Too Old

The other day for some reason I mentioned Hardy's poem Old Furniture to Noi, telling her about the central idea of him thinking of pieces of furniture handed down the generations bearing the marks of all the users. Even as I was telling her about the poem I felt a brooding sense of something lost for ever.

Then it occurred to me today that it's a long time since since I read the poem, or anything else by Hardy for that matter (though I have a few poems in memory.) So I picked it off the shelf, and was very happy to have done so - and a little sad, as always.

Two things. First, it's the willed clumsiness of the poems that makes them unmistakably by the Wessex master. Second, I'd forgotten just how quietly powerful the ending of Old Furniture is (I mean, that Well, well is just perfect) but understood for the first time something about myself. I've become the one for whom The world has no use...