¹ The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry (Chapel Hill, 1961), p. 31. “Hardy and the Poets,” the chap, containing Hynes's remarks on Barnes, is substantially the same as his essay “Hardy and Barnes: Notes on Literary Influence” in South Atlantic Quarterly, lviii (1959), 44–54.

² This Preface has been recently reprinted in Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel (Lawrence, Kan., 1966), pp. 76–82. In this essay I quote from the original source.

³ As a poet, Hardy seems not to be interested in solving mysteries, but in acknowledging them. Speaking of his mythological characters created for The Dynasts, he says, “Their doctrines are but tentative, and are advanced with little eye to a systematized philosophy warranted to lift ‘the burthen of the mystery’ of this unintelligible world. The chief thing hoped for them is that they and their utterances may have dramatic plausibility” (The Dynasts, London, 1924, p. viii). As in the Preface quoted above, he contrasts probing mysteries with creating dramatic plausibility, and favors the latter.

⁴ Hynes quotes the passage on “dramatic form” given above, and, in his analysis of it, contrasts Hardy's practice with Browning's: “Hardy differs … in that his monologues are less concerned with the creation of character than with the presentation of a view of the world, a ‘dramatic truth’ for which the speaker is a more or less anonymous voice” (p. 27). I think it would be more accurate to say that for Hardy the speaker must be clearly and concretely identified (though not necessarily named) : he must express the notions of his sphere. The poet remains “anonymous.”

⁵ See Hynes, pp. 28, 29.

⁶ The dates of the first appearance in books of the six poems make it virtually certain that Hardy's were written after their counterparts in Barnes: “The Motherless Child” (1859)—“To a Motherless Child” (1898, originally titled “To An Orphan Child”) ; “Went Hwome” (1862)—“Welcome Home” (1922); “The Milk-Maid o' the Farm” (1844)—“The Milkmaid” (1902). Many of Hardy's poems were written long before they were published, but none of his published poems was written before the sixties.

⁷ There is an excellent modern edition of Barnes: The Poems of William Barnes, ed. Bernard Jones (London, 1962); but, unless otherwise noted, I quote (as here, e.g.) from Hardy's Select Poems of William Barnes.

⁸ All Hardy's poems are quoted from Collected Poems (London, 1930).

⁹ In Select Poems Hardy omits a stanza of “The Milk-Maid o' the Farm” (I quote from Jones):

An' in the barken or the ground,

The chaps do always do their best

To milk the vu'st their own Cows round,

An' then help her to milk the rest.

That he does so weakens the case that his poem is a direct, conscious answer to Barnes's, for the view of love in the omitted stanza has its ironic counterpart in “The Milkmaid.” If Hardy had wanted his poem to be seen as an answer to “The Milk-Maid o' the Farm,” it seems likely that he would have included the omitted stanza.

¹⁰ “The Conserving Myth of William Barnes,” VS, vi (June 1963), 328.

¹¹ With the exception of “A Wold Friend,” the poems I use in this section to illustrate Barnes's sentimentality (“The Weather-Beäten Tree” as well as “Rivers Don't Gi'e Out,” “Kindness,” and “The Railroad” which follow) are omitted from the Select Poems (I quote them from Jones). “The Wold Friend,” unlike the others, preserves memories of a lost past. Hardy omits from his collection poems like “The Happy Days When I Wer Young,” which contrast past and present, but express explicit religious faith. In “The Happy Days When I Wer Young” the speaker has preserved his faith in the midst of a faithless world; in “The Wold Friend” the speaker attempts to recall something he has lost.

¹² Barnes seems to have valued the railway. In 1845 he projected “plans for running the South Western Railway from London to Dorchester.” William Turner Levy, William Barnes: The Man and the Poems (Dorchester, 1960), p. xvi.

¹³ See Carl J. Weber, Hardy of Wessex, rev. ed. (New York, 1965), p. 28.

¹⁴ This quotation, as well as those from Jude the Obscure, is taken from Macmillan's “Greenwood Edition” of the novels (London, 1965).

¹⁵ “The Rev. William Barnes, B.D.” (first appeared as obituary notice in The Athenaeum, 16 Oct. 1886), Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings, p. 105.

¹⁶ Hardy omits the last three, happy stanzas in Select Poems. For lines from those stanzas I quote Jones. Hardy's version of the poem ends with “But how I wish'd that I wer there!”

¹⁷ “The Rev. William Barnes, B.D.,” Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings, p. 105.

¹⁸ Quoted from Jones.

¹⁹ Quoted from Jones.

²⁰ Quoted from Jones.

²¹ The same cannot be said for the humorous poems by Barnes (e.g., “A Bit o' Sly Coortea' ”) despite the similarities. The speaker in Barnes leads one to look down on the rustics from a superior position and shows merely that his characters are innocent and simple; his attitude approaches condescension. Hardy forces one to do more: to suspend moral judgment, but only partially. We are amused by Amelia's pride in her ruination, and see it as simple and naive; yet we do not forget that she is ruined.

²² In the analysis which follows I am heavily indebted to the way John F. Lynen sets up his discussion of Frost in The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost (New Haven, 1960). Lynen's book is the most instructive model I know for dealing with a modern poet as a regionalist. Significantly, Lynen sees Hardy to be akin to Frost, though he makes the point only briefly (p. 58).