24 June 2025

We read one of Thomas Hardy’s favourite passages on Sunday. It was the Old Testament lection in the Revised Common Lectionary incorporated into our Common Order. It was all about Elijah’s depression and, in particular, the voice of God which is not heard in wind, earthquake or fire but in ‘a still small voice’.

In the 1662 Prayer Book, this lection is set for what is called ‘The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity’ which usually falls in the month of August. Hardy’s poem about it finds its context in a Cornwall church where his brother-in-law was vicar. It is called, ‘Quid Hic Agis’ and refers to God’s word to Elijah, ‘What doest thou here?’

Whilst the tale of Elijah is being read, the young Hardy finds himself looking for the smile of a girl ‘across the sunned aisle’ and reflecting that this tale does not ‘in any degree/ Bear on her or on me’. In youth, he doesn’t make any connection between himself and the depressed Elijah.

In the second verse, the vicar has asked him to read the lesson. Hardy reveals that he did this when his brother-in-law was ‘not in vigour’. Still he doesn’t see the connection. ‘I did not see/ What drought might be/ With me, with her,/ As the Kalendar/ Moved on, and Time/ Devoured our prime.’

In the last verse, he has grown much older. He was 76 when the poem was written in 1916. There is no smile across the aisle. She is dead. Now the connection with Elijah is made most powerfully. ‘And spiritless/ In the wilderness/ I shrink from sight/ And desire the night’.

His first wife, Emma, died in 1912. Although they continued living in the same house, they were estranged and had little contact. In her death, he poured out his grief in several poems about their early love. Here the passage of time is marked by the liturgy which triggers memories of loss, pain and a lasting regret.