'In my memory / Again and again I see it strangely dark / And empty of life but just withdrawn.'Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The Chalk Pit by Edward Thomas suggests a number of ways to think about the correlation between memory and writing. The line is both visually stimulating and “strangely dark.” This communicates a void or absence of physical activity but, at the same time, Thomas clarifies that this vacancy is recent and that the movement “has just withdrawn.” The poem is interested in temporality and the impossible act of revisiting a specific moment other than through the “dark” reconstruction of memory. This symbiosis between physical experience and what the poet is able to “see…strangely” through memory also dominates Thomas Hardy’s later poetry. Here, Hardy's painful awareness of the progression of time remorsefully characterizes his poems, shaping a strangeness in his writing in which the "shifting shadows" of the imagination are more tied to reality than the points from which they originate. In the first stanza of Edward Thomas's poet Adlestrop establishes a relationship between memory and writing that is maintained throughout the poem. His language is precise, anchoring the verse in an isolated moment. He tells us: “Yes. I remember Adlestrop - / The name, because one afternoon / In the heat the express train stopped there / Unusually. It was the end of June. The stanza focuses on awareness of the inevitable advancement of time. By structuring three beats for each line of his four-line stanzas, Thomas creates a coherent regularity, moving the poem forward quickly. This sense of movement is important, because the first stanza is very much about progression. The movement of the train, the progression of language, and the poet's recognition of the passage of time all suggest a linear passage of time that has little to do with the experiences of the individual. However, the poem also presents an interlude in this progression. . The train itself has stopped, and Thomas reflects this pause in his own plosive stop at the word “Adlestrop” and in the hesitant caesura that follows. Furthermore, despite the regular form of the poem, the imagery it evokes does not follow a linear sequence but is panoramic. The poem begins with speculation about a sign, moves to the form and meaning of the word itself and finally to a broader enjoyment of "...the sweetness of the meadows and the dry hay" under "...the high clouds in the sky. Thomas's imagery reflects his narrator's wandering gaze, but perhaps most striking is his shift from visual perception to sensory experience. The afternoon is characterized by “heat” and Thomas’s traveling companion is defined by the clearing of “his throat.” Thus, we move from the mechanical progression of the meter to a deeper and broader perception of human experience. The language of the poem weaves a surprisingly aural soundscape and demands to be read aloud. While the alliterative "And the willows, the weeds, and the herbs" of the third stanza denotes forward movement, the clarity of the final stanza's "And for that minute a blackbird sang" is piercing in its cacophony, imitating the precision of his singing and causing a moment of pause in Thomas's writing. This transition from a linear to an external perception is striking because it denotes a movement away from the rigidity of time towards a "minute" in which experiences are not "obscured" as in The Chalk Pit, but in harmony with the clarity of the senses and in which the poet is able to “see”. Here we can recall theVirginia Woolf's famous allegory of life "...not as a series of symmetrically arranged concert lamps", but as a "luminous halo" that encompasses intersecting threads of experience. The stopping of the train in Thomas's first line and the pause of its high-speed engine suggest a movement away from the concept of "concert lamps" such that the poet's perception is open to the complex levels of existence. However, Thomas specifies that this “minute” does not take place at the time he writes. The first word “Yes” is intriguing in that it seems to answer a prior question, indicating a speech. It’s both irresistibly inclusive and strangely enigmatic. While Thomas's response suggests a personal conversation, it also distances the reader from the moment described, because it is only accessible through Thomas's writing. The very act of reading denotes an engagement with the past, because writing and reading cannot exist simultaneously. This gives new meaning to Thomas's "minute" of pause, as it demonstrates how memory emerges separately from the shared physical world as an entirely personal and subjective mental process for the individual. This distinction between physical experience and memory is at the heart of Hardy's approach. The Shadow on the Stone. Although it was not completed until 1916, the poem belongs to a series of "poems 1912-1913" that Hardy composed after the death of his ex-wife Emma. Knowing this, it is hard not to read the poem as an autobiographical account of Hardy's own grief. From this perspective, the "shifting shadows" that fall on the "Druid's Stone" in Hardy's garden stimulate his personal memory of "...the shadow which a well-known head and shoulders / cast upon it when it gardened.” However, the poem addresses the broader nature of memory and the process by which it works. Hardy's "imagining" is fundamental here because it highlights the role of imagination in memory, or more precisely in the reconstruction of past events. The very title of the poem is inspired by this process. “The Shadow on the Stone” describes the interaction between weight and shadow and thus establishes a distinction between the physical and the non-physical, or more precisely between action and memory. Much like Thomas's engagement with a broader sphere of human perception, Hardy describes both the physical immediacy of a moment of impression and the coinciding reality of the mental process stimulated by that moment. In Memory and Writing, Philip Davis examines the parallels between Hardy's poetry and the writings of WK Clifford that Hardy had read. In his Readings and Essays, Clifford seeks to reconcile Hume's empiricism with Kant's idealism and postulates that the mental world is composed of the same basic elements as the material world from which it comes. For Clifford, “the actions that take place in the brain differ in no way from other material actions, except in their complexity”. This vision is striking in that it elevates the importance of the imagination to that of the sensory world. When read alongside Clifford's writings, Hardy's verse takes on a timelessness similar to the moment of pause created in Thomas's Adlestrop. . Davis points out that Hardy was "...deeply attracted to the idea that there is a parallelism between matter and mind." However, in The Shadow on the Stone, this takes on a new intensity since the “shadow” takes on more substance than the stone on which it falls. Hardy's frequent half-rhymes between the third and seventh lines of each stanza and his omission of this rhyme in the second add to a feeling of uncertainty or lack of solidarity. Thus, the poem induces a “displacement” in multiple senses, to the extent.