Self-Unconscious

Along the way
He walked that day,
Watching shapes that reveries limn,
And seldom he
Had eyes to see
The moment that encompassed him.

Bright yellowhammers
Made mirthful clamours,
And billed long straws with a bustling air,
And bearing their load
Flew up the road
That he followed, alone, without interest there.

From bank to ground
And over and round
They sidled along the adjoining hedge;
Sometimes to the gutter
Their yellow flutter
Would dip from the nearest slatestone ledge.

The smooth sea-line
With a metal shine,
And flashes of white, and a sail thereon,
He would also descry
With a half-wrapt eye
Between the projects he mused upon.

Yes, round him were these
Earth’s artistries,
But specious plans that came to his call
Did most engage
His pilgrimage,
While himself he did not see at all.

Dead now as sherds
Are the yellow birds,
And all that mattered has passed away;
Yet God, the Elf,
Now shows him that self
As he was, and should have been shown, that day.

O it would have been good
Could he then have stood
At a focussed distance, and conned the whole,
But now such vision
Is mere derision,
Nor soothes his body nor saves his soul.

Not much, some may
Incline to say,
To see in him, had it all been seen.
Nay! he is aware
A thing was there
That loomed with an immortal mien.

Collected in Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces, Self-Unconscious is one of those Hardy poems where a folk-dance rhythm seems to become the audible passing of time. Its stanza pattern enjoys an exchange between two partner-metres – the dimeters of lines one, two, four and five, with the tetrameters of three and six. Those dancers are firmly shod in an AABCCB rhyme scheme.

The bounciness is barely hinted in the trudge of the first sustain, and the speaker makes his observations in a similarly pedestrian style. From stanza two it’s as if the metre had absorbed energy from the nest-building birds.

Comparing the sixth line of stanzas one and two reveals the difference. “The moment that encompassed him” (stanza one) is formal iambic tetrameter. Visually, it’s almost a snapshot, holding the moment still. In stanza two, “the road / That he followed, alone, without interest there” – despite being a portrait of indifference – has a livelier, anapaestic movement and, for visual comparison, early cinema might come to mind. Writing in 1909-10, Hardy has a two-way view of traditional and future artforms.

Something similar occurs in the diction, too. There are places where a modern reader might feel the poem showed its age and literary heritage. “Watching shapes that reveries limn” would be tricky even without the inversion (“Watching shapes that limn reveries” is the likeliest meaning). Self-Unconscious is classified as one of the Reveries of the published collection, so the word may signal poetry and its making, but “limn” seems to be there chiefly for its usefulness as a rhyme. As well as such occasional over-expression of self-consciousness, there’s a casual, almost vox pop tone in some of the commentary: “Not much, some may / incline to say, / To see in him.” A more subtle and historically relevant shift occurs when what is described as “the way” in the first stanza becomes “the road” in the second. Again, a clash of chronological realities is suggested. The road, where the walker’s mind is on “specious plans that came to his call”, might be taking him to a job in the nearest town. He is alienated from the remaining semi-naturalness of his surroundings. The yellowhammers are better able to negotiate with a life lived between hedge and gutter.

The yellowhammers have an important role in the poem, and inspire some of its best writing. Their movements, sidling and fluttering, are beautifully captured in stanza three, played off against the stasis of “the slatestone ledge” and the distant sea with its “metal shine”. The protagonist’s “tragedy” is that he doesn’t notice any of this: his eye is “half-wrapt” – a telling compound that contains the word “rapt” to suggest, perhaps, what the response ought to have been.

Hardy isn’t writing a lament for an endangered species, the focus is on the human in the picture, and the harm he has caused himself through not being alive to the moment. However, the problem is bigger than that: the walker’s distracted, eventless “pilgrimage” is deprived of significance because he’s unable to see himself and, presumably, his place in “Earth’s artistries”. This is the crux.

“God” takes the blame as a malevolent “elf” and, perhaps, the only cinematographer who might have illuminated and enlarged the man’s vision that day, but who waited deliberately until it was too late. The poem inscribes a kind of Wordsworthian reversal: the visionary aspect of nature is unseen, and no epiphany occurs.

Is Hardy talking obliquely about himself? Or has he created a character who symbolises Everyman as potential artist? Focus is a serious concept in the poem and we see what inhibits it, but it’s harder to know exactly what would ideally inhabit it. Perhaps it’s simply that the “thing … that loomed with an immortal mien” represents an escape from the self-in-time. If he had only “conned the whole” the man, representing humankind, would have been self-aware, but he wouldn’t have been lost in self-absorption.