HE NEVER EXPECTED MUCH
[OR]
A CONSIDERATION
[A REFLECTION] ON MY EIGHTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY
Well, World, you have kept faith with me,
Kept faith with me;
Upon the whole you have proved to be
Much as you said you were.
Since as a child I used to lie
5
Upon the leaze and watch the sky,
Never, I own, expected I
That life would all be fair.
‘Twas then you said, and since have said,
Times since have said,
10
In that mysterious voice you shed
From clouds and hills around:
‘Many have loved me desperately,
Many with smooth serenity,
While some have shown contempt of me
Till they dropped underground.
15
‘I do not promise overmuch,
Child; overmuch;
Just neutral-tinted‫ لون محايد‬haps and such,’
You said to minds like mine.
20
Wise warning for your credit’s sake!
Which I for one failed not to take,
‘He Never Expected Much’ falls under the anthology of
Hardy poems that could be categorized as
autobiographical, being an offshoot of his personal and
growing-up process, thereby making it to a large extent
quite philosophical. It chronicles the life of a child with a lot
of dreams and aspirations. As an adult he realizes the
reality of the fairness of life. With this philosophy even to
his old age, he has been able to be happy and to keep his
sanity in a turbulent world of uncertainty.
With a rather simple language, the poem is able to employ
apostrophe, which portrays life itself as an entity. Thus,
‘World,’ ‘Life’ is always addressing the persona throughout
the poem. The same light tone of a conversation between
two friends is applied by the persona in addressing ‘Life’.
This creates a cordial‫ قلبي‬atmosphere in the poem simply
because the persona himself has lived his life in
conformity and harmony with ‘Life’. However, there are
times when rich imagery is employed to convey the
omnipotence(power) and mystery of Life. This is replicated
in, ‘…you shed from clouds and hills around’, to show how
Life itself is reflected in nature which speaks to man
everyday reminding him of his mortality. The mysterious
nature of Life is also captured in ‘Just neutral –tinted haps
and such’’, to show the difficulty in defining nature. The
image of a neutral colour here depicts Life as something
that cannot be defined and quite unpredictable.
Life could also be defined from the repetition applied in the
poem. The repetition of ‘kept faith with me’ in the opening
of the poem asserts the feeling of satisfaction on the way
Life has treated him. However in the second stanza, have
said is also repeated to confirm the enduring message
that Life has always echoed to all men. Apart from the
repetition, all the lines are mostly accentuated by endstops except lines 3, 5, 7, which reflect the freedom and
liveliness associated with childhood. However for other
lines, there is the conformity with the general reflective
and serious tone of the poem
The poem uses a casual tone of a conversation between
two friends, though one party ( Life) is older. Thus, one
could see a father-son relationship kind of tone implied
here. This is even confirmed with the use of Child in
reference to the poet-persona in the last stanza. A sense
of harmony is created because, the persona has probably
conducted his life according to the dictates of this fatherfigure. However for those choose to disobey the dictate of
nature-cum Life, the tone could be stern as found in, ‘Wise
warning for your credit’s sake!’
In terms of diction, the language is mostly monosyllabic to
confirm the simplicity of the poem and to depict nature
such as clouds and hills around. There is also an element
of this in the nature-colour description, ‘neutral-tinted’. All
these are to give the effect of Life depicted in the poem as
being synonymous with nature. Man therefore has Life
everywhere to teach him the fairness of life.
Hardy is able to maintain some amount of unity among all
the devices used in the poem, as they are used to portray
how fair Life could be. However, one obvious technique is
the conversational tone of the poem, which presents Life
as both complacent )satisfactory)and yet stern‫عقيمة‬.