The Figure of the Singer in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy

Abstract

My title suggests a particular interest in Hardy’s poetry, but it is an interest which bears on the work of many other poets. I can best put it in the form of a question: why do poets continue to describe themselves as singers long after poetry ceased to be sung? Apollo’s lyre functions as a figure of speech, a metonym for poetry, even in periods when the spectacle of a bard with his lyre, or minstrel with his lute, was ludicrously outdated. Metonymy, taking the part to describe the whole, ought to depend on there being some connection between the two, and when the connection is lost the metonym ought to disappear. But in the case of poetry the opposite seems to have happened. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of ‘lyre’ as a figure of speech for poetry in the late seventeenth century, in a poem by Dryden, ‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham’, dated 1683: ‘One common note on either lyre did strike/And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike’. In 1782 we have William Cowper, writing of ‘The painter’s pencil, and the poet’s lyre’.