Compare the ways in which Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13 and Andrea Levy’s Small Island present
an attachment to place.
In Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13 and Levy’s Small Island, an attachment to place is explored in
depth, considering the connections between physical places and the larger issues of identity, time and
hope. The interest in the exploration of the significance of place and people’s relationships to places
was exemplified by the context of Hardy’s remorse in the wake of his wife Emma’s death in 1912,
and Levy’s multicultural identity as a British author with Caribbean heritage, brought up by parents
of the Windrush generation. The attachment to place is a prominent motif within both works.
Both Hardy and Levy recognise the emotions associated with an attachment to place often
resemble a sense of longing. Whilst in Poems of 1912-13, this yearning is for a reprise of the past, in
Small Island, the characters long for a better future. In I Found Her Out There, Hardy ruminates on
the location of his and Emma’s first meeting, the Cornish coast “where the ocean breaks”. The
speaker imagines that while her body is held “in a noiseless nest” in Stinsford churchyard where
Emma is buried, her “shade, maybe // Will creep underground” back to Boscastle. Here, his
attachment to a memorable place of their courtship conveys Hardy’s yearning for the past and to
relive the early days of their courtship. The abrupt shift in places from “I found her out there” to “I
brought her here // And have laid her to rest” – as though her life with Hardy is forgotten, or did not
occur – may also be a manifestation of Hardy’s desire to expunge the estrangement which
characterised the latter years of their marriage, and return to the past to mend their relationship.
Mallett states that Hardy told Florence Henniker that he intended to publish Poems of 1912-13 as
“the only amends he could make for his inconsiderate treatment of Emma” 1 Where the Picnic Was
also explores the return to a place of significance. The picnic Hardy might have recalled was
presumably the one in 1912 when Hardy and Emma entertained fellow poets Yeats and Newbolt. In
the third stanza, the speaker confesses that he is “here // Just as last year”, revealing that this isn’t the
first time that the speaker has revisited this place alone. The speaker personifies the sea as breathing
out “brine” from the shoreline (“its strange straight line”) inland. This use of sensory language
emphasises that the place in a physical sense is unchanged; to the eyes, the sea looks much the same
as it did before and the sea air smells and tastes as salty as it ever did. However, emotionally the
polar opposite is true. To the speaker, his attachment to this place has transformed from symbolising
1
Mallett, P. (2004). “YOU WERE SHE”: HARDY, EMMA, AND THE “POEMS OF 1912-13.” The Thomas Hardy
Journal, 20(3), 54–75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45274749
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, jubilance to a yearning for the past. Much like Hardy, Levy also uses an attachment to place to
portray a sense of longing in Small Island. However, rather than a longing to relive the past, Levy’s
characters yearn for a better future. Queenie’s disgust with her parents’ butchery drove her to move
to London in search of a life away from the farm which “smelt acrid like vinegar made from rotting
flesh”. Gilbert is also motivated to migrate to “the Mother Country” where opportunities are “ripe”.
The lexical choice of “ripe” which belongs in the semantic field of fruits carries of sense of
foreboding of Gilbert’s disappointment upon his arrival to England, for even as he describes the
perceived myriad of opportunities in Britain, it is done through comparison to “fruit on Jamaican
trees”, indicating the chasm between the two cultures which will be the source of Gilbert’s alienation
by Britons. The lack of job opportunities Gilbert faces in London also renders the adjective ironic,
for he later says “for a Jamaican man a job as a driver was great luck – if only luck England-style”.
Levy stated that when her father boarded the Empire Windrush together with 1,027 immigrants from
various Caribbean nations, “he believed he was travelling to the centre of his country”. 2 However,
once they arrived, the hopeful immigrants faced a largely hostile British populace and discrimination
in almost every aspect of life, from jobs and housing to church memberships and entry into pubs.
Hardy and Levy highlight the connection between attachment to place and a sense of longing, with
physical places representing intangible concepts such as remorse and hope.
The relationship between an attachment to place and the idealisation and romanticisation of
said place is regularly explored by Hardy and Levy, with both often presenting the reality of places as
mixed with imagination despite the starkly different forms of Poems of 1912-13 as a collection of
Hardy’s poetry and Small Island as a novel. Hardy most often uses romantic imagery (such as using
the "Lyonnesse" of his poetry and fiction as the setting) to present the relationship between
attachment to place and imagination. In contrast, Levy’s exploration of this relationship is done
primarily through the expectation and subsequent disappointment experienced by her characters. In A
Dream Or No, the romanticisation of place is demonstrated by the speaker’s questioning of the very
reality of the past. “Why go to Saint-Juliot? What’s Juliot to me? … Yes. I have had dreams of that
place…Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist?”, the incessant rhetorical questions causing
even the reader to doubt the reality of Saint-Juliot, or if instead it was a figment of Hardy’s
imagination. Reading Emma’s Some Recollections after her death, in which she had evocatively
described “a lovely Monday evening” in March 1870 when she met the young architect from Dorset
2
O’Reilly, S. (2020). “How come England did not know me?” Recording Andrea Levy for Authors’ Lives
https://www.bl.uk/windrush/articles/recording-andrea-levy-for-authors-lives
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