‘Memory and Writing’ in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas Anonymous College

'In my memory / Again and again I see it strangely dark / And vacant of a life but just withdrawn.’

Edward Thomas’s The Chalk Pit suggests a number of ways of considering the correlation between memory and writing. The line is at once visually stimulating and ‘strangely dark.’ It communicates an emptiness or absence of physical activity yet, at the same time, Thomas makes it clear that this vacancy is recent and that movement has ‘just withdrawn’. The poem is concerned with temporality and the impossible act of revisiting a precise moment in any way other than through the ‘dark’ reconstruction of memory. This symbiosis between physical experience and what the poet is able to ‘see…strangely’ through recollection equally dominates the later poetry of Thomas Hardy. Here, Hardy’s painful awareness of the progression of time characterises his poems with remorse, shaping a strangeness in his writing whereby the ‘shifting shadows’ of the imagination are more connected to reality than the points from which they stem.

In the first stanza of Edward Thomas’ Adlestrop the poet establishes a relationship between recollection and writing that is upheld throughout the poem. His language is precise, anchoring the verse to an isolated moment....