The swallows flew in the curves of an eight
Above the river-gleam
In the wet June’s last beam: 
Like little crossbows animate,
The swallows flew in the curves of an eight
Above the river-gleam.

Planing up shavings made of spray,
A moor-hen darted out
From the bank thereabout. 
And through the stream-shine ripped her way;
Planing up shavings made of spray,
A moor-hen darted out.

In this poem we find observation leaping into song in one line and hobbling into a hard-wrought image in another.  Both the line in which the first appears, however—­

Like little crossbows animate,

and the line in which the second happens—­

Planing up shavings made of spray,

equally make us feel how watchful and earnest an observer is Mr. Hardy.  He is a man, we realize, to whom bird and river, heath and stone, road and field and tree, mean immensely more than to his fellows.  I do not suggest that he observes nature without bias—­that he mirrors the procession of visible things with the delight of a child or a lyric poet.  He makes nature his mirror as well as himself a mirror of nature.  He colours it with all his sadness, his helplessness, his (if one may invent the word and use it without offence) warpedness.  If I am not mistaken, he once compared a bleak morning in The Woodlanders to the face of a still-born baby.  He loves to dwell on the uncomfortable moods of nature—­on such things as:—­

      ... the watery light
    Of the moon in its old age;

concerning which moon he goes on to describe how: 

    Green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it globed
    Like a dying dolphin’s eye seen through a lapping wave.

This, I fear, is a failure, but it is a failure in a common mood of the author’s.  It is a mood in which nature looks out at us, almost ludicrous in its melancholy.  In such a poem as that from which I have quoted, it is as though we saw nature with a drip on the end of its nose.  Mr. Hardy’s is something different from a tragic vision.  It is a desolate, disheartening, and, in a way, morbid vision.  We wander with him too often under—­

      Gaunt trees that interlace,
    Through whose flayed fingers I see too clearly
      The nakedness of the place.

And Mr. Hardy’s vision of the life of men and women transgresses similarly into a denial of gladness.  His gloom, we feel, goes too far.  It goes so far that we are tempted at times to think of it as a factitious gloom.  He writes a poem called Honeymoon Time at an Inn, and this is the characteristic atmosphere in which he introduces us to the bridegroom and bride: 

    At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn,
        The moon was at the window-square,
      Deedily brooding in deformed decay—­
      The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze;
    At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn,
        So the moon looked in there.