Conclusion

Abstract

Though I began by citing Hardy’s statement that the ‘poetry of a scene varies with the minds of the perceivers’, and though much of what I’ve said has been an attempt to show how firmly his work is tied to the positivism and sceptical empiricism implicit in that statement, I’m aware that there are areas of my discussion — particularly in the last chapter — which suggest that his imagination wasn’t wholly governed by a despotic eye, that he wasn’t the absolute prisoner of his sense impressions. For me there are times when he breaks out of Hume’s imaginative universe and achieves a visionary freedom. This is what happens in ‘During Wind and Rain’, where each of the four major images is a vision that transcends the injustices of time. In arguing this, I’ve deliberately left the last sentence of the final chapter open — open not so much as a question but as an unsubstantiated assertion — and in doing so I’m aware that some of Hardy’s readers may well object that such moments of vision can’t possibly be reconciled with the ‘full look at the worst’ which he takes in those pitiless and terrible refrains. Here, I would simply argue that such a reconciliation is impossible: there can be no connection between the truth of the refrains and the truth of the images, and Hardy doesn’t attempt to make one. Each truth is uncompromising and, in its own terms, final.