|
"Twinges of Old Wounds": Thomas Hardy's "Panthera"
from "Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses"
[London: Macmillan, 1909]
We Americans, like the ancient Romans and our most apparent cultural
forefathers the English, have a thing for bigness. We love the World
Trade Center, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon. Bill Gates is spending
more on his Washington home than it costs to build and equip two or three
public high schools.
 Unfortunately this obsession extends to the arts as well. We
honor Whitman over Dickinson, simply because his poems are bigger. We
talk about the "great" American novel, instead of the "best" or the "most
perfect" or the "smartest," confusing dimension with quality. Witness
the rash of "serious" hernia-inducers published just in the last few
years-- "Underworld," "Mason & Dixon," "Infinite Jest," the Border
Trilogy.
Other cultures--the "classical" Greek and Japanese, for
example--recognized the artistry of concision, giving due reverence to
the epigram, the watercolor, the haiku. And one of the most widely
admired novelists of the post-Romantic period, Thomas Hardy, made no
secret of his estimation of the novel as compared to the poem: he
surrendered fiction writing with relief, after the uproar which greeted
"Jude the Obscure" in 1895, and spent the last three decades of his life
writing poems, all of them--excepting his two poetic dramas--under a
few hundred lines long. His achievement has been both well rewarded and
curiously ignored. On the one hand, his oeuvre contains a cool dozen
"anthology pieces" (or a baker's dozen, if you count "In Time of 'The
Breaking of Nations'"), ranging from the early "Hap" to the late "Snow
in the Suburbs," which puts him quantitatively ahead of all but a very
few of his peers. On the other hand, his "Complete Poems" numbers more
than 900 titles, the majority of which are totally unknown to anyone but
Hardy scholars, whether those "scholars" are academicians or simply
devotees of fine writing.
One of the forgotten poems, a fine example of Hardy's deft touch
with narrative verse as well as story-within-a-story architecture, is
"Panthera," from his 1909 collection "Time's Laughingstocks and Other
Verses."
"Panthera," as the title will indicate to readers of Biblical
apocrypha, takes as its source the ancient Christian (or anti-Christian,
if you prefer) legend that Jesus was born of the sexual relationship of
the teenaged Mary and a Roman soldier stationed in Palestine. The
"original" tale can have served a number of purposes. It might have
originated in an attempt to discredit Judaism's upstart relative,
Christianity. It might have been a Gnostic or philosophic effort to mock
the very idea of God taking on a human body. It might have indicated one
way by which Christianity, as a new religion, could overcome the aversion
of old guard Romans to "innovation"--give the Christ a Roman father. If
the story were younger than it is, it might even be seen as a metaphor
for Christianity Triumphant--a union of Jewish monotheism with the
hierarchical power of the Roman Empire. In Hardy's hands, it becomes the
affecting recollection of an old soldier, remembering what his erstwhile
superior told him many years earlier.
The unnamed narrator speaks in iambic pentameter, rhymed mostly
in couplets, though the often enjambed lines de-emphasize the rhyme and
give his speech a smoothly flowing colloquialism, both natural and a bit
archaic, an appropriate fictional dialect for a provincial resident of an
ancient empire. He begins directly--
Yea, as I sit here, crutched, and cricked, and bent,
I think of Panthera, who underwent
Much from insidious aches in his decline.
(Hardy's mastery of conversational verse, as opposed to conversational
prose, ought to be noted by everyone associated with the "new
narrative.")
For the next few lines the old man continues, as old men will,
moaning about his and Panthera's various bodily woes. Then he shifts
topics abruptly, but believably, and begins to discuss Panthera's
experience in "the Levant." And here, only two stanzas into the poem, he
introduces narrative doubt by telling us that Panthera
later knew some shocks, and would grow grave
Pondering them; shocks less of corporal kind
Than phantom-like, that disarranged his mind[. . . .]
We are thus allowed, even encouraged, by Hardy to take the entire
narrative to come (and, by extension, its ancient sources) as nothing
more than an old man's reverie born of "shocks" to his mind. It is
characteristic of Hardy, who, as an agnostic, might have welcomed such
legends for whittling away at Christian "certainty," to express doubt
even about his doubt. And characteristic as well to undercut even that
doubt by having his narrator note, just a few lines later, that
Panthera's
mind at last being stressed by ails and age [ , ]
Yet his good faith thereon I well could wage.
Panthera's reverie is incited by our narrator's announcement that
he wishes he might leave a son somewhere, even a bastard who would never
know him--
some small tree
As channel for my sap, if not my name[. . . . ]
Panthera sharply rebukes him, pointing out that a son may be "a comfort
or a curse." Then Hardy takes us from his narrator's speech, which
rhymes even when quoting Panthera, into a direct narrative quotation from
the older man, written in blank verse.
Panthera recalls a day when, as part of his tedious duties in
pacified Judea, he and his soldiers supervised a multiple crucifixion.
It was, he says, nothing out of the ordinary and
would have slid
Clean from my memory at its squalid close
But for an incident that followed[. . . .]
He noticed that a woman, weeping nearby, the mother of one of those
executed, looked familiar. Then he realized why.
He tells of a time, some thirty years prior to this recollection,
when he and a company of men passing through Palestine encamped for a
while in Galilee so that several ailing soldiers could convalesce. He
was young and "readily stirred / To quick desire" and soon formed a
liaison with one of the local girls who came to the well for water--
a slim girl, coy
Even as a fawn, meek, and as innocent.
That blandly "poetic" description is followed by a detail lovely in its
specificity, whether historically accurate or not--
the string of silver coins
That hung down by her banded beautiful hair,
Symboled in full immaculate modesty.
He tells how he responded to that modesty--
to her sweet allure,
Who had no arts, but what out-arted all,
The tremulous tender charm of trustfulness.
We met, and met, and under the winking stars
That passed which peoples earth--a marriage, yea,
To the pure eye of her simplicity.
Soon, of course, his ailing men were well again, and the company left,
Panthera telling his "wife" bluntly if sincerely that they will never
meet again.
Now he recalls how that vow was broken, though he only saw, and
did not speak to her, at the crucifixion. In the days following, though,
he had inquiries made, and learned that the mother of the crucified one
was indeed married, as a young pregnant woman, to an old man who pitied
her. And thus Panthera is convinced that the malefactor, who "Had
wakened sedition long among the Jews", was his son. His conclusion, and
his warning to our narrator, is that
At this point the narrator resumes the telling, emphasizing that
Panthera may have been wrong to identify the criminal as his son, and
that his tale may have been "fantasy." He concludes by telling his
listener that the later diffidence of the emperors ended the chance for
brilliant careers for such men as Panthera and that Panthera himself died
"untroublously, / An exit rare for ardent soldiers such as he."
Though narrative force alone cannot make a first-rate narrative
poem, "Panthera" exists first as a compelling story, however one may feel
about its source material. Hardy's clever Chinese box structure keeps
shifting the chronological focus, step by step distancing the central
event of the poem--Panthera's idyll with the unnamed Mary--from the
reader. One effect of this distancing is the deromanticization of the
romance, not simply by removing it to the glowing years of youth, but
also by containing it within a sharply unromantic larger story, that is,
the apparently wasteful deaths of both Panthera and his son. Another
effect is to emphasize the doubt concerning the tale--or rather
Panthera's interpretation of events--that the narrator reveals at the
outset. More to the point, in considering the narrative as narrative,
Hardy's architecture keeps the reader hooked to the tale, and furthermore
centers that tale, generally as grim as Hardy's tales are reputed to be,
in something utterly not grim, something very small and human and
particular, the short-lived relationship of two young people whom
cultural animosities could never have allowed to be "wed" in any
conventional sense.
But despite the sophistication and vigor of Hardy's narration,
what makes "Panthera" an exemplary narrative poem, instead of a short
story or the skeleton of a novel, is the skill of Hardy's verse and his
clear understanding of the distinctions between verse and prose. The
subtlety of the rhyme, when the narrator himself is speaking, not only
keeps the reader's primary attention focused on the message rather than
the medium, but also reminds the reader, even if indirectly, that this
tale is, after all, a poem, a piece of craft, and not to be confused with
"serious" Biblical or historical criticism. Moreover, the rhythm--so
much more musical than typical free verse--reinforces the pull of the
narrative line, drawing the reader perpetually in.
When Hardy shifts to blank verse with Panthera's own
recollection, he also shifts the manner in which he approaches the ends
of lines, and is much more likely not to use enjambment as a device,
preferring to allow the reader's almost natural tendency to pause at a
line's end to indicate a break between or within phrases or clauses, thus
simplifying the reader's way through the complex sentences which mirror
the complexity of Panthera's thought.
One must look long and far to find equally adept poetry dealing
with such potentially confusing or controversial material. Not only do
most contemporary poets lack the Biblical knowledge to structure a truly
thoughtful poem on any Biblical theme, but few seem capable of taking
such an esoteric legend as that of Panthera and rendering it sensible to
the reader without prosily explicating the hell out of it. The truest
companions of "Panthera," both in quality and in depth of treatment, are
probably the "Christian" poems of David Jones collected in "The Sleeping
Lord and Other Fragments" (London, 1974) and Ezra Pound's "Ballad of the
Goodly Fere," also published, oddly enough, in 1909. And it is certainly
worth noting that Pound, 45 years Hardy's junior and soon to become the
apostle of modernism, wrote a more archaic and far more self-consciously
"arty" poem.
|
