starred.

Many of the poems in his last book fail through a lack of imaginative
energy. It is imaginative energy that makes the reading of a great
tragedy like _King Lear_ not a depressing, but an exalting experience.
But is there anything save depression to be got from reading such a poem
as _A Caged Goldfinch_:--

Within a churchyard, on a recent grave,
I saw a little cage
That jailed a goldfinch. All was silence, save
Its hops from stage to stage.

There was inquiry in its wistful eye.
And once it tried to sing;
Of him or her who placed it there, and why,
No one knew anything.

True, a woman was found drowned the day ensuing,
And some at times averred
The grave to be her false one's, who when wooing
Gave her the bird.

Apart even from the ludicrous associations which modern slang has given
the last phrase, making it look like a queer pun, this poem seems to one
to drive sorrow over the edge of the ridiculous. That goldfinch has
surely escaped from a Max-Beerbohm parody. The ingenuity with which Mr.
Hardy plots tragic situations for his characters in some of his other
poems is, indeed, in repeated danger of misleading him into parody. One
of his poems tells, for instance, how a stranger finds an old man
scrubbing a Statue of Liberty in a city square, and, hearing he does it
for love, hails him as "Liberty's knight divine." The old man confesses
that he does not care twopence for Liberty, and declares that he keeps
the statue clean in memory of his beautiful daughter, who had sat as a
model for it--a girl fair in fame as in form. In the interests of his
plot and his dismal philosophy, Mr. Hardy identifies the stranger with
the sculptor of the statue, and dismisses us with his blighting aside on
the old man's credulous love of his dead daughter:

Answer I gave not. Of that form
The carver was I at his side;
His child my model, held so saintly,
Grand in feature.
Gross in nature,
In the dens of vice had died.

This is worse than optimism.

It is only fair to say that, though poem after poem--including the one
about the fat young man whom the doctors gave only six months to live
unless he walked a great deal, and who therefore was compelled to refuse
a drive in the poet's phaeton, though night was closing over the
heath--dramatizes the meaningless miseries of life, there is also to be
found in some of the poems