Hardy and Warner Haunting Graveyards

The poems of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Townsend Warner both deploy graveyard-haunting attention to relationships between death as a leveller and as a means for underlining social and cultural inequalities. They each reveal, through allusion, familiarity with Gray’s ‘Elegy’ as a classic instance of how the pastoral can be used both to lament and accommodate such social and political conflicts and contradictions. By revisiting William Empson’s words in Some Versions of Pastoral on Gray’s poem, as well as his views on Hardy as a poet, this article looks at ways in which Warner’s poetry both draws sustenance from that of her great predecessor and employs her own versions of the pastoral to address politically left-leaning concerns. Consideration of Donald Davie’s partisan writings on both Hardy and Warner are then used to focus more precisely what graveyard poems by these two poet-novelists show of feeling for how death and our treatment of the dead reveal the hard outlines of a determinedly unequal culture, and how they address it differently in the formal orderings of their poetry. The article also draws attention to differences of emphasis to be found in Hardy’s pessimistic ameliorism and Warner’s political engagement, as well as underlining shared sympathies for the fates of others they reveal through their graveyard-haunted verse.