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영어

This paper aims at reading Thomas Hardy’s poetry with the concept of melancholy. Behind the overwhelming images of a merciless God/Nature Hardy describes, which traditionally characterize him as a pessimist, many a loser in modern history appears in his poems. His major concern is human failures and its fleeting nature. His steady contemplation on all the vanishing reveals his poetic ground: a sense of melancholy. Hardy’s poetics of melancholy are discussed in two ways: a melancholy view of nature/history and his own use of allegory. In contrast to Romantic poets, who aspire to dialectical synthesis and a harmonious resolution of conflicts, based on teleological, progressive history, Hardy reveals the existence of those who fail and are forgotten, their wishes denied. Given that one who is a melancholic refuses any synthetic totality, with his consistent reflections on the transient, he considers history a decline. A melancholic thinker expresses through allegories the necessity of extinction of all beings. With his passionate concerns about the defeated, Hardy is thus a melancholic allegorizer. Mysterious animals in his poems appear as an allegory for the fleeting nature of human history. Unlike the symbolic usage of animals in Romanticism, Hardy’s allegories of deserted objects and animals uncover the fleeting feature of the world.