A Wife in London: a poem by Thomas Hardy

The Poem

I

She sits in the tawny vapour

That the City lanes have uprolled,

Behind whose webby fold on fold

Like a waning taper

The street-lamp glimmers cold.

A messenger's knock cracks smartly,

Flashed news is in her hand

Of meaning it dazes to understand

Though shaped so shortly:

He--has fallen--in the far South Land . . .

II

'Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker,

The postman nears and goes:

A letter is brought whose lines disclose

By the firelight flicker

His hand, whom the worm now knows:

Fresh--firm--penned in highest feather -

Page-full of his hoped return,

And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn

In the summer weather,

And of new love that they would learn.

Discussion

The poem is dated December 1899, which was two months after the outbreak of the Second Boer War in South Africa. The theme of the poem is the receipt of news of an early British casualty of that war.

Thomas Hardy was a pacifist by nature, and he was particularly horrified by the Boer War, which he saw as the exercise of imperialist bullying by the British government on the settlers of Dutch descent who – in Hardy’s eyes – fought for “homes and liberties” whereas the British were only interested in “Transvaal Funds, diamonds and gold” (these words were actually penned by his wife in a letter dated 7th February 1899, but in this matter Mr and Mrs Hardy were in complete agreement).

Thomas Hardy wrote several anti-war poems at this time, and these were collected as the “War Poems” section of his “Poems of the Past and the Present”, published in November 1901. The War Poems include some of Hardy’s best-known poems, including “Drummer Hodge” and “The Souls of the Slain”.

One unusual feature of “A Wife in London” is that Hardy chose to write about the fate of a soldier from London rather than those recruited from his own county of Dorset (which he referred to in his novels and poems as Wessex). In his other war poems it was very clear that his sympathies lay squarely with the latter – Drummer Hodge, for example, had a “Wessex home”, and Hardy had cycled to Southampton Docks to watch Dorset regiments embarking for South Africa.

So why London? It is possible that Hardy based his poem on an actual experience of someone he knew, who lived in London, or it might simply be that by setting the poem in London he could make effective symbolic use of the “peasouper” fogs that often enveloped the capital city but not rural Dorset.

The poem comprises four five-line stanzas split into two sections, the second forming a distinct contrast with the first. One might ask whether it was necessary to make this split – it is surely obvious enough to the reader that the contrast is there for them to find without drawing his/her attention to it quite so blatantly.

The rhyme scheme for each stanza is ABBAB, although Hardy is a bit careless in the second stanza with trying to make “shortly” rhyme with “smartly”.

Hardy is also careless with the rhythm, which is unusual for him. The syllable count for the first stanza is conventional enough – 8,8,8,6,6 – but this is not repeated. Indeed every stanza has a different syllable count, with anything from 5 to 10 syllables in a line, which means that the rhythm is necessarily irregular unless syllables are lengthened or shortened.

However, the main feature of the rhythm is that the fourth line of each stanza is “out of step” with the other lines because the metrical pattern is interrupted – it cannot be read at the same pace, which means that greater attention is drawn to it than to the other lines.

That must imply that the fourth line has a particular significance to the meaning of the poem, but it is questionable whether this is the case, except possibly in the second stanza.

Stanza One

The scene-setting stanza is mostly about fog – the “tawny vapour” of the polluted peasouper that afflicted cities like London in the days before smokeless zones were introduced. Fog is a regular occurrence near rivers on still Autumn days, and when this is combined with smoke from thousands of homes and factories the result can be deadly, not only from lack of visibility but also from the foul air that people are forced to breathe.

One has to assume that the wife in question is in a working-class terraced house close to the river, and that – because she is actually sitting “in the tawny vapour” – the fog has penetrated into the house. That is quite possible, especially if the smoke from her fire (referred to in the fourth stanza), is unable to escape from her chimney and has created a fog in her own room.

The impression of poor light is also conveyed by references to “a waning taper” (i.e. candle) and a glimmering street-light. It is not actually stated that the setting is night-time, but the implications are clear enough.

Stanza Two

The action of the poem happens in this and the following stanza. Stanza two simply describes the arrival of a messenger who delivers a telegram that has been “flashed” by means of the electric telegraph system that was in full operation by the time of the Boer War. The messages were sent using Morse Code and transmitted via undersea cables that skirted the coasts of Africa and Europe. An urgent message, such as one informing a spouse of the death of her soldier husband, would be transcribed with all due speed and delivered at any hour of the day or night.

The tone of this stanza is suddenness and shock, conveyed by “cracks smartly” and “flashed”. This is in contrast to the soft focus of the fog, the effect of which is to hide things and make them uncertain.

However, the fog cannot be forgotten. The line “Of meaning it dazes to understand” is interesting, particularly for the use of “dazes”, which suggests uncertainty and confusion, whereas “fails” or something similar would not have done so. The word also suggests that the wife is dazed by hearing the news, as though she has been hit over the head by a heavy object.

Stanza Three

Morning has broken but the fog is even thicker. We can take this as a symbol of the darkness and despair that the wife must be experiencing, having spent the rest of the night at the lowest possible ebb. Nothing can make her world any brighter, and surely it cannot get any worse.

But something worse is precisely what is about to happen. The ordinary post arrives, with a letter from her husband. Contemporary readers of the poem would probably have appreciated better than modern ones the contrast between telegraph and postal services, in that the former were extremely rapid and the latter very much slower, especially if international mail was involved.

The postal service from South Africa would have been by ship for much of its journey, largely following the course of the undersea cables used for the telegraph service. The letter might therefore have been written as much as a month before it was delivered, possibly only shortly after the soldier had arrived in the war zone.

Hardy uses quite a clever device to link the letter to the death of the soldier, which is the double meaning of the word “hand” – the part of the body and a short form of “handwriting”. To say that you know somebody’s hand indicates that you recognize their handwriting, but the only knowledge a worm can have is that of burrowing into dead flesh.

Stanza Four

The irony of the poem is expressed full-force in the final stanza. There is no suggestion of fog here, only mentions of freshness and “summer weather”.

We can picture the soldier writing home in high spirits, presumably not having been engaged in any military action up to this point. This is what Hardy has in mind with “penned in highest feather”, but it is a slightly odd use of words. It could give the impression that the soldier is using an old-fashioned quill pen in order to write his letter! I think we have to assume that Hardy was stuck for a rhyme with “weather” and this was the best he could manage!

The hopes expressed in the letter are that the couple will have plenty of holidays well away from the fog and that they will maybe start a family (“new love that they would learn”). We can picture how the wife felt on reading the letter just after she learned the terrible news brought by the earlier messenger.

There is one other small problem with word choice in this stanza, which is the reference to “jaunts by brake and burn”. Firstly, would a working-class soldier from the London slums really use an old-fashioned word like “brake” to refer to woodland thickets? And would he also have used “burn”, this being a Scottish word for a small stream? Holiday trips to Scotland from London on the pay of a common soldier? It seems unlikely! Once again, Hardy’s search for a rhyme seems to have led him to use an inappropriate word for the circumstance in question.

Conclusion

So – does this poem work or not? As a piece of anti-war poetry it strikes home in a way that a story of death on the battlefield would not have done. It brings the war home to the domestic front and looks at it from the point of view of a wife who has just become a widow. There is another of the War Poems that has a similar perspective, namely “Song of the Soldiers’ Wives and Sweethearts”, but that one is very different, being about the safe return of soldiers from the Boer War.

Hardy’s use of irony in “A Wife in London” has given rise to differing opinions, favourable and otherwise, some seeing this as a perfect example while others thinking it too “raw” and obvious. One thing to remember is that it is the reader who is the target of the irony – it would be a mistake to think that the wife would be expected to regard the situation as ironic – just utterly tragic.

It is worth noting that Hardy used this device in other poems. One such example was his much later “A Circular” (1913) in which he was himself the recipient of ill-timed mail, namely a catalogue of the latest fashions addressed to his wife, who had just died and needed only a funeral shroud.

Irony is indeed one of Thomas Hardy’s strongest suits – it runs through many of his poems to a greater or lesser extent. “A Wife in London” is definitely on the “greater” side of the scale.

There are problems with this poem, as noted above. Let’s just say that he wrote plenty of better ones!