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Auction archive: Lot number 197•

AUTOGRAPH REVISED MANUSCRIPT, IN EFFECT

Estimate
£12,000 - £16,000
ca. US$18,373 - US$24,498
Price realised:
n. a.
Auction archive: Lot number 197•

AUTOGRAPH REVISED MANUSCRIPT, IN EFFECT

Estimate
£12,000 - £16,000
ca. US$18,373 - US$24,498
Price realised:
n. a.
Beschreibung:

AUTOGRAPH REVISED MANUSCRIPT, IN EFFECT A DRAFT, OF HIS FINE ELEGIAC POEM 'A SINGER ASLEEP (A. C. S. 1837-1909)', title altered from 'A South-Coast Nocturn', signed by Hardy beneath the title ('Thomas Hardy'), 52 lines, in one eight-line and eight five-line stanzas, with substantive autograph revisions to ten lines preserving reconsidered text, 2 pages, quarto, sewn into a paper wrapper inscribed with the title and with a note signed by St. J Hornby 'Given to me by Mrs Thomas Hardy August, 1937, dated at the end, cloth box, Bonchurch, 1910 In this fair niche above the slumbering sea, The sentrys up & down, all night, all day, From cove to promontory, from ness to bay, The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be Pillowed eternally. -- It was as though a garland of red roses Had fallen about the hood of a smug nun... I still can hear the brabble & the roar At those thy tunes, O still one, now passed through That fitful fire of tongues then entered new! Their power is spent like spindrift on the shore; Thine swells yet more and more. So here, beneath the waking constellations, Where the waves peal their everlasting strains, And the dull subterrene reverberations Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains - Him once their peer in sad improvisations, And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes - I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines Upon the capes and chines. Hardy was a tremendous admirer of Swinburne, whose death in April 1909 was a great shock to him. The hypocritical notices in the press 'roused him to an anger reminiscent of his indignation at the reception of Poems and Ballads more than thirty years earlier.' (Millgate). Hardy did not attend the funeral but in March 1910 he and Florence Dugdale, later the second Mrs Hardy, went to the Isle of Wight to visit Swinburne's grave. In Later Years, she described the visit: 'that windy March day had a poetry of its own, how primroses clustered in the hedges, and noisy rooks wheeled in the air over the little churchyard. Hardy gathered a sprig of ivy and laid it on the grave of that brother-poet of whom he never spoke save in words of admiration and affection.' The poem was 'half finished' by 13 March 1910 and was published in the English Review in April 1910. It was collected in Satires of Circumstance, 1914. It was entirely appropriate that the sea was so much a theme in this poem: it was an obsession of Swinburne's, about which he wrote often. 'Chines' was a word used by Swinburne. As a child 'he could have gone blindfold over miles of beach' where he 'played like a sea-bird' (Henderson, who also states that Hardy wrote 'A Singer Asleep' beside Swinburne's grave). Hardy's admiration for Swinburne dated from his years in London in the 1860s when he was working as a draughtsman for the architect Arthur William Blomfield He used to walk through crowded London streets from lodgings near Hyde Park reading the early poems of Swinburne 'to my imminent risk of being knocked down' (Purdy). He would later recall this period 'as one of extraordinary excitement in which the intoxication of Swinburne's verse merged with a growing sense of his own capacities as a poet.' (Millgate). The third and fourth stanzas of 'A Singer Asleep' recall those heady days: O that far morning of a summer day, When, down a terraced street whose pavement lay Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes, I walked & read with a quick glad surprise New words, in a classic guise: The passionate pages of his earlier years, Fraught with hot signs, sad laughters, kisses, tears... When Swinburne and Hardy met, they greeted each other as kindred spirits. 'We laughed & condoled with each other on having been the two most abused of living writers - he for "Poems & Ballads" & I for "Jude the Obscure"'. A RARE DRAFT OF A POEM BY HARDY, AND THE ONLY ONE SURVIVING FOR THIS POEM. This is the kind of poetical manuscript that Hardy habitually destroyed as soon as he had made a copy for the printer, as the present o

Auction archive: Lot number 197•
Auction:
Datum:
10 Apr 2013
Auction house:
Bonhams London
London, New Bond Street 101 New Bond Street London W1S 1SR Tel: +44 20 7447 7447 Fax : +44 207 447 7401 info@bonhams.com
Beschreibung:

AUTOGRAPH REVISED MANUSCRIPT, IN EFFECT A DRAFT, OF HIS FINE ELEGIAC POEM 'A SINGER ASLEEP (A. C. S. 1837-1909)', title altered from 'A South-Coast Nocturn', signed by Hardy beneath the title ('Thomas Hardy'), 52 lines, in one eight-line and eight five-line stanzas, with substantive autograph revisions to ten lines preserving reconsidered text, 2 pages, quarto, sewn into a paper wrapper inscribed with the title and with a note signed by St. J Hornby 'Given to me by Mrs Thomas Hardy August, 1937, dated at the end, cloth box, Bonchurch, 1910 In this fair niche above the slumbering sea, The sentrys up & down, all night, all day, From cove to promontory, from ness to bay, The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be Pillowed eternally. -- It was as though a garland of red roses Had fallen about the hood of a smug nun... I still can hear the brabble & the roar At those thy tunes, O still one, now passed through That fitful fire of tongues then entered new! Their power is spent like spindrift on the shore; Thine swells yet more and more. So here, beneath the waking constellations, Where the waves peal their everlasting strains, And the dull subterrene reverberations Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains - Him once their peer in sad improvisations, And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes - I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines Upon the capes and chines. Hardy was a tremendous admirer of Swinburne, whose death in April 1909 was a great shock to him. The hypocritical notices in the press 'roused him to an anger reminiscent of his indignation at the reception of Poems and Ballads more than thirty years earlier.' (Millgate). Hardy did not attend the funeral but in March 1910 he and Florence Dugdale, later the second Mrs Hardy, went to the Isle of Wight to visit Swinburne's grave. In Later Years, she described the visit: 'that windy March day had a poetry of its own, how primroses clustered in the hedges, and noisy rooks wheeled in the air over the little churchyard. Hardy gathered a sprig of ivy and laid it on the grave of that brother-poet of whom he never spoke save in words of admiration and affection.' The poem was 'half finished' by 13 March 1910 and was published in the English Review in April 1910. It was collected in Satires of Circumstance, 1914. It was entirely appropriate that the sea was so much a theme in this poem: it was an obsession of Swinburne's, about which he wrote often. 'Chines' was a word used by Swinburne. As a child 'he could have gone blindfold over miles of beach' where he 'played like a sea-bird' (Henderson, who also states that Hardy wrote 'A Singer Asleep' beside Swinburne's grave). Hardy's admiration for Swinburne dated from his years in London in the 1860s when he was working as a draughtsman for the architect Arthur William Blomfield He used to walk through crowded London streets from lodgings near Hyde Park reading the early poems of Swinburne 'to my imminent risk of being knocked down' (Purdy). He would later recall this period 'as one of extraordinary excitement in which the intoxication of Swinburne's verse merged with a growing sense of his own capacities as a poet.' (Millgate). The third and fourth stanzas of 'A Singer Asleep' recall those heady days: O that far morning of a summer day, When, down a terraced street whose pavement lay Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes, I walked & read with a quick glad surprise New words, in a classic guise: The passionate pages of his earlier years, Fraught with hot signs, sad laughters, kisses, tears... When Swinburne and Hardy met, they greeted each other as kindred spirits. 'We laughed & condoled with each other on having been the two most abused of living writers - he for "Poems & Ballads" & I for "Jude the Obscure"'. A RARE DRAFT OF A POEM BY HARDY, AND THE ONLY ONE SURVIVING FOR THIS POEM. This is the kind of poetical manuscript that Hardy habitually destroyed as soon as he had made a copy for the printer, as the present o

Auction archive: Lot number 197•
Auction:
Datum:
10 Apr 2013
Auction house:
Bonhams London
London, New Bond Street 101 New Bond Street London W1S 1SR Tel: +44 20 7447 7447 Fax : +44 207 447 7401 info@bonhams.com
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