Hardy’s Eyes

Abstract This chapter reflects on Hardy’s use of imaginary eyes to fulfil impossible wishes. Its focus is Hardy’s poetry, which, it argues, may be distinguished from the fiction by its whimsical optimism. Bending elegies into tricks of optical revival, Hardy writes in ‘The Last Signal’ of how by ‘looking hard and harder’ he may see his dead friend William Barnes in a light beam, or in ‘The Shadow Across the Stone’ of how a shadow reminiscent of his dead wife Emma may be upgraded into evidence of her return: ‘Let me not unvision a sight which somehow there may be.’ Nothing is irreversible for eyes that may see anything. But the miracles are bitter edged. To wish for something you need to be conscious of not having it, while a poem that animates a wish relies for its life on the postponement of results. Also if the poems could actually have what they wanted by any other means than by dreaming it, they would not have needed to be written. Whimsy’s presence betrays not only a prior loss but a presupposed one, a sense of the futility of any more practical course of action than that in which they consist. Imagining alternative eyes appealed most to Hardy from middle age on, when the building pessimism of his fiction had come to overwhelm him and the poems were a skylight. He also began in his thirties to fret about the health of his real eyes, which by then, print-sore from reading and writing through the night after long days of close architectural work, ached to transform.