He Never Expected Much

Poet: Thomas Hardy — English novelist and poet, born Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, 1840; died Max Gate, Dorchester, 11 January 1928.

Year: Drafted around Hardy’s 86th birthday (June 1926); first published 1928.

First publication: Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (Macmillan, October 1928), the posthumous collection prepared by Hardy in his final months.

Themes: stoicism and acceptance; modest expectations as a defence against disappointment; old age and looking back; the address of the World as a personified figure; the consoling power of low expectations.

Form & structure: three stanzas, each combining a short opening ‘Well’ line of address with a longer pentameter passage. The World speaks to the speaker as a child, repeatedly counselling him not to expect too much. Strict end-rhyme in each stanza; ballad-like simplicity that suits the conversational frame.

Hardy wrote this poem near the end of his life. By 1926 he was in his mid-eighties, living quietly at Max Gate with his second wife Florence. He had outlived most of his contemporaries, his first wife Emma, and the Victorian world that produced him.Winter Words is full of valedictory poems; this is one of the gentlest.

The personification of the World is at the heart of the poem: the World is given a voice, a memory of past statements, and a steady, parental tone. Hardy converts an abstract pessimism (life will disappoint) into a domestic conversation between old friends who have come to accept each other’s limits.

Pairs effectively with: Edward Thomas’s Rain (also stoic mortality); Tennyson Turner’s On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book (small creatures, small consolations); and Auden’s Funeral Blues for a contrasting refusal to accept disappointment with equanimity.