“At Day-Close in November": Hardy and the Spectral Signs of a Landscape

Thomas Hardy established a relationship with the visible world which was mainly founded on his spectralising imagination. This way of reading the real was his response to a deeply ingrained convinction: fragmentation and discontinuity are much closer to human predicament than order and totality. A poem which embodies such a conception of man's role in the universe is "At Day-Close in November" whose semiotic texture conveys a symbolic parallelism between humans and trees, which implies a common destiny of human beings and the vegetal world. In this sense, this poem can be interpreted as a significantly coherent representation of Hardy's notion of temporality. Everything changes, things grow and decay. Similarly, men and trees are part of this everlasting process in which, considering the fast flux of time and the impermanency of animate and inanimate objects, they are only spectral presences in a vortex leading to a culminating nothingness.