| Summary: | The image of a haunting is of particular significance in
the poetry of Thomas Hardy. As metaphor for the workings
of memory it fills Hardy's need for an image which
captures the intensity of recall he experiences, and which
cannot be described simply in the image of remembering.
The image of a haunting Is at times implicit in poems
concerned with the recreation of the past. The sense we
have in these poems of memory summonsing the past, and its
consequent materialization, the assumption of immediate
form, distinguishes these poems from those in which a
conventional memory is recorded, where the past is simply
described rather than recreated. The haunting is used
explicitly to accommodate Hardy's sensitivity to the
lingering presence of past experience which expresses
itself in repeated images of shadowy phantoms , presences
which seem to edge into the poet's present experience and
in the multiplicity of actual ghosts dramatically re- enacting
the scenes of the past. By associating the
experience of remembering with a haunting Hardy transforms
the recall of the past, into a dramatic event, in which the
self actively confronts his past and is allowed to
visualize, hear and address the dead. The image is
expressive of Hardy's profound nostalgia for a past
which is perceived as affording placement and familiarity
to a self unhoused and estranged in a present which bars
comprehension and the perception of significance. in a
haunting the self is allowed a rehearsal of the past
equipped with understanding and vision.
In an examination of the 1912-1913 poems, the centrality of
the haunting image to the sequence is considered. The
image of the haunting functions as antidote to the burdens
of transience and mortality? in the haunting the pain of
estrangement can be allayed and the reality and finality of
death can be momentarily annexed. In the 1912-1913 poems
the haunting is the medium for an expression of regret and
atonement, a mode of expiation.
Finally, the dissertation studies the assumption of
ghost hood by Hardy's personae and considers the
appositeness of the image of the poet as haunter in
expressing the self's tendency to withdrawal and self effacement.
The equation of the self with a ghost is
expressive of the self's sense of exclusion from a
welcoming' community, its retreat from the press of
experience, but also of the self's unwilling immersion in
the past and consequent inability to maintain a firm grip
on its identity.
The complexity of the haunted and haunter images
accommodates Hardy's sense of the complexities of memory
and identity, concerns to which the poems return repeatedly
as the focus of exploration.
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