Poem of the Week – God’s Funeral by Thomas Hardy
Having written acclaimed works like Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy is primarily known as a novelist. However, after the turn of the century, he exclusively wrote verse, prolifically composing ballads, villanelles, sonnets, satires and folk songs with prodigious ease. Seemingly traditional, he consistently experimented with the forms he mastered and made ample use of his esoteric vocabulary and striking appreciation of orthodox themes to distinguish himself from his accomplished poet contemporaries. His poetic output alone affords his legacy the acknowledgement and respect that his novels previously engendered.
This week’s poem is entitled God’s Funeral. The seventeen, four-line stanzas depict a funeral procession progressing across a “twilit plain”. Leading this mysterious march is an “amorphous cloud of marvellous size” that “at first seemed man-like”. The allure of the looming haze that leads this train of people through life symbolises our varied perception of God. Far from being an attack on the conception of God, Hardy lyrically describes the disintegration of faith and the central sentiment of religious feeling – “potency vast and loving-kindness strong”. Written in a time when Atheism first became a credible intellectual position, Hardy concedes his lack of foresight with regards to how we may yet further alter our engagement with the idea of the divine and the sublime. We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did.
God’s Funeral by Thomas Hardy
I
I saw a slowly-stepping train —
Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar —
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.II
And by contagious throbs of thought
Or latent knowledge that within me lay
And had already stirred me, I was wrought
To consciousness of sorrow even as they.III
The fore-borne shape, to my blurred eyes,
At first seemed man-like, and anon to change
To an amorphous cloud of marvellous size,
At times endowed with wings of glorious range.IV
And this phantasmal variousness
Ever possessed it as they drew along:
Yet throughout all it symboled none the less
Potency vast and loving-kindness strong.
V
Almost before I knew I bent
Towards the moving columns without a word;
They, growing in bulk and numbers as they went,
Struck out sick thoughts that could be overheard: —
VI
‘O man-projected Figure, of late
Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive?
Whence came it we were tempted to create
One whom we can no longer keep alive?VII
‘Framing him jealous, fierce, at first,
We gave him justice as the ages rolled,
Will to bless those by circumstance accurst,
And longsuffering, and mercies manifold.
VIII
‘And, tricked by our own early dream
And need of solace, we grew self-deceived,
Our making soon our maker did we deem,
And what we had imagined we believed,IX
‘Till, in Time’s stayless stealthy swing,
Uncompromising rude reality
Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,
Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.X
‘So, toward our myth’s oblivion,
Darkling, and languid-lipped, we creep and grope
Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon,
Whose Zion was a still abiding hope.XI
‘How sweet it was in years far hied
To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer,
To lie down liegely at the eventide
And feel a blest assurance he was there!
XII
‘And who or what shall fill his place?
Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes
For some fixed star to stimulate their pace
Towards the goal of their enterprise?’…XIII
Some in the background then I saw,
Sweet women, youths, men, all incredulous,
Who chimed as one: ‘This is figure is of straw,
This requiem mockery! Still he lives to us!’XIV
I could not prop their faith: and yet
Many I had known: with all I sympathized;
And though struck speechless, I did not forget
That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized.XV
Still, how to bear such loss I deemed
The insistent question for each animate mind,
And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed
A pale yet positive gleam low down behind,
XVI
Whereof, to lift the general night,
A certain few who stood aloof had said,
‘See you upon the horizon that small light —
Swelling somewhat?’ Each mourner shook his head.XVII
And they composed a crowd of whom
Some were right good, and many nigh the best….
Thus dazed and puzzled ‘twixt the gleam and gloom
Mechanically I followed with the rest.