Daniel Brain

How do Hardy and Brittain present loss in  A Wife in London and Perhaps?

Thomas Hardy's A Wife in London and Vera Brittain's Perhaps each depict the loss of a wife or fiancé with contrasting style and message, but similar tone - as befits the purpose of each poet. Hardy's poem focuses on an unnamed subject – a widow who might represent any of the bereaved during the Boer War, thus emphasising the suffering felt among wives in general, whose husbands did not return from war. Conversely, Brittain writes about her own loss during the First World War:  her displayed emotions are thus far more personal and arguably more poignant in comparison.

Hardy begins his poem by creating a sullen atmosphere: the “waning taper” of the street lamp immediately instils an appropriately dark mood, the dying light perhaps symbolic of lives lost at war, fading and guttering before finally coming to an end. The lamp itself “glimmers cold” - a polar opposite to a light's usual association with clarity and warmth. The immediate message of the poem is one of negativity and obscurity – and even with no knowledge of Hardy's message, his intention is clearly to present an unfavourable scenario.

Having created this wholly melancholy mood, Hardy introduces the tragedy that is the subject of the poem: the news of the husband's death is delivered quickly to the nameless wife – the messenger's knock “cracks smartly” and she is bestowed with “flashed news”. The presentation of this seems to mirror the sharp, bitter reality of death during war; a quick and unrelenting reality, “shaped so shortly” by unforeseen events. The letter is terse – and despite its euphemistic tone, its message is succinct and without compassion: “He has fallen”. Again, perhaps echoing the reality of war, the news of his death is slow to sink in: for the widowed recipient, its significance “dazes to understand”, as if she is not fully aware of its meaning.

Hardy again uses nature to depict the mood of his poem's subject: the fog has descended further; it “hangs thicker”, the poet's language seeming to suggest that it pre-empts the implied grief of the widow. Again, a letter is brought, this time from the husband himself – by the “firelight flicker”, an image which pervades this poem and seems to represent the flimsiness of life, she reads of his “hoped return”. The timing of this second letter unsubtly embellishes the tragedy faced by the wife: Hardy implies that War is a destroyer of  hope such as is depicted in idyllic love-letters, the “summer weather” and “new love” already superseded by the soldier's death. The positivity expressed by the husband, his letter “penned in highest feather”, serves only as an ironic reminder that ultimately, war does not allow for any such hope.

Brittain's poem begins and ends in self-pity – however it is through her lament that we gain an infinitely more personal perspective of the loss felt by women through war. While in the former poem nature was used to depict of the wife's grief, and also as a means of representing the general dispirited atmosphere, in Perhaps it is the poet's loss which disconnects her from the natural world: she can no longer can experience the joys of “golden meadows” nor the “sunny hours of Spring”, without her loved one.

The poet's loss is presented as hugely significant to her – so much so that her whole reality is shrouded; “Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,” she states, “and I shall see that still the skies are blue”. Her mourning has altered her perspective of the world, and left her bitter to anything positive – as with her fiancé, the gratifying parts of her life have been cruelly removed, and she is left feeling that she lives “in vain”. It is not just her loss which affects her, but its associations – she “shrinks in pain” at the connotations of Christmas time, when her lover died - her language even echoing physical discomfort and suffering, which perhaps is intended to mirror that of the soldiers still on the front line.

The memory of her fiancé's death is constantly pressing in upon Brittain throughout this poem; in each stanza she repeats the fact to herself, “you have passed away”, “you are not there”, emphasising her difficulty in forgetting, and re-affirming her loss.  Interestingly, her tragedy is recurringly mentioned on the final line of each verse: she appears to begin to hope for a brighter future, always using nature as a means of depicting it, before returning to the weighing factor preventing her from embracing such a reality. When death is referred to, much like in the former poem, it is only through euphemisms, suggesting that the poet has not yet fully come to terms with her loss.

Like in Hardy's poem, Perhaps presents nature in a very sensory manner, the colour in the depicted “crimson roses” and the “shimmer” of summer comparable to the “tawny vapour” in A Wife in London. While both sets of visual imagery are used to emphasise loss, each poet does so in an entirely contrasting manner. In the former poem, the imagery represents the depression and solitude of the subject, while in Brittain's poem it is mostly positive, a reality to strive for amidst the poet's mourning, used as a means of highlighting her detachment from such pleasant ideals. Both poems speculate on what could have been – the former with bitter irony, the latter with retrospective melancholy  – a technique which in both cases embellishes the depicted loss.

Each of these poems is moving in different ways: Hardy's for the realisation that so many women have been left without husbands so suddenly and without warning, Brittain's for the poignancy of personal loss, and its impact on the poet's everyday life. The latter poem, despite being arguably self-centred in that it focuses only on the feelings of loss felt by the poet, is nevertheless effective in a a way the former can not be, in that it exists as the overflow of emotion from an actual victim – rather than the speculation of a mere observer. Each poem, however, gives a dysphoric insight into the nature of bereavement through war – and neither takes the subject lightly or without emotion.