by Thomas Larson

In 1874, Thomas Hardy married Emma Gifford, a woman who never let her novelist husband forget that she was born of a higher class than he, ever his superior in taste and breeding. After her death he got back at her—poetically—in a big way. And she—from the grave—at him.
The pair began a premarital affair, fervent and soulful, as romantic and intellectual companions; not long after, they were quarantined in thirty-eight years of a childless and mutually regrettable marriage. When Emma died of a bad heart and impacted gallstones (she wrote treacly poems, many published, and suffered from delusions of grandeur), Hardy at sixty-two composed a loose sequence of verse, “Poems of 1912-1913.” These twenty-one rhyming, pithy elegies, among the finest in English, conjure the ghost of his first wife as the means of grieving his loss in a fatalistic anti-theism that feels downright religious.
For Hardy, as Claire Tomlin writes in her biography, there are three Emma’s: “Sometimes she appears as a ghost, sometimes as the elderly woman who liked parties and hats; more often as the girl of long ago, wearing an ‘air-blue gown,’ or with her ‘bright hair flapping free.’” Hardy names her (“woman much missed”), recalls their slow-dissolving marriage (“scars of the old flame”), owns up to their mutual failures (“things were not lastly as firstly well / with us”), and measures her apparitional lingering, postmortem, in places where she shadows him (“how you call to me, call to me, / Saying that you are not as you were”). He resurrects her girlish form, the woman he began courting long ago, (“fair-eyed and white shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed”). Read more »