I’m going to keep up with Mild Monday for the time being. Although some just skip it, others find it really interesting. And it’s both fun and relatively easy to do.

Today’s poem is by Thomas Hardy. I first encountered him as an author when we had to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles in my senior year of high school. I never actually finished reading it at the time, since I was slipping into a not-very-functional level of depression, but a few years later, I wondered how the story ended and checked it out of the library.

If it hadn’t been a library book, I would have thrown it across the room at the end!

I found it very ironic that an author who supposedly had a low opinion of Victorian conventionality wrote an ending that so completely embraced that conventionality. Perhaps he felt it necessary to do so in order to get it published at all.

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Dorset, and I was pleased to discover that he (like me) was a Gemini. Interestingly, his father was a stonemason, which put Hardy in a social class that did not normally write books. But his mother was well-read and taught him a great deal before he went to school. In an attempt to help him move up a little in the world, he was apprenticed to an architect and finally was able to study for a while at King’s College in London, where he joined an architectural firm. But he was constantly aware of his lower social class, and eventually went back to the countryside of his childhood, where he turned to writing as a profession.

Although he became famous as a novelist, which largely superseded any questions of social class, any remaining anxieties over his social position could only have been worsened by his marriage. He fell in love with a lawyer’s daughter, Emma Gifford, while in Plymouth on an architectural assignment when he was 30. Possibly due to her family’s straitened financial circumstances, she ended up marrying Hardy, but she always felt that she had married ‘beneath her,’ and she never let anyone forget it. Until her death in 1912, they continued to live in the same house together—a house in Dorchester that he himself had designed—but they became almost completely estranged after the publication of Jude the Obscure (his last novel).

It was also after the furor caused by Jude the Obscure—a novel deemed so offensively controversial that the Bishop of Wakefield is reputed to have burnt his copy—that Hardy turned almost exclusively to writing poetry. As a reader, it is my opinion that this was an excellent decision, since I find his poetry much better than his prose. He published eight volumes of poetry before his death in 1928.

Today’s poem, “The Ruined Maid,” is one of my favorites of his. In it, Hardy unleashes the full force of irony and sarcasm against Victorian social strictures. The title character is a country girl, Amelia, who has run away to London and succeeded (as far too many such girls did not) in improving her apparent social class and living circumstances by becoming some rich man’s mistress. In the parlance of the times, she is ‘ruined’ as a result of having sex outside of marriage. But when she encounters a girl who knew her ‘back when’ in the country, she becomes an object of envy. Becoming ‘ruined’—she boasts—has its benefits.

The Ruined Maid

“O ’Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town1?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?” —
“O didn’t you know I’d been ruined?” said she.

— “You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,
Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks2;
And now you’ve gay bracelets and bright feathers three!” —
“Yes: that’s how we dress when we’re ruined,” said she.

— “At home in the barton3 you said ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’
And ‘thik oon,’ and ‘theäs oon,’ and ‘t’other’; but now
Your talking quite fits ’ee for high compa-ny!” —
“Some polish is gained with one’s ruin,” said she.

— “Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I’m bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!” —
“We never do work when we’re ruined,” said she.

— “You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,
And you’d sigh, and you’d sock4; but at present you seem
To know not of megrims5 or melancho-ly!” —
“True. One’s pretty lively when ruined,” said she.

— “I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!” —
“My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined,” said she.

Thoughts?

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