Poems

This selection gathers the lyrics Hardy wrote from the 1860s into the 1920s, alongside and after the Wessex novels. Many pieces return to Dorset lanes, churches, and farms, or to the Napoleonic wars treated at greater length in The Dynasts. Satires of circumstance set small ironies of marriage and chance. A concentrated group written after the death of his first wife Emma revisits Cornwall and early love in a plainer, grieving voice. Later war poems answer 1914 without heroic consolation. The book is a large body of short poems on time, place, and missed meetings, not a single narrative and not a digest of the fiction.

Quarter bound in dark green cloth, green paper palm leaf illustrated boards. Dark orange endleaves. Grey slipcase.