In his book Thomas Hardy and the Death of Emma, Andrew Norman explores the reasons why Hardy’s 38-year marriage to Emma Gifford went from romantic to estranged, and yet he was grief-stricken when she died, resulting in the Emma Poems
In many of his poems, the great Dorset poet and novelist Thomas Hardy referred to a certain romantic courtship, a marriage which became progressively more problematical, and finally to a bereavement in which a man loses his wife. So, who was Hardy writing about? The clue is in his early poems, where the names of several locations in North Cornwall are mentioned, this being the very same place which featured in Hardy’s courtship of Emma Gifford, who was to become his first wife. In other words, Hardy was writing about his own experience of love, marriage, and loss.
The poems raise certain questions. Given that Hardy and Emma gradually drifted apart so that in the end they lived mainly separate lives, albeit under the same roof, why was he so grief-stricken when she died, bearing in mind that their marriage was so unsatisfactory?
Finally, how did Hardy survive and come out the other side? He married for a second time, in 1914, to Florence Dugdale, who was nearly 40 years younger than him. And can his experience be a guide to others who find themselves alone and bereft after losing their partner?
It is impossible to understand the poetry of Thomas Hardy without first knowing the context in which the poems were written. This is especially true of the poems that he wrote after the death of his wife Emma (on November 27, 1912) which is the subject of this narrative. In his poetry, like nowhere else, Hardy expressed his grief over the loss of Emma, and within these poems are clues as to Hardy’s deepest thoughts and feelings. Here, Hardy’s poems are reappraised in the light of modern psychology and, in particular, in the light of the groundbreaking work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. In her 1969 publication On Death and Dying, she proposed the ‘five stages’ model of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Hardy was an incurable romantic even as a boy and he was forever falling in love, even though the objects of his desire were often completely unaware of his amorous feelings towards them. Hardy was dazzled by the beauty of his wife-to-be, Emma. When he met her in 1870, they were both around 30, it was love at first sight; in his words, ‘magic’! However, this joyous state of affairs was not to last, and in his poems, he alluded to the fact that his marriage was not a happy one. This much is borne out by the fact that in the later years they became estranged from one another and lived virtually separate lives at their Dorchester home, Max Gate. This disunity is reflected in the poems. In To a Sea-Cliff , Hardy admits that his marriage to Emma has been a disastrous failure, the final line of the poem being the most poignant and shocking:
Lend me an ear
While I read you here
A page from your history,
Old cliff — not known
To your solid stone,
Yet yours inseparably.
Near to your crown
There once sat down
A silent listless pair;
And the sunset ended,
And dark descended,
And still the twain sat there.
Past your jutting head
Then a line-ship sped,
Lit brightly as a city;
And she sobbed: ‘There goes
A man who knows
I am his, beyond God’s pity!’
He slid apart
Who had thought her heart
His own, and not aboard
A bark, sea-bound ….
That night they found
Between them lay a sword.
Finally, it is no coincidence that although Hardy does not mention Emma by name in the several dozen poems that he wrote after her unexpected death, he clearly alluded to her. When Emma suddenly died, Hardy was filled with grief as well as remorse for his years of neglect. Yet in his poems, he reflected not only upon the later years of their marriage, when they became increasingly distant, and upon her death and its aftermath, but also upon their first meeting and the happy days of their courtship leading to their wedding in 1874. For example, he reveals his previous joy in When I Set Out for Lyonnesse, especially in the final verse. Lyonesse is a kingdom which, according to legend, stretched from Land's End at the south western tip of Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly, before the sea claimed it.
When I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away.
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there
No prophet durst declare,
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there.
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes!
Whatever the answer, the fact remains that Hardy was utterly grief-stricken by the loss of Emma. He responded by going through all the classical phases of grief which are well known to psychologists and bereavement counsellors today. For example, in I Thought, my Heart, Hardy described his late wife as a traumatised person who believed that he was totally responsible for the pain and misery that she had endured during their 38 years of marriage.
I thought, my Heart, that you had healed
Of those sore smartings of the past,
And that the summers had oversealed
All mark of them at last.
But closely scanning in the night
I saw them standing crimson-bright
Just as she made them:
Nothing could fade them;
Yea, I can swear
That there they were -
They still were there!
Then the Vision of her who cut them came,
And looking over my shoulder said,
“I am sure you deal me all the blame
For those sharp smarts and red;
But meet me, dearest, to-morrow night,
In the churchyard at the moon’s half-height,
And so strange a kiss
Shall be mine, I wis,
That you’ll cease to know
If the wounds you show
Be there or no!”
As a bereaved person myself, I am in an especially advantageous position to empathise with Hardy who, like me, lost the love of his life and the precious light of his life. But this is not all that I have in common. My ‘Norman’ ancestors came from Fordington, a short distance from Higher Bockhampton where Hardy was born in 1840 and spent his formative years. Furthermore, the Vicar of Fordington, the Reverend Henry Moule, baptised the infant Norman children in the 19th century at Saint George’s Church. And it was Moule’s son Horace who became Hardy’s dearest friend.
What comfort did Hardy find following the death of his beloved Emma? Not in religion, surely, as he was a confirmed atheist. Not for him the prospect of resurrection and everlasting life, of being reunited with Emma. If he did entertain such hopes, he had little expectation of them being fulfilled. In examining Hardy’s life, are there lessons to be learnt which might help others who find themselves in a similar position? How to summon up the strength to put one foot in front of the other once more? In short, to soldier on.
I firmly believe that only a bereaved person who has lost a beloved partner can fully comprehend the significance of Hardy’s ‘Emma Poems’. Did Hardy survive this cataclysmic life event unscathed? What were his coping mechanisms, and how effective were they? This, and more, is what I explore in Thomas Hardy and the Death of Emma: What His Writings Reveal. ENDS
Meet Andrew Norman
Born in Newbury, Berkshire, in 1943. Andrew Norman was educated in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Midsomer Norton Grammar School, Somerset, and St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
He worked as a GP in Poole, before a spinal injury cut short his medical career. He is now an established writer with biographies of Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Thomas Hardy, T. E. Lawrence, Adolf Hitler, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter, Marilyn Monroe, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to his name.
Thomas Hardy and the Death of Emma: What His Writings Reveal by Andrew Norman is published by Pen & Sword Books at £25. andrew-norman.co.uk
