With Brain Aglow

What was Thomas Hardy's final poem?

So far as I am aware, I happen to be the only English poet who has brought out a new volume of his verse on his … birthday

Thomas Hardy, unfinished “Introductory Note” to Winter Words (1928)

As a child, Thomas Hardy’s health was so delicate that he overheard his parents discussing whether he was likely to live. Yet he went on to be one of the most remarkably persistent poets in the history of English literature — a writer so determined to keep going in old age that it’s not easy to say what his last poem was.

I began to wonder about this question while setting the Some Flowers Soon Christmas quiz. Hardy’s “Yuletide in a Younger World” — which was the answer to question 14 — had appeared as a two-page pamphlet aimed at the Christmas card market in 1927. Like his more popular seasonal poem “The Oxen”, published in 1915, it looks back to the folk beliefs that enchanted his childhood. “The Oxen” recalls the superstition that cattle knelt down every Christmas Eve, and ends “in the gloom, / Hoping it might be so”. “Yuletide in a Younger World” concludes, similarly:

Hardy died on 11th January 1928, at the age of 87. Was this his last published poem?

A little research soon told me: no. “Yuletide in a Younger World” appeared in bookshops from August 1927; on Christmas Eve that year, The Times published “Christmas in the Elgin Room”, which is also concerned with the passing away of a world of poetic belief: this time, statues of Greek deities in the British Museum lamenting their redundancy (“We are those whom Christmas overthrew”). So here was another candidate.

Both poems appeared again, posthumously, in Hardy’s final collection, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928). But neither is last in the table of contents — that honour is given to a previously unpublished piece with a title that does at least sound like a final poem: “He Resolves To Say No More”. Here it is in full:

It’s an odd, even awkward poem, whose level of irony is hard to gauge (it doesn’t help that its prophetic solemnity — the “Pale Horse” of Death is from Revelation — has been set to the tune of a rhyming stanza not a million miles from the limerick). Perhaps it is best read as the lyrical counterpart of the introductory note to Winter Words, which Hardy left unfinished at his death. In it, he complains that his previous book, Human Shows (1925), “was pronounced wholly gloomy and pessimistic by reviewers”, but then declares that he will “take no trouble to argue” with the critics — despite the “surprises” he could show them in his work — and ends by warning that “no harmonious philosophy is attempted in these pages”.