My last post looked at the theme of fate and free will in a couple of Hardy’s poems, but this post is a more in-depth look at one of those poems.
In “Going and Staying,” Hardy gives us his view of time, and its nature. This lovely little poem is not a mere observation of time, the constant of life, but it is a roadmap, a guidebook to the intricacies of time. It shows us how time flows, its nature, its effect of us, its effect on the world, and even its tripartite structure. The poem, though it is a short 15 lines, packs all of these elements into its metrical form, its formatting, and its other metaphorical and poetic mechanics.
Beginning, the overall theme of the poem, if taken as a whole, is clearly time. Time is the ever-flowing part of our lives, and Hardy gives us that image in the first stanza. Each piece of the poem has something to do with movement or with something temporal. The “moving sun-shapes” let us infer the movement of the sun as a day passes, the brook is flowing, the “moonlit May” again instills the idea of all things being trapped in a temporal universe (ll. 1-5). These images continue in the second and third stanzas with the mentions of “seasons,” “bleed,” and not to mention the words reused from the title: going and staying (ll. 6-7). The third stanza is the most blatant use of time-related language. Hardy confronts time head-on, and even describes Time as something ethereal, something just beyond our grasp, but still active in our lives.
While the words themselves lend us the thematic concerns of time, we can extrapolate that theme to the layout of the poem as well. The poem is in three stanzas, representing the three parts of time: past, present, and future. The first stanza gives us the feeling of good times, of outdoor activities as the sun casts long shadows, the pleasant murmuring of the brook, the cool Spring evenings, “but they were going.” These are pleasant memories of the past, of things since ended. The second stanza takes us into the winter, into the cold and bleak time of year. Everything nice has faded, and in the present, cold reality is what stares us in the face. The final stanza looks forward to the foggy future, and it realizes that what was good then has faded. What is bad now will fade. And in their due course, all things good and bad will fade as one. Hardy’s tripartite poem seems directly related to our attitudes toward tripartite Time. Don’t we often wish for the simpler days of the past, in lieu of the difficult times we are facing now? How much easier is it to cling to the pleasantries of the past instead of focusing on what’s in front of us now? The future, then, is ethereal, is unattainable. We can never live in the future, only in the present, and Hardy’s exactly right: the niceties of the past and the harsh reality of the future will both be obscured by time. The good will be replaced by bad, the bad will be replaced by good, and, to steal from Browning, “God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world” (“Pippa Passes”).
Hardy’s meter also gives us a view of his thoughts on the nature of time. Not only do his stanzas tell us of the tripartite structure of time, but also do his metrical tendencies show that tripartite structure, and the subtle differences in those parts. The meter tells us that time is, by and large, regular, plodding ever onward without change; however, sometimes, it may not seem so. Sometimes things take longer than we’d expected. The meter in the first and third stanzas is exactly the same: iambic tetrameter in the first line, the same plus an extra short syllable in the second, iambic tetrameter in the third and fourth lines, and two iambic feet and an extra short syllable in the fifth. The sameness of these two stanzas is akin to the steady pace of time for eternity past and eternity future. In either case, time is fixed, and nothing can make past events closer to the present, and nothing can make the events of the future further away. It’s even, and it’s symmetrical. The further away the past, the closer the future, and vice versa. The middle stanza, however, is unique from the other two.
In the middle paragraph, the measured, symmetrical meter gives way to a more chaotic beat. This stanza has the same basic pattern, but there are a few anomalies. The first line begins with an inverted iambic foot. The second line is almost metrically the same, but just before the last foot, Hardy has added an extra short syllable. Rather than having nine syllables, this second line has ten. The fourth line is almost entirely metrically different. Rather than the strict iambs of the other stanzas, this line is setup this way: inverted, inverted, double long, iamb. Changing the meter for only this stanza, the stanza on the present, shows us that while the underlying structure of Time is the same, the present is chaotic and dynamic. In contrast to the evenness of the past and the future, the present is able to be grasped, to be controlled, and while Time itself will always continue on, the present is less stable than either of the other two pieces of the structure of time.
The rhyme scheme, too, gives us a clue about where to find another statement about the nature and persistence of Time. Each of the three stanzas follows the same rhyming pattern, ABAAB, but the A rhyme is replaced in the two other stanzas. The B rhyme is repeated throughout the poem, and like Time, remains a constant in all parts of our lives. The B rhyme also falls on the same lines in every stanza. This measured consistency is another indication of the easy, measured consistency of Time. Time never changes, its ever-presence
The persistence of the B rhyme is, in itself telling, but it signals another interesting element of the poem which, in yet another way, illustrates Hardy’s insistence that Time does not stand still and is always flowing. Looking at the B rhymed words, all of them end with –ing. Grammatically, verbs ending in –ing are participles, which implies a continuation of action, whether relegated to the past, or continuing from past to present, or even continuing from the present on into the future. It’s this repetition of description of continuing action that gives us the sense that all of these events are taking place in some temporal structure, and the fact that it’s continuing necessarily means that time is moving around and through whatever action that may be. The repeated participial verbs give the poem a sense of motion, and that motion is the inescapable flowing of the great river of Time.
Hardy wanted to illustrate to us the nature of Time, and its multi-faceted structure. Hardy’s comments on time permeate the poem, from the overt in the diction itself to the clandestine and subtle in the rhyming pattern, the meter, even in individual metric feet. The poem is rich with comments on time, and what may seem like a simple musing on the flow of time, is actually a deep, meditative, intentional look at time, its features, its nature, and its structure.
