ng 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.'

Yet no one reading the sonnets of these years can fail to mark the
impress of an individual personality. The effect is, at times, curious
and impressive in the extreme. We almost feel that Mr Hardy is bringing
some physical compulsion to bear on Shakespeare and forcing him to say
something that he does not want to say. Of cours