‘Beeny Cliff’ by Thomas Hardy
I
O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.
II
The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.
III
A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.
IV
--Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?
V
What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is--elsewhere--whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will see it nevermore.
After his wife Emma died, Hardy wrote "Beeny Cliff" as a commemoration of their romance and the
natural places which were special to them, as the poem's subtitle indicates.
Notes on Life and Works
Thomas Hardy, born in 1840 near Dorchester, took up architectural work, both with a local
firm and in London, before turning to writing and publishing novels, beginning with
Desperate Remedies in 1871 and ending in Jude the Obscure in 1895. Disgruntled after years
of controversy dogged his novels, Hardy turned to poetry, his preferred form, quite late, with
Wessex Poems in 1898. Seven more volumes of poetry followed: Poems of the Past and
Present (1902), Time's Laughingstocks (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), Moments of
Vision (1917), Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Human Shows (1925), and Winter Words
(1928). Married to Emma Gifford from 1874 to her death in 1912, Hardy wrote some of his
most moving lyrics about her in the year of her death. He remarried Florence Dugdale in
1914. His Collected Poems was published two years after his death (1930).
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poet/148.html
After the evening meal this "young lady in brown" played and sang and thus got herself into
Hardy's notebook. Before the week of his stay was over she was in his heart. In his records "Miss
Gifford" soon became "E.L.G." Tuesday, March 8, he spent in drawing and measuring at the
church; on Wednesday the ninth he visited nearby quarries. Then, instead of returning to Dorset
he stayed on. The whole of Thursday the tenth he spent with Miss Gifford. In the morning they
visited Beeny Cliff on the Cornish coast. She rode her mare; Hardy walked.
O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free -The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.
The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.
1
As they talked Miss Gifford forgot about his beard. She noticed his Dorset accent, but soon forgot
that. She liked his soft voice. She discovered that he wrote poetry. In the afternoon they visited
Boscastle.
Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather, we climbed the road . . .
What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much . . . But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill's story? To one mind, never. 2
It was a perfect day; too perfect, Hardy thought, ever to return. "The tender grace of a day that is
dead will never come back to me." Tennyson's lines occurred to him. He was sorry to have to
announce his return to Dorset the next day.
In order to reach home by night he had to make another early start, but "E.L.G." was up to see
him off. They had breakfast together and talked of the cold weather. It had been a severe winter.
"There was a frost
Last night!" she said,
"And the stove was forgot
When we went to bed,
And the greenhouse plants
Are frozen dead!"
By the breakfast blaze
Blank-faced spoke she,
Her scared young look
Seeming to be
The very symbol
Of tragedy. 3
Without waiting for her to cover her head, they went outdoors together to look at the frozen
plants.
She looked like a bird from a cloud
On the clammy lawn,
Moving alone, bare-browed
In the dim of dawn.
The candles alight in the room For my parting meal
Made all things withoutdoors loom
Strange, ghostly, unreal . . .
"I am leaving you . . . Farewell!" I said,
As I followed her on
By an alley bare boughs overspread;
"I soon must be gone!"
Even then the scale might have been turned
Against love by a feather,
But crimson one cheek of hers burned
When we came in to-gether. 4
1"Beeny
Cliff."
Castle Boterel."
3"The Frozen Greenhouse."
1"Beeny Cliff."
2"At Castle Boterel."
3"The Frozen Greenhouse."
2"At
Publication Information: Book Title: Hardy of Wessex, His Life and Literary Career. Contributors: Carl J. Weber author. Publisher: Columbia University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1940
BEENY CLIFF is an abrupt cliff nearly a mile long, rising 150 to 200 feet from the sea. Beginning at
Pentargan Bay, about a mile northeast of Boscastle, it extends northeastward along the Cornish
coast.
A DEATH-DAY RECALLED presents essentially that conventional portion of a classic elegy in which
features or places of nature familiar to the dead are personified as mourners. In Hardy's poem,
however, the convention is realistically inverted. After his pilgrimage to Cornwall in March of 1913,
he discovered that the places Emma had loved in her maiden years remained just as he
remembered them. He rebukes them for exhibiting no reaction to a loss so great to him. The
places, all actual, are rather listed than described. "Bos" is evidently the high, clifflike headland
that semicircles Boscastle Harbour; "Targan" is Pentargan Bay.
BEENY CLIFF has two dates below the title, March, 1870, and March, 1913. They indicate the
fusion of two visions of the cliff as Hardy saw it when he was taken there by Emma Gifford on his
first visit and when he returned alone after her death. His journal for March 10, 1870, records:
"Went with E. L. G. to Beeny Cliff. She on horseback.... On the cliff.... 'The tender grace of a day,'
etc. The run down to the edge." 1 Then in 1913: "On March 6 ... he started for St. Juliot, putting
up at Boscastle, and visiting ... Beeny Cliff, on which he had not once set foot in the long interval."
2 The statement overlooks several visits to Beeny Cliff during Hardy's courtship. For instance, "On
Monday, August 22 [1870], the pair [Hardy and Emma] visited Beeny Cliff, where Hardy made the
sketch now in the Dorset County Museum. The foreground shows, on the right, the hooded figure
of Emma (it had begun to rain)." 3
Beeny Cliff is often covered in mists that give the sea below a slate-blue color; sea-birds circle and
call below the crest. In sunlight, underwater rocks color the water with rainbow colors. Hardy's
description in the poem is accurate. He gave other details of the scene in a notebook entry in
1872: "August: At Beeny Cliff ... green towards the land, blue-black towards the sea. Every ledge
has a little, starved, green grass upon it: all vertical parts bare. Seaward, a darkgrey ocean
beneath a pale green sky, upon which lie branches of red cloud. A lather of foam around the base
of each rock. The sea is full of motion internally, but still as a whole. Quiet and silent in the
distance, noisy and restless close at hand." 4 In reply to the editor of the Saturday Review in 1897,
asking Hardy to name "The Best Scenery I Know," he listed, among five items, "The coast from
Trebarwith Strand to Beeny Cliff, Cornwall." 5
-302
Beeny Cliff is portrayed in A Pair of Blue Eyes. On March 6, 1925, Hardy wrote to Marie Flower
that "The Cliff without a Name ... so far as it is anywhere, is near Beeny [a village near the cliff],
about a mile from Boscastle." 6 It seems, therefore, justifiable to associate the scenes on the cliff
in the novel with Hardy's experience and with the poem. Ellis wrote that "When Mr. Hardy
showed me the portrait of his first wife, with her long, fair hair hanging down over the shoulders,
he said she was the prototype in many respects of Elfride in A Pair of Blue Eyes, particularly in
her physical attributes." 7 Hardy wrote from memory in describing "the woman ... with bright
hair flapping free," and the same memory underlies a passage in A Pair of Blue Eyes: "'See how I
can gallop. Now, Pansy, off!' And Elfride started; and Stephen beheld her light figure contracting
to the dimensions of a bird as she sank into the distance— her hair flowing." (Chapter VII. )
The phrase "the woman riding high above" suggests that Hardy, on a "run down to the edge,"
remembered himself on a slope of the cliff, while Emma on her pony was silhouetted at the top.
From either place, the breakers seem at a distance; the sea seems a "nether sky," and great
chasms in the cliff justify the terms "chasmal" and "wild weird."
1.
Early Life, p. 99; Life, p. 75. The ellipses are Hardy's.
2.
Later Years, p. 156; Life, p. 361.
3.
Phelps, Annotations by Thomas Hardy in His Bibles and Prayer-Book, p. 8. The drawing is
reproduced on p. 82 of Hardy and Gittings, Some Recollections by Emma Hardy.
4.
Evelyn Hardy, Thomas Hardy's Notebooks, p. 38. Lea, Thomas Hardy's Wessex, has a
picture of Beeny Cliff as Plate 135 on p. 177, though it does not convey the grandeur of the
scene.
5.
Later Years, p. 71; Life, p. 295.
6.
Pencil-draft of Hardy's reply is in the Dorset County Museum. See also his Preface of 1895
to A Pair of Blue Eyes.
7.
"Some Personal Recollections of Thomas Hardy," p. 402.
ON A DISCOVERED CURL OF HAIR describes a lock of hair contained in a green leather locket with
a miniature of Hardy's first wife Emma. The miniature, prominently showing young Emma's curls,
is reproduced in The Early Life, facing page 96. 1 The portrait of Emma as she was about 1870 and
the curl of hair were not (as the poem implies) entirely forgotten. Rebekah Owen, annotating the
poem in her copy of Late Lyrics, wrote opposite the poem: "Mr. Hardy showed me this curl once in
his wife's presence. Also a miniature of her. I should call the colour more golden than brown—not
red-golden." 2
The poem is a soliloquy addressed to Emma's spirit three months after her death when Hardy had
"discovered" the curl of hair and returned in memory to his courtship. The particulars of this
courtship are much concerned with Emma's curls. (See the poems that picture Emma's hair, "A
Dream or No," "After a Journey," "Beeny Cliff," and "The Tresses.") The "discovered" curl is related
to the "forgotten" miniature. (See "A Forgotten Miniature.")
Hardy of Wessex, His Life and Literary Career
Book by Carl J. Weber; Columbia University Press, 1940
Subjects:
Hardy, Thomas--1840-1928
At Beeny Cliff . . . green towards the land, blueblack towards the sea. Every ledge has a little,
starved, green grass upon it: all vertical parts bare. Seaward, a dark-grey ocean beneath a pale
green sky, upon which lie branches of red cloud. A lather of foam round the base of each rock. The
sea is full of motion internally, but still as a whole. Quiet and silent in the distance, noisy and
restless close at hand.
During his long, unofficial engagement to Emma Gifford, Hardy visited St. Juliot, in Cornwall, at
least twice a year in order to supervise the restoration of the church. Beeny Cliff, which lies to the
north of Boscastle harbour, is 'The Cliff without a Name' in A Pair of Blue Eyes. It also appears in
the lyric poems, notably The Poems of 1912-13 written immediately after his wife's death.
Publication Information: Book Title: Notebooks, and Some Letters from Julia Augusta Martin. Contributors: Evelyn
Hardy - author. Publisher: Hogarth Press. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1955. Page Number: 38.
The ‘Poems of 1912-13’ are a sequence of elegies which Thomas Hardy wrote after
the sudden death of his first wife Emma on the morning of 27 November 1912. They
describe her death, Hardy’s reaction, and his visit to the scenes of their courtship in
Cornwall the following March. The original sequence, published with other groups of
poems in the first edition of Satires of Circumstance (1914), comprised 18 poems.
http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/012/Poems%20of%201912-13.pdf
YouTube Thomas Hardy “Beeny Cliff” Poetry Animation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUMknU7N16s