So far these remarks, like most criticisms of Hardy, have tacitly assumed that his poetry is all of a piece, one solid mass of verse expressing a sensibility at a single stage of development.
For critics, Hardy has had no poetic periods -- one does not speak of early Hardy or late Hardy, or of the London or Max Gate period, but simply of Hardy, as of a poetic monolith.
This seems odd when one recalls that he wrote poetry longer than any other major English poet: "Domicilium" is dated "between 1857 and 1860";
"Seeing The Moon Rise" is dated August, 1927.
One might expect that in a poetic career of seventy-odd years, some changes in style and method would have occurred, some development taken place.

This is not, however, the case, and development is a term which we can apply to Hardy only in a very limited sense.
In a time when poetic style, and poetic belief as well, seem in a state of continual flux, Hardy stands out as a poet of almost perverse consistency.
Though he struggled with philosophy all his life, he never got much beyond the pessimism of his twenties;
the "sober opinion" of his letter to Noyes, written when Hardy was eighty years old, is essentially that of his first "philosophical" notebook entry, made when he was twenty-five: "The world does not despise us: it only neglects us" (Early Life, p. 63).
And though in his later years he revised his poems many times, the revisions did not alter the essential nature of the style which he had established before he was thirty;
so that, while it usually is easy to recognize a poem by Hardy, it is difficult to date one.

There is only one sense in which it is valid to talk about Hardy's development: he did develop toward a more consistent and more effective control of that tone which we recognize as uniquely his.
There is only one Hardy style, but in the earlier poems that style is only intermittently evident, and when it is not, the style is the style of another poet, or of the fashion of the time.
In the later poems, however, the personal tone predominates.
The bad early poems are bad Shakespeare or bad Swinburne;
the bad late poems are bad Hardy.

There are two ways of getting at a poet's development: through his dated poems, and through the revisions which he made in later editions of his work.
About a quarter of Hardy's poems carry an appended date line, usually the year of completion, but sometimes inclusive years ("1908 - 1910") or two separate dates when Hardy worked on the poem ("1905 and 1926") or an approximate date ("During the War").
These dates are virtually the only clues we have to the chronology of the poems, since the separate volumes are neither chronological within themselves nor in relation to each other.
With the exception of Satires Of Circumstance, each volume contains dated poems ranging over several decades (Winter Words spans sixty-one years);
the internal organization rarely has any chronological order, except in obvious groups like the "Poems of Pilgrimage", the "Poems of 1912 - 13", and the war poems.

From the dated poems we can venture certain conclusions about Hardy's career in poetry, always remembering that conclusions based on a fraction of the whole must remain tentative.
The dated poems suggest that while Hardy's concern with poetry may have been constant, his production was not.
He had two productive periods, one in the late 1860's, the other in the decade from 1910 to 1920 (half of the dated poems are from the latter period, and these alone total about one-tenth of all Hardy's poems).
There was one sterile period: only one poem is dated between 1872 and 1882 and, except for the poems written on the trip to Italy in 1887, very few from 1882 to 1890.

The dated poems also give us an idea of the degree to which Hardy drew upon past productions for his various volumes, and therefore probably are an indication of the amount of poetry he was writing at the time.
Poems Of The Past And The Present and Time's Laughing Stocks, both published while Hardy was at work on The Dynasts, draw heavily on poems written before 1900.
Satires Of Circumstance and Moments Of Vision, coming during his most productive decade, are relatively self-contained;
the former contains no poem dated before 1909 - 10 -- that is, no poem from a period covered by a previous volume -- and the latter has only a few such.
The last three volumes are again more dependent on the past, as Hardy's creative powers declined in his old age.

These observations about Hardy's productivity tally with the details of his life as we know them.
The first productive period came when he was considering poetry as a vocation, before he had decided to write fiction for a living (in his note for Who's Who he wrote that he "wrote verses 1865 - 1868;
gave up verse for prose, 1868 - 70;
but resumed it later").
During the poetically sterile years he was writing novels at the rate of almost one a year and was, in addition, burdened with bad health (he spent six months in bed in 1881, too ill to do more than work slowly and painfully at A Laodicean).
Two entries in The Early Life support the assumption that during this period Hardy had virtually suspended the writing of poetry.
Mrs. Hardy records that "at the end of November (1881) he makes a note of an intention to resume poetry as soon as possible" (Early Life, p. 188);
and on Christmas Day, 1890, Hardy wrote: "While thinking of resuming 'the viewless Wings Of Poesy' before dawn this morning, new horizons seemed to open, and worrying pettinesses to disappear" (Early Life, p. 302).
There are more poems dated in the 1890's than in the '80's -- Hardy had apparently resumed the viewless wings as he decreased the volume of his fiction -- but none in 1891, the year of Tess, and only one in 1895, the year of Jude.
After 1895 the number increases, and in the next thirty years there is only one year for which there is no dated poem -- 1903, when Hardy was at work on The Dynasts.

The second productive period, the decade from 1910 to 1920, can be related to three events: the completion of The Dynasts in 1909, which left Hardy free of pressure for the first time in forty years;
the death of Emma Hardy in 1912, which had a profound emotional effect on Hardy for which he found release in poetry;
and the First World War.
It may seem strange that a poet should come to full fruition in his seventies, but we have it on Hardy's own authority that "he was a child till he was sixteen, a youth till he was five-and-twenty, and a young man till he was nearly fifty" (Early Life, p. 42).
We may carry this sequence one step further and say that at seventy he was a poet at the height of his powers, wanting only the impetus of two tragedies, one personal, the other national, to loose those powers in poetry.

Hardy's two productive decades were separated by forty years, yet between them he developed only in that he became more steadily himself -- it was a narrowing, not an expanding process.
Like a wise gardener, Hardy pruned away the Shakespearian sonnets and songs, and the elements of meter and poetic diction to which his personal style was not suited, and let the main stock of his talent flourish.
The range of the later poetry is considerably narrower, but the number of successful poems is far greater.

We can see the general characteristics of the earlier decade if we look at two poems of very different qualities: "Revulsion" (1866) and "Neutral Tones" (1867).
There is not much to be said for "Revulsion".
Like about half of the 1860 - 70 poems, it is a sonnet on a conventional theme -- the unhappiness of love.
Almost anyone could have written it;
it is competent in the sense that it makes a coherent statement without violating the rules of the sonnet form, but it is entirely undistinguished and entirely unlike Hardy.
The language is the conventional language of the form;
there is no phrase or image that sounds like Hardy or that is striking enough to give individuality to the poem.
It is smoother than Hardy usually is, but with the smoothness of anonymity.
It is obviously a young man's poem, written out of books and not out of experience;
it asserts emotion without evoking it -- that is to say, it is sentimental.
There are many such competently anonymous performances among the earlier poems.

"Neutral Tones" we immediately recognize as a fine poem in Hardy's most characteristic style: the plain but not quite colloquial language, the hard, particular, colorless images, the slightly odd stanza-form, the dramatic handling of the occasion, the refusal to resolve the issue -- all these we have seen in Hardy's best poems.
The poem does not distort the syntax of ordinary speech nor draw on exotic sources of diction, yet it is obviously not ordinary speech -- only Hardy would say "a grin of bitterness swept thereby;
like an ominous bird a-wing", or "wrings with wrong", or would describe a winter sun as "God-curst".

The details of the setting of "Neutral Tones" are not, strictly speaking, metaphorical, but they combine to create a mood which is appropriate both to a dismal winter day and to the end of love, and in this way love and weather, the emotions and the elements, symbolize each other in a way that is common to many of Hardy's best poems ("Weathers", "The Darkling Thrush", and "During Wind and Rain", for example) and to some moving passages in the novels as well (Far From The Madding Crowd is full of scenes constructed in this way).

"Neutral Tones" is an excellent example of Hardy's mature style, drawn from his earliest productive period;
I cite it as evidence that he did not develop through new styles as he grew older (as Yeats did), but that he simply learned to use better what he already had.
In the poem we recognize and acknowledge one man's sense of the world;
if it is somber, it is also precise, and the precision lends authority to the vision.
In "Revulsion", on the other hand, the pessimism is a case not proven;
the poem offers nothing to persuade us of the speaker's right to speak as he does.
In the 1860 - 70 decade there are many poems like "Revulsion", but there is only one "Neutral Tones".
Hardy was not Hardy very often.

The "Poems of 1912 - 13" offer a good example of Hardy's style as it was manifested in the later productive decade.
These are the poems Hardy wrote after the death of his first wife;
they compose a painful elegy to what might have been, to a marriage that began with a promise of happiness, and ended in long years of suffering and hatred.
Hardy obviously felt that these poems were peculiarly personal and private;
he sometimes called them "an expiation", and he would not allow them to be published in periodicals.
They are the only poems that he rearranged as a group between their first appearance (in Satires Of Circumstance) and the publication of the Collected Poems.

The elegiac tone is Hardy's natural tone of voice, and it is not surprising that the 1912 - 13 poems are consistently and unmistakably his.
The view is always toward the past;
but the mood is not quite nostalgic -- Hardy would not allow sentiment to soften his sense of the irredeemable pastness of the past, and the eternal deadness of the dead.
The poems are, the epigraph tells us, the "traces of an ancient flame";
the fire of love is dead, and Hardy stands, as the speaker does in the last poem of the sequence, over the burnt circle of charred sticks, and thinks of past happiness and present grief, honest and uncomforted.