Poetry as Pagan Pilgrimage: the ‘Animative Impulse’ of Thomas Hardy’s Verse

All Hardy critics have noted how the poet-novelist’s works often dramatize a constant oscillation between the Pagan and the Christian. This essay proposes to observe once again how the two traditions seep into each other, but chooses to focus specifically on Hardy’s verse and to examine this in the light of the poet’s agnosticism and of his appropriation of some folkloristic and positivistic ideas. Hardy’s interest in the fusion of Pagan and Christian beliefs, present in the surfacing traces of the past, actually depends on the human associations to be found there. Hardy’s ‘survivals’ do not help reconstruct the past stages of an obsolescent culture or society so much as they stimulate artistic creation. The fetishism to be observed in his verse is also neither a direct application of Positivistic thought nor a revival of Pagan rites, but one element of a more general ‛animative impulse’ that attaches to the celebration and preservation of human individual affect. Hardy’s leaning towards paganism is therefore more poetic than theistic. The poem ‛Aquae Sulis’ illustrates this by staging an ironic reunion of the Pagan and Christian traditions—‛images both’—while testifying to the ‛animative impulse’ of Hardy’s poetry that reconciles metaphorical discourse with living experience