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 HARDY'S AESTHETICS OF DISJUNCTION AND THE
LITERARY ANTECEDENTS OF "THE MOTH-SIGNAL"

VERN B. LENTZ AND DOUGLAS D. SHORT

North Carolina State University

In his influential essay "The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy,"

R. P. Blackmur attempted to winnow the Collected Poems by estab-
lishing "a canon of inclusion as well as exclusion, to apply roughly
throughout the mass of Hardy's work."' One of the poems that
he cited as an example of the latter category is "The Moth-Signal,"
an infrequently anthologized poem that first appeared in Satires of
Circumstance (1914):
"What are you still, still thinking,"
He asked in vague surmise,
"That you stare at the wick unblinking
With those deep lost luminous eyes?"
"O, I see a poor moth burning
In the candle flame," said she,
"Its wings and legs are turning
To a cinder rapidly."
"Moths fly in from the heather,"
He said, "now the days decline."
"I know," said she. "The weather,
I hope, will at last be fine."
"I think," she added lightly,
"I'll look out at the door.
The ring the moon wears nightly
May be visible now no more."
She rose, and, little heeding,
Her life-mate then went on
With his mute and museful reading
In the annals of ages gone.
Outside the house a figure
Came from the tumulus near,
And speedily waxed bigger,
And clasped and called her Dear.
"I saw the pale-winged token
You sent through the crack," sighed she.
"That moth is burnt and broken
With which you lured out me."
4 Hardy
"And were I as the moth is
It might be better far
For one whose marriage troth is
Shattered as potsherds are!"
Then grinned the Ancient Briton
From the tumulus treed with pine:
"So, hearts are thwartly smitten
In these days as in mine!"2
Blackmur argued that the poem "shows in its first half the
immediate advantage of being relatively well-written as verse"; but
in the second half "the quality of the writing begins to slip," and
with the final stanza "the poem ends . . . inadequately to its
promise-which is to say awkwardly" (pp. 36-37). Blackmur was
operating within the constraints of the New Criticism, and in this
essay he was more concerned with evaluation than interpretation.
In fact, a significant portion of his discussion is devoted to a
demonstration of how the poem might have been revised in order
to remedy what he saw as its lack of "compositional strength."
However, in the case of "The Moth-Signal," Blackmur's critical
values thwarted his understanding of the poem and in particular
the function of the last stanza. Although his argument is most
persuasive, it is based on an interpretation that ignores the funda-
mental poetic technique Hardy employed in the poem.
We have long become accustomed to distortions of reality as
a means of achieving a poetic effect. What Hardy has created with
the last stanza of "The Moth-Signal" is a grotesque disjunction of
the expected poetic form to emphasize what he feels to be a "truth."
Readers who are acquainted with such poems as "Neutral Tones"
or "Wessex Heights" know that Hardy had a keen awareness of
unity of form. However, in "The Moth-Signal" Hardy deliberately
employed a disjunctive mode, that is, one in which distortion or
disunity of form is a calculated poetic technique designed to con-
vey a harsh truth about the human condition. Hardy mentions
this technique several times in his autobiography. In an entry
headed "Reflections on Art," he says that "Art is a disproportion-
ing-(i.e., distorting, throwing out of proportion)-of realities, to
show more clearly the features that matter in those realities." And
elsewhere, in discussing "the constructional part" of his writing,
he says that "the adjustment of things unusual to things eternal
and universal" is "the key to the art."3 In the case of "The Moth-
Signal," an understanding of Hardy's technique is best cultivated
by examining the separate literary antecedents that he juxtaposed
to produce the distinctive effect of the poem.
 South Atlantic Bulletin 5

Recently J. 0. Bailey has pointed out what those who have

read The Return of the Native will have already recognized, namely,
that "The Moth-Signal" is a variation on the scene in Book IV,
Chapter 4, in which Wildeve uses a moth to signal Eustacia to a
rendezvous on the heath.4 The scene from the novel, then, is an
obvious analogue (and very likely the source) for stanzas 1-8 of the
poem. However, stanza 9, the last stanza of the poem, has no coun-
terpart in the novel. Interestingly enough, it is precisely this stanza
that Blackmur found so offensive:
Then grinned the Ancient Briton
From the tumulus treed with pine:
"So, hearts are thwartly smitten
In these days as in minel"
Here Hardy has conjured up a ghost from antiquity who eaves-
drops on the illicit rendezvous and utters to himself an exclamation
that removes the poem from its immediate and localized setting
and places it in the realm of the immemorial and universal.
Bailey suggests that "in view of the relation of the poem to
The Return of the Native, the Ancient Briton may be a substitute
for Diggory, called a 'weird' (fateful) character and a 'Mephisto-
phelian vistant'" (p. 324 n.). But there is an even more specific
explanation for the Ancient Briton. It seems probable that the
figure was called to Hardy's mind by the figure of the ancient
Roman whom the speaker envisions in Housman's poem "On
Wenlock Edge":
Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.5
It is known that Hardy read A Shropshire Lad; in fact, another of
his poems, "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?", was directly
modeled on Housman's "Is My Team Ploughing?", a poem which
Housman referred to as Hardy's favorite.6 It is worth noting that
"The Moth-Signal" shares with these poems the motif of the voice
from the grave, a motif that has no analogue in The Return of the
6 Hardy

Native but was evidently suggested by Housman's poem. Hardy

ultimately employed this motif in several of his poems, and al-
though the dates of composition are not always certain, there is no
evidence that any were written before A Shropshire Lad.
As a literary antecedent to Hardy's Ancient Briton, Housman's
Roman, recast as a voice from the grave, together with the analogue
to the scene from The Return of the Native would seem to have
provided the components for Hardy's poetics of juxtaposition. On
the one hand the scene from the novel furnished the dramatic
ingredients of the poem and hence fixed the dominant theme of
"crossed fidelities," to use Blackmur's term. But on the other hand
the moral perspective and emotional distance that the poem
achieves in its final moment are established by the Ancient Briton,
who like Housman's Roman brings an incontrovertible authority
to the poem that the reader must accept.
The correspondence between "The Moth-Signal" and "On
Wenlock Edge" not only suggests another instance of Hardy's in-
debtedness to Housman, but it also invites a comparison of the two
poems. Perhaps the most obvious resemblance between them is
that they share the same postulate, namely, that misery is the in-
evitable lot of humankind. But more significantly, both poems
convey this idea by calling forth a representative of the past to
emphasize the universality of the respective situations. Thus the
illicit passions and subsequent remorse of the woman on Egdon
Heath are the same emotions that had distressed the ancient Britons.
Similarly the perturbations of the speaker viewing Wenlock Edge
were those that likewise troubled the Romans of a bygone era. But
beyond the similarity of a shared postulate the two poems differ in
a fashion that effectively illustrates the contrasting poetic tempera-
ments that characterized the work of the two poets. Despite its
somber tone, "On Wenlock Edge" is largely a poem of consolation.
Against the backdrop of the metaphoric gale, the fate of the Roman
becomes an assurance that in death the speaker's troubles too shall
cease, just as they have for the Roman. In contrast, "The Moth-
Signal" is a poem that exploits the particulars of anxiety rather
than offering a prospect of release from them. In effect, the dis-
embodied voice at the end of the poem denies any possibility that
man might overcome the anguish of his "crossed fidelities." Con-
gruent with this contrast in tone and purpose, Housman's Roman
is a well-integrated premise in the logic of consolation and as such
the poem is a more unified artistic endeavor; on the other hand,
Hardy's Briton is a deliberate appendage who startles us with his
sudden appearance and shakes us with his sardonic grin.
It is probably the abruptness of Hardy's last stanza and the
rigid interpretation it forces upon the reader that prompted Black-
 South Atlantic Bulletin 7
mur to place "The Moth-Signal" in the "canon of exclusion," and
as a private judgment his criticism cannot be faulted. But in defer-
ence to Hardy one must recognize that he purposely directed his
poem to this end. Certainly he intended to jar the reader with the
sudden shift in perspective brought about by the utterance of the
voice from the grave and with the powerful jolt to the sensibilities
delivered by the single word "grinned." For Hardy, ambiguity had
no special poetic value, but juxtaposition did, and the Ancient
Briton's commentary, a device inspired by Housman, was by its
very intrusiveness a means of establishing the significance of a
dramatic situation to which no particular value could otherwise
be assigned.

NOTES
1. "The Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy," Southern Review, 6 (1940), 34;
rpt. in Language as Gesture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), pp. 51-79.
2. Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1928), pp.
369-370. The poem also carries the subtitle (On Egdon Heath).
3. Florence Emily Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891, and
The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928 (1928 and 1930; rpt. 2 vols. in 1,
Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1970), pp. 228-29, 252. Other relevant discussions are
to be found on pp. 272-73 and 300-01. See also Samuel Hynes's discussion of
Hardy's "antinomial" technique in The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry (Chapel Hill:
Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 34-55.
4. The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (Chapel
Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1970), p. 323.
5. The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1965), p. 48.
6. For the parallel between the two poems see C. Hobart Edgren, "A Hardy-
Housman Parallel," Notes and Queries, 199 (1954), 126-27. Hardy's comment on
Housman's poem is quoted in a letter by Housman to Houston Martin reprinted
in Henry Maas, ed., The Letters of A. E. Housman (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1971), p. 331. Bailey (p. 288) enumerates the occasions on which Hardy
and Housman met and speculates that on the last occasion, at Cambridge in
November, 1913, they discussed "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?" and that
at this meeting he told Housman that "Is My Team Ploughing?" was his
favorite.