Richard Morrison

Thomas Hardy's dark poems are a vital record of a rich musical past

- Richard Morrison

There are many reasons to read Thomas Hardy's poems, which I have been doing all my adult life. As with his novels, but rather more pithily, they often plunge you into the terrifying darkness of Victorian pessimism. Yet they are full of humour and irony.

And for musicians and music lovers there's an additional reason. Though Hardy's quirky metres make his poems notoriously hard to set to music (fine cycles by Britten and Finzi notwithstanding), they are themselves full of music. And I mean that in two ways. First, Hardy depicts a musical world that still existed in his 1840s Wessex boyhood but was fast disappearing. It's a world of viol consorts bowing ancient hymns in the west galleries of village churches; of folk fiddlers striking up reels at country fairs; and 'waits' carolling themselves hoarse on their Christmas Eve rounds.

So simply as a record of a bygone folk tradition, Hardy's poems are invaluable. Indeed, when in 'The Dance at the Phoenix' he manages to cram eight dance titles (plus instructions of their steps) into seven rhyming lines, he seems to be consciously recording for posterity an already vanished culture.