With gestures toward a rural dialect, the poem mocks the tragedy of a fallen woman, a ‘ruined maid,’ in the city.
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The Poem of the Day feature here in The New York Sun has run four poems by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) over the past year or so, making him one of our most featured poets. His poetic corpus is so large, and so consistent, that there always seems to be another Hardy poem that catches the editorial eye.
But it’s true that his poems tend to run a little grim — as does his fiction. What readers remember of his novels is the darkness of “Jude the Obscure,” “Far from the Madding Crowd,“ “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” and “Tess of the d’Urbervilles.”
He did write some lighter fiction. There’s “The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters” in 1876, for example, and (much better, perhaps his most enjoyable book) the small romance “Under the Greenwood Tree” in 1872. Hardy wrote some comic poetry, as well. For his birthday this month — June 2, 1840 — here’s “The Ruined Maid,” one of the lighter poems we offer on Wednesdays.
The poem is in six quatrains of tetrameter, three-syllable feet in four-foot lines rhymed in pairs, with a repeated rhyme long-e rhyme in the last couplet of each stanza. A hyphen emphasizes the comically forced stress of the last syllable of such words as “prosperi-ty” and “melancho-ly.” With gestures toward a rural dialect, the poem mocks the tragedy of a fallen woman, a ruined maid, in the city: “’And now you’ve gay bracelets and bright feathers three!’ — / ‘Yes: that’s how we dress when we’re ruined,’ said she.”
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