. The nature of the phantom is not often the crux of the matter (as it is for Hamlet and Macbeth); more often it is left in doubt simply because for Hardy the favorite word has lost its sharp distinctions of meaning, and has become simply a word for a vague emotion. In “The Lament of the Looking-Glass” the glass says:

“I flash back phantoms of the night

That sometimes flit by me,

I echo roses red and white—

The loveliest blooms that be—

But now I never hold to sight

So sweet a flower as she.”

(Collected Poems, p. 638)

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