For Mr Hardy's poetic gift is not a late and freakish flowering. In the volume into which has been gathered all his poetical work with the exception of 'The Dynasts,'[12] are pieces bearing the date 1866 which display an astonishing mastery, not merely of technique but of the essential content of great poetry. Nor are such pieces exceptional. Granted that Mr Hardy has retained only the finest of his early poetry, still there are a dozen poems of 1866-7 which belong either entirely or in part to the category of major poetry. Take, for instance, 'Neutral Tones':--
'We stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod; --They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
'Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove Over tedious riddles long ago; And some winds played between us to and fro On which lost the more by our love.
'The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing Alive enough to have strength to die; And a grin of bitterness swept thereby Like an ominous bird a-wing....
'Since then keen lessons that love deceives And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree And a pond edged with grayish leaves.'
[Footnote 12: _Collected. Poems of Thomas Hardy_. Vol. I. (Macmillan.)]
That was written in 1867. The date of _Desperate Remedies_, Mr Hardy's first novel, was 1871. _Desperate Remedies_ may have been written some years before. It makes no difference to the astonishing contrast between the immaturity of the novel and the maturity of the poem. It is surely impossible in the face of such a juxtaposition then to deny that Mr Hardy's poetry exists in its own individual right, and not as a curious simulacrum of his prose.
These early poems have other points of deep interest, of which one of the chief is in a sense technical. One can trace a quite definite influence of Shakespeare's sonnets in his language and imagery. The four sonnets, 'She to Him' (1866), are full of echoes, as:--
'Numb as a vane that cankers on its point True to the wind that kissed ere canker came.'
or this from another sonnet of the same year:--
'As common chests encasing wares of price Are borne with tenderness through halls of state.'