Thomas Hardy and the Goldfinch

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The celebrated pet cemetery at Max Gate is an unequivocal declaration of Thomas Hardy’s love of animals and his epitaph for his beloved, if unruly, wire-haired terrier Wessex is a testament to his rarely heralded mastery of brevity. It says, simply: ‘Faithful. Unflinching.’ It’s little surprise to find Hardy was a member of the RSPCA, indeed, he wrote a poem to mark the organisation’s centenary in January 1924 and made a bequest to it in his will. He was an ardent anti-vivisectionist, his wife Emma hosted anti-vivisection meetings at Max Gate and in 1909 he wrote: ‘the practice of vivisection, which might have been defended while the belief ruled that men and animals are essentially different, has been left without any logical argument in its favour.’ He also protested against the blinding of caged birds for sport and supported a campaign by veterans of World War 1 to have the practice outlawed, which it was in 1920. Hardy had been sickened by the Flemish practice of Vinkensport in which finches are made to compete for the highest number of birdcalls in an hour. In the belief that birds sang more without visual distraction, the finches were routinely blinded with hot needles before competing*. He wrote about it in his melancholy poem The Blinded Bird, published in Moments of Vision, a collection of works written in 1912 and 1913 that also includes The Caged Goldfinch in which he contemplates the fate of a goldfinch abandoned in its tiny cage on a recent grave. The goldfinch has been seen as a symbol of good fortune and loaded with allegorical meaning since the Middle Ages, frequently appearing in religious paintings – including The Goldfinch, the 1654 painting by Carel Fabritius that inspired Donna Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The red flash of the goldfinch was a sign to medieval Christians that, like the robin, it had acquired blood-coloured feathers at the crucifixion of Christ trying to remove seeds from the thistles in the crown of thorns. In medieval times thistles were thought to combat the plague and gold was considered a colour that could cure sickness. Thus, the goldfinch was believed to be a symbol of endurance, an allegory of the salvation Christ would bring through his sacrifice.

None of which was lost on Thomas Hardy whose finch poems recall the earlier appearance of a caged goldfinch in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) when, in an act of contrition, Henchard visits his stepdaughter Elizabeth-Jane on her wedding day with the gift of a goldfinch in a cage as penitence for his previous bad behaviour. When she dismisses him, the bird is left behind and found days later starved to death, prompting Elizabeth-Jane to go in search of her stepfather to forgive him. Too late, she finds he has suffered the same fate as the bird, starved to death in a metaphorical cage of his own past actions. In his assessment of The Blinded Bird Mark, Richardson, Associate Professor of English at Doshisha University, writes: ‘It is nigh impossible to read this without feeling in it an intimation not simply that God might ‘consent’ to indignities such as these … but that there is no God at all: ‘divinity’ and ‘charity,’ such as they are, are here, on Earth, with us – indeed, in a finch – or they are nowhere. The Blinded Bird puts everyone to shame.’ What motivated Hardy’s pre-occupation with animal welfare in his later years has long divided opinion among students of his work. Some say it was born of his generally gloomy view that evolution serves only to make suffering universal for both man and beast; whereas others attribute a note of hopefulness in his concerns, that mankind is ultimately able to elect to take a more ethical view of the animal world. ‘What are my books but one plea against ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ – to woman – and to the lower animals?’ Hardy told writer and critic William Archer in Real Conversations (1904, W Heinemann). The last stanza of The Blinded Bird revises the Biblical text from St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and many scholars point to the poem as further evidence of Hardy’s growing agnosticism. Where St Paul finds godliness in mankind’s capacity for charity Hardy finds it in the bird in the cage, the victim of such ungodly cruelty and another indictment of the way we treat the natural world. Nature in all its forms was a constant in Hardy’s writing throughout his career, but he had a particular affinity with animals. In his autobiography he relates how a snake was found curled up beside him in his cradle and recalls crawling into a sheep-pen as a child in order to imagine how it felt to be a sheep. As an old man he pities the payload of the cattle trucks that drove past Max Gate. In Afterwards, the grand finale of Moments of Vision, Hardy considers his own demise and hints heavily at how he would like to be remembered. Hoping that after he ‘had been stilled at last’ people would remember how he enjoyed seeing the new green leaves of Spring, or a hawk perched in the thorns, or watching a hedgehog cross the lawn and say: ‘He was a man who used to notice such things.’ ◗

© Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons * Vinkensport is considered part of traditional Flemish culture and survives to this day although the birds are now kept in small wooden boxes to limit their vision.

The PoemsThe Blinded Bird So zestfully canst thou sing? And all this indignity, With God’s consent, on thee! Blinded ere yet a-wing By the red-hot needle thou, I stand and wonder how So zestfully thou canst sing!   Resenting not such wrong, Thy grievous pain forgot, Eternal dark thy lot, Groping thy whole life long; After that stab of fire; Enjailed in pitiless wire; Resenting not such wrong!   Who hath charity? This bird. Who suffereth long and is kind, Is not provoked, though blind And alive ensepulchred? Who hopeth, endureth all things? Who thinketh no evil, but sings? Who is divine? This bird.         The Caged Goldfinch Within a churchyard, on a recent grave, I saw a little cage That jailed a goldfinch. All was silence save Its hops from stage to stage.   There was inquiry in its wistful eye, And once it tried to sing; Of him or her who placed it there, and why, No one knew anything.

CompassionAn odeIn celebration of the centenary of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals   By Thomas Hardy I. Backward among the dusky years A lonesome lamp is seen arise, Lit by a few fain pioneers Before incredulous eyes. We read the legend that it lights: “What should throughout this land of historied rights Mild creatures, despot-doomed, bewildered, plead Their often hunger, thirst, pangs, prisonment, In deep dumb gaze more eloquent Than tongues of widest heed?” II. What was faint-written, read in a breath In that year – ten-times-ten away – A larger clearer conscience saith More sturdily to-day. But still those innocents are thralls To throbless hearts, near, far, that hear no calls Of honour towards their too-dependent frail; And from Columbia Cape to Ind we see How helplessness breeds tyranny In power above assail. III. Cries still are heard in secret nooks, Till hushed with gag or slit or thud; And hideous dens whereon none looks Are blotched with needless blood. But here, in battlings, patient, slow, Much has been won – more, maybe than we know – And on we labour stressful. “Ailinon!” A mighty voice calls: “Bit may the good prevail!” And “Blessed are the merciful!” Calls yet a mightier one.   January 22, 1924

AfterwardsWhen the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, “He was a man who used to notice such things”?   If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink, The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think, “To him this must have been a familiar sight.”   If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say, “He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.”     If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door, Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, “He was one who had an eye for such mysteries”?   And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom, “He hears it not now, but used to notice such things”?