"Ahead of His Time" Is a Synonym for "Unpopular"

Thomas Hardy is much better known for his novels like "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and "The Native Returns." Those books are fine, but for my money I'll take his poetry. 


His active period straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and he's a really good example of how things started to get shaken up in Victorian England. Hardy's forms, rhymes, dialect and so forth all have the very stately, proper sense to them that we expect from the Lake Poets through the pre-WWI era. It's all regular, sedate, almost magisterial.


But Hardy was very dark, dismal really. He had a negative sense of things that plays really well in today's literary mags but was pretty unfashionable at the time. In fact, he gave up poetry because nobody would give him a good review. As with all things literary, once he was dead he'd get the last laugh.


A couple of notes on the poem, if your Victorian properspeak is rusty: "wight" is a colloquialism for "man" or "gentleman caller", and the title is an allusion to the Book of Jeremiah describing war and pestilence and nations breaking apart. (In this case, the specter of World War I.)

In Time of "The Breaking Of Nations"

Thomas Hardy

          1
 Only a man harrowing clods
         In a slow silent walk
 With an old horse that stumbles and nods
         Half asleep as they stalk.


          2
 Only thin smoke without flame
         From the heaps of couch-grass;
 Yet this will go onward the same
         Though Dynasties pass.


          3
 Yonder a maid and her wight
         Come whispering by:
 War's annals will cloud into night
         Ere their story die.