"She is shut, she is shut From the cheer of them, dead To all done and said In her yew-arched bed." - Thomas Hardy, Lament (1898) In celebration of #WorldPoetryDay, I am reading Thomas Hardy's A Trampwoman's Tragedy, which I have not expected to be a book filled with the great man's poetry. This pocket-sized paperback has piqued my curiosity and found myself reading a little more about his background since I know him to be more famous for his novels, and learned that poetry was Thomas Hardy's first and last love. He wrote poems for sixty years - before his famous novels and after he stopped writing them. His greatness in poetry was not properly recognized long after his death in 1928. Altogether he wrote nearly 1000 poems, many of which are now rated more highly than even his best prose fiction.
