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Text of the page (random words):
r death the first stanza has no tense however it merely apostrophizes the colors and then gifford in a voice that belongs to neither the present nor the past a voice that floats between and the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free the woman whom i loved so and who loyally loved me in a memoir that gifford wrote not long before she died and which hardy didn t discover until after she recalls that when she rode her pony which was named fanny fanny and i were one creature and very happy and that she rode him in a brown dress whose color matched his coat so long that she had to carry the end of it in order not to trip she met hardy because he was the architect hired to remodel the church where her brother in law was rector a structure so dilapidated that birds and bats had a good time in the roof timbers she remembered that when the architect visited i rode my pretty mare fanny and he walked by my side and i showed him some of the neighbourhood the cliffs along the roads and through the scattered hamlets sometimes gazing down at the solemn small shores below where the seals lived coming out of great deep caverns very occasionally in her biography of hardy claire tomalin reports that gifford and hardy sketched each other the victorian equivalent of taking joint selfies unlike the poem s first stanza the second commits itself to the past and describes one of the couple s outings the pale mews plained below us and the waves seemed far away in a nether sky engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say as we laughed light heartedly aloft on that clear sunned march day peter and i both stumbled over mews which are gulls it turns out not stables i thought at first that plained had something to do with the flatness of the horizon but hardy means cried as in the related words complained and plaintive gulls are crying below in other words but mews plained comes a little closer to the sound gulls make when they re doing so hardy doesn t mind using a word that s a step removed from common diction if he can gain a poetic effect by it his calling the sea below a nether sky is a nifty metaphor because sea and sky are alike in both stretching away into the distance where they meet and mirror each other along the horizon and the metaphor accomplishes a neat trick of perspective looking down somehow feels like looking up there s a suggestion too that the sea or the reversed sky covers an underworld a suggestion at the moment easy to dismiss given that the sea is distant and the murmuring of its waves sounds trivial easily interrupted by the laughter he and gifford are sharing a little cloud then cloaked us and there flew an irised rain and the atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain and then the sun burst out again and purples prinked the main colors are always subtle in hardy irised means iridescent the shimmer of rainbow that sometimes appears in rain especially when seen from above the atlantic ocean lying behind this prismatic rain appears to color it to darken it in horizontal strata hardy s language here is as precise and general as an experiment in optics at one moment he sounds like he s talking to you in a conversational tone a little cloud then cloaked us and in the next line he compresses his thought to the density of a mathematical formula irised isn t a common word but its meaning is clear and its compactness keeps the poem in its trotting rhythm there s a kind of grammatical insistence too i think in the accumulation of past participles engrossed sunned irised misfeatured there s even one at the core of light heartedly act is being consolidated into completed action in the dull misfeatured stain the malevolence of the nether sky is again visible still in the background for now but beginning to leach through happily the sun returns the action of this stanza is taking place in the past when rebirths were still possible and transfigures the staining ocean whose tints now become decoration still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old beeny to the sky and shall she and i not go there once again now march is nigh and the sweet things said in that march say anew there by and by with the em dash hardy jump cuts to the present beeny has become old beeny fond in memory and hardy asks as if challenging a limit he knows he can t pass whether he and gifford will ever visit it again together the small love talk he exchanged with her on the cliff summit years ago now seems as distant as the babbling of the waves did when he stood next to her there what if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore the woman now is elsewhere whom the ambling pony bore and nor knows nor cares for beeny and will laugh there nevermore the phrase chasmal beauty and the name beeny are repeated as if to stress that the cliff still exists as the woman a word repeated with a similar stress in the first stanza does not in any sublime geographic feature there s a hint of eternity which is part of the attraction for human visitors a hint that plays on the visitors a very slow joke in that while rocks and sea may be lasting any admirers though they may feel like they have been placed above nature by virtue of their powers of perception are not in his two volume autobiography written and then posthumously published under the not very convincing pretense that his second wife was the author of it hardy reprinted some of the notes he made in his journal when he first visited beeny cliff in march 1870 with gifford march 10 went with e l g to beeny cliff she on horseback on the cliff the tender grace of a day etc the run down to the edge the coming home the ellipses are hardy s what a little shocked me when an annotation to beeny cliff sent me to hardy s autobiography for a look at this journal entry is the quoted fragment of poetry the tender grace of a day it comes from the conclusion of tennyson s poem break break break which is also about looking out over the sea while in mourning the last two lines of that poem read as follows but the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me tennyson wrote the poem while grieving for his young friend arthur hallam who had died while abroad and whose death became the subject of his later masterpiece in memoriam which imaginatively follows the homeward progress by sea of hallam s sealed coffin what s puzzling is that while it makes a great deal of sense for break break break to have been in hardy s mind in 1913 when he was composing beeny cliff as an elegy for gifford the poem seems to have been in his mind already in 1870 back when he was courting her the stenographic style of the journal entry implies that when he was writing about the day he was confident he would always remember its texture the run down to the edge the coming home these were lyrical moments that he knew a brief prompt would always return him to the way a short quoted phrase can call to mind the poem it has dropped out of did he and gifford kiss when they came to the edge of the cliff did the sight of the waves crashing below bring the same tennyson poem into both of their minds break break break on thy cold gray stones o sea and did one of them quote it to the other those details are not recoverable by us now but the surprise is that the nether sky that hardy saw in the sea that day with gifford by his side was not a later invention projected onto the past by a grieving husband he saw it then and so probably did she the tender grace of a day that is dead the young lovers wouldn t have quoted that tennyson line to each other unless they were already aware that they were living through a moment that was not going to return aware that the beauty of their happiness together was not going to last as long as beeny cliff posted on 7 january 2026 author caleb crain categories exegesis poetry thomas hardy irresolute i want to have a new year s resolution but i can t think of one i already don t smoke or drink and a minor and extremely tedious recent health issue cost me five pounds last month that i didn t want to lose and have been trying to get back read more books and fewer social media feeds i guess good luck me as for writing past experience suggests that the tightening of thumbscrews fails to increase my productivity or maybe i just don t want to believe or admit that it could holding on as i do to the notion that life should be worth living i don t seem to have as much faith in my raw will power as i used to and yet and yet on some days raw will power seems to be all i have according to the wrapped function in the app that tracks my cross fit workouts i lifted 868 994 pounds in 2025 which is 129 685 pounds more than i lifted the year before which suggests a certain amount of single mindedness or bloody mindedness one idea is that i should write more of these little essays for my blog newsletter and then also turn on the enable payments spigot and dive headfirst into the resulting piles of cash like scrooge mcduck i have hesitated to turn this spigot because i have a conflictual relationship to the idea that there should be any relationship at all between writing and money also because one reason i mistrust my reserves of will power is that i really ought to be devoting them to the writing of novel 3 my new year s resolutions for the past half dozen years were pre inscribed long ago if i m being honest i continue to write these essays at all only because every so often i work myself into a knot that i can t figure out how to unravel any other way if i were to write them more often and more incidentally they would probably have a different flavor less urgent more meandering for example i could write about a feeling that i ve had lately which i think is a symptom of late middle age where i ll be doing something like goofing with the new puppy whom we adopted on christmas eve and when i rise from the floor a little light headed from the sudden shift in blood pressure i experience something that isn t as well formed as a recollection but does seem to have the coloring of one the fragment of an episode that i ve mostly forgotten maybe a residual sense memory of wrestling with our last dog when he was a puppy twenty years ago or of a joke my husband and i used to make back then or of what it was like proprioceptively to be on the floor in the apartment where we then lived at the age i then was or maybe all these trace sense memories overlaid together transposed onto the current moment without the right tags so that what comes into my mind is nonsensical the way a dream is vague cryptic i get moments like this a lot lately and they remind me of and this is such a historical thing to be reminded of that it s a little embarrassing a product called silly putty a plasticky rubbery ball that they sold at the grocery store when i was a child which came in an egg i seem to recall and which you could stretch and snap in two and bounce and another of its odd properties was that you could flatten it and press it on top of the sunday newspaper s comic strips which in those days were printed in color and the dry flexible tablet that the silly putty had become would lift a reversed impression off of the comic strips which you could marvel at the exactness of for a minute or two and then smush up and marvel again as the bright reds and blues and oranges of the comics were diluted by your folding and massage back into the light pink substrate that had briefly held them what i experience in other words in my moment of lightheadedness is like one of those short lived silly putty copies the text in them an illegible mirror image of something i probably didn t pay that much attention to at the time restored for a moment with colors that are strangely sharp but at the same time recognizably secondhand restored however without any possibility of lasting preservation restored only for the ephemeral pleasure of a chance to notice how the plastic of memory is emptied as the tissues on which your memory is imprinted are recycled while i was lost in the composition of these sidewinding sentences the current puppy today s puppy sitting on my lap chewed a corner off the case for my reading glasses posted on 2 january 2026 author caleb crain categories aging memory writing as a way of life posts pagination page 1 page 2 page 357 next page about contact overthrow necessary errors american sympathy short stories essays reviews subscribe to leaflet my substack newsletter to get these photos and posts by email archives archives select month june 2026 1 may 2026 1 march 2026 1 january 2026 2 november 2025 1 october 2025 1 september 2025 1 august 2025 1 july 2025 1 june 2025 2 may 2025 1 april 2025 1 march 2025 3 february 2025 1 january 2025 1 december 2024 3 october 2024 1 september 2024 3 august 2024 5 july 2024 2 may 2024 2 april 2024 1 march 2024 1 february 2024 1 january 2024 1 december 2023 4 november 2023 3 october 2023 1 september 2023 5 august 2023 4 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