Poem Of The Week: Happiness By Blake Morrison

Happiness

...but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain
THOMAS HARDY

Cloudless skies, old roses coming into flower,
a breeze flicking through The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Toasted granary bread with damson jam,
a pair of goldfinches on the bird-feeder.

The whiff of fennel and rosemary,
the farmer’s quad bike leaving the field.

Two deckchairs in the shade of a weeping birch.
Everyone you love still alive, last time you heard.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Taken for its own sake, Blake Morrison’s succinct lines capture the essence of a moment of contentment because measured against happiness’s alternative. Hardy’s ‘general drama of pain’ describes, in epigraph, a closer summation of the human condition, especially as experienced by our agrarian forbears, and more especially in the rural Wessex of the early nineteenth century.

And it is on the presence of such pain that the poem’s narrator, by default, reflects as he slows his observation to a languid wisp of Keatsian sensual diversions, and the image of Hardy himself in the open book, before closing his narrative with a timely memento mori, delivered, almost, as a corrective to the earlier arcadian reverie:

‘Everyone you love still alive, last time you heard.’

‘Happiness’ is taken from Shingle Street, published by Chatto & Windus (2015)

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