HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H01065 7/22/01 "THE LEVELLED CHURCH YARD QUESTION" ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 10:00:50 -0700 From: Betty Cortus Subject: Levelled Churchyard Question Dear List Members, Sherwin Hall, who has had some technical difficulty joining the list himself, has asked me to forward the following question. You may write to him directly, or to the list, and I will forward your responses to him. Many Thanks, Bettty Cortus Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 10:40:03 -0400 From: Sherwin Hall <100101.3577@compuserve.com> Subject: Query for Hardy Forum Sender: Sherwin Hall <100101.3577@compuserve.com> To: Betty and/or John Cortus MIME-Version: 1.0 Status: Which Levelled Churchyard? As part of the OUP project to publish the New Dictionary of National Biography I was contracted to revise the entry on William Youatt, a veterinarian who died in London in 1847 and was buried in St Pancras churchyard. On the Information Sheet that accompanies the revised text I made a note that a) this was the churchyard that was subseqently disturbed when the Midland Railway Company was building a new line into London, St Pancras station, and b) that Thomas Hardy had been employed in about 1864 in removing graves and levelling the site and c) that this became the subject of his poem called 'The Levelled Churchyard'. I submitted my text and notes to the OUP in 1995. Last year I was discussing the subject of the poem with a friend who is knowledgeable on Hardy matters and she advised me that the poem was not a reference to St Pancras but to the churchyard of Wimborne Minster where, I gather, Hardy was also responsible for tidying-up a graveyard. My question to the Forum is which churchyard was the subject of the poem? According to the 'Variorum Edition of the Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy', Macmillan 1979, the manuscript of the poem has a subtitle 'W[imborne] Minster' which was apparently subsequently deleted (by Hardy, presumably). Could it be that Hardy wrote the subtitle in error and subsequently deleted it? I read the first line of the poem "O PASSENGER, pray list and catch" at face value to mean that Hardy is addressing the passenger on a Midland train passing the reconstructed graveyard. If that is not the interpretation whom is he addressing? I visited St Pancras graveyard in April this year. It had just had a major restoration and clean-up done. The so-called Hardy Tree was pictured in the Guardian newspaper still standing with the many headstones intertwined with the roots. Sherwin Hall ========== From: brown@jc.edu Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 13:08:22 -0500 Subject: Re: Levelled Churchyard Question > I read the first line of the poem "O PASSENGER, pray list and catch" at face > value to mean that Hardy is addressing the passenger on a Midland train > passing the reconstructed graveyard. If that is not the interpretation whom > is he addressing? Hardy may mean "passenger" in the more generic sense of "passerby." Mark Brown Jamestown College North Dakota, USA ========== Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 14:34:28 -0400 From: jgould@andover.edu (John Gould) Subject: Re: Levelled Churchyard Question Dear Sherwin Hall, I did some research on "The Levelled Churchyard" a few years ago for a conference presentation. Here's what I discovered about the poem's genesis: "The Levelled Churchyard" was written in 1882 while Hardy and Emma were living in Winborne, and it appears to refer specifically to Winborne Minster. The manuscript originally bore a subtitle: "W------- Minster" (CP, 958). Michael Millgate explains that Hardy, while cooperating with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, "offered, in particular, to keep a watchful eye on work being done on Winborne Minster" (Millgate, 235) The germ of the poem -- with the scattered parts of the disinterred bodies -- may have come from an experience twenty years earlier. In The Early Life, Hardy recounts being involved with the overseeing of churchyards that were being cut through by railroad companies. His employer, Arthur Blomfield, described "return[ing] from visiting the site on which all the bodies were said by the [railway] companies to be reinterred; but there appeared to be nothing deposited, the surface of the ground quite level as before" (Hardy, 58). In order to make sure the bodies were actually buried properly, Hardy was asked to check one such job at irregular intervals. One evening, accompanied by Blomfield, he watched as a coffin fell apart. Out dropped a skeleton and two skulls. When years later he met Arthur Blomfield again, "among the latter's first words were: 'Do you remember how we found the man with two heads at St. Pancras?'" (Hardy, 59) I don't read "passenger" as a train passenger, mostly because the poem is nominally set at Winbourn Minster. (Also the train would have to be moving VERY slowly!) He probably means "passerby," with the connotation of a passenger through life confronting the end of the journey. So both of you are right. (The most placating answer!) Best, John Gould ========== From: "Ahmad" Subject: "The Levelled Churchyard" Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 00:51:38 +0300 For identification of the churchyard of the poem and Hardy's probable sources for its details, see J.O. Bailey's commentary in _The Poetry of Thomas Hardy_ , 172-73. Bailey glosses "Passenger" as "any passer-by." Suleiman M. Ahmad Department of English University of Damascus (smahmad@mail.sy) ========== Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 20:01:12 -0400 Subject: Re: The "Passenger" walking through "The Levelled Churchyard" From: "Philip & Andrea Allingham" On Shakespeare's tomb at Stratford-upon-Avon are inscribed monumental lines that begin with the words, "Stay, passenger! Why goest thou by so fast?" One assumes that Hardy is beyond punning on railway "passenger," and is using the expression in the time-honoured sense of "one is who passing by the grave." Thus, J. O. Bailey's gloss is consistent with this tradition of graveyard inscriptions, the irony, of course, being that the "memorial stones" themselves cannot make this plea as is this case in normal English churchyards. The practice of interring the dead in churchyards seems to go back to Shakespeare's time, prior to which the quaint custom of the charnel house helped preserve valuable agricultural land. London's Great Plague of 1666 with its mass burials produced Bunhill Fields as a cemetary for the general population (previously, as unconsecrated ground it was deemed suitable only for dissenters). Philip V. Allingham, Faculty of Education, Lakerhead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. ========== Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 17:35:17 -0700 From: Betty Cortus Subject: Levelled Churchyard F.B Pinion in _A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy_ also glosses passenger as passer-by. He states that the poem was "[w]ritten at Wimborne with references to the Minster and its restoration in 1855-7 Betty Cortus ========== From: "Gary Alderson" Subject: The levelled churchyard Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 07:54:19 +0100 "The practice of interring the dead in churchyards seems to go back to Shakespeare's time, prior to which the quaint custom of the charnel house helped preserve valuable agricultural land. " - the bone crypt at Rothwell in Northamptonshire was closed before Shakespeare's time. It is estimated that it contains about the remains of about 4,000 people in an area 30ftx15ft. Goodness knows what Hardy would have thought of that if he objected to a bit of random jumbling... ========== Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 19:51:15 -0500 From: Bill Morgan Subject: Re: Levelled Churchyard Question Two responses to the "passenger" question: (1) I'm sure I've heard English people speak of those using the pavements (U.S. "sidewalks") as "foot passengers"; (2) the 1913 Webster's dictionary, available on-line, shows both the useage I'm remembering and the now more common one of "rider but not driver in a vehicle." Interestingly, in 1913, the notion of a "foot passenger" was the first definition given: 1. A passer or passer-by; a wayfarer. Shak. 2. A traveler by some established conveyance, as a coach, steamboat, railroad train, etc. Passenger falcon (Zošl.), a migratory hawk. Ainsworth. -- Passenger pigeon (Zošl.), the common wild pigeon of North America (Ectopistes migratorius), so called on account of its extensive migrations. I would venture, therefore, on the basis of my auditory memory of English useage and the evidence of a 1913 dictionary, that Hardy is more likely to have had in mind a "foot passenger" or passer-by--or, what he once signed himself: "a wayfarer." It's a grotesquely funny poem, by the way--"mixed to human jam," indeed! cheers, Bill Morgan ========== Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 11:53:14 -0600 From: Harry Sheski Subject: Re: Levelled Churchyard Question Merely a thought, but I wonder if the grave, which appears to be doing the speaking,is calling the passer-by as if it were the conductor, or carriage, of death. Of course this raises the question whether or not death is a journey, but perhaps one could think of a grave as something that carries one to...death. Then the implication would be that the passer-by would, inevitably, become a future passenger "aboard" the grave. Joan ========== Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 16:29:54 -0400 Subject: Re: The Persona of "The Levelled Churchyard" From: "Philip & Andrea Allingham" The grave itself crying out "All aboard"? I think not. The first person plural "we" of "The Levelled Churchyard" indicates a chorus of the dead, "late-lamented, resting here, / . . . mixed to human jam." Thus, it is not the grave itself which is imploring the passerby to "list and catch / Our sighs." Nor do I have any sense of the final "All abord!" being sounded, although the final trumpet (humorously rhyming with "strumpet") is ironically anticipated. ========== Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 09:41:28 -0700 From: Betty Cortus Subject: Levelled Churchyard Question Dear All, I received the following message from Sherwin Hall this morning. Many thanks to all who responded to his question about "The Levelled Churchyard." Betty Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 05:33:16 -0400 From: Sherwin Hall <100101.3577@compuserve.com> Subject: More Levelled Grave Sender: Sherwin Hall <100101.3577@compuserve.com> To: Betty and/or John Cortus MIME-Version: 1.0 Status: Dear Betty Thank you very much for your help in posting my query on the Hardy Forum and copying the responses to me. It seems that everybody accepts that the graveyard was that at Wimborne and that the passenger was an allusion to the person passing through this life. Nobody said anything about the deletion in the manuscript of the "W__Minster", preumably by Hardy, and why he did it. I am glad that I was able to delete the reference to the poem in my DNB article before it was published. That would have been an embarrassing error. Many thanks, again, for your kind help. Sherwin ==========