I can’t prove this is based on a real couple, but Hardy gives a very strong hint by inserting the words ‘Near Tooting Common’ in brackets and small print, just after the title.
The poem also gains power from the sense it gives of being based on a real situation, an actual experience Hardy had of seeing a couple and being unable to forget them and eventually writing it down and making a poem out of it. But since we don’t know, all we can do is empathise with their suffering. I mean, if we knew what the issue was, then depending on our view of the matter, we might find ourselves taking sides or passing judgment, or explaining it away.
And this is part of the poem’s power – we can only imagine what it is, or maybe project our own troubles and dilemmas, past or present, onto the couple.Īnd the fact that we don’t know the specific issue heightens our sympathy. Whatever the circumstances, lots of Hardy’s characters end up in a situation like this – pacing together at the edge of town, on the margins of society, worrying at the problem together or arguing about it, or trying to persuade each other of one course of action or another.īut in the case of this poem, we don’t know, any more than the speaker of the poem knows, what is troubling this particular couple. Sometimes there is a crime involved, or even a simple mistake like going to the wrong church on your wedding day. Sometimes they are separated by a class divide. Sometimes it’s the discovery or confession of another lover or even a spouse or a child. In story after story, Hardy the novelist presents us with ways in which love’s young rays are darkened or blotted out by circumstance. This poem has haunted me for thirty years, just as the memory of the couple haunted Thomas Hardy for thirty years, before, if we can believe him, he wrote it down.Īnyone who is familiar with Hardy’s novels will recognise this as a quintessential Hardyesque scene: a pair of lovers are in some kind of trouble, and find themselves ‘absorbed / In mental scenes no longer orbed / By love’s young rays.’ We get the sense that they are going over and over their situation together, and finding no resolution, only what Shawn Coyne calls ‘the best bad choice’. Some heavy thought constrained each face,
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