Victorian Verse - I Look Into My Glass - Thomas Hardy

This poem was probably written in 1897 and published in 1898 when Hardy was 57 years old.  He laments his physical deterioration as he ages.  He contrasts his aging, weak body with his still-youthful feelings, which remain powerful.  It is perhaps tempting to believe that this, too, is a poem about his feelings for Florence Henniker, some twenty years his junior.  It was another published in “Wessex Poems” in 1898 – five years after his meeting with her in Dublin.

The idea of youthful feelings being frustrated by being contained within an aging “frame” was explored by Tennyson in one of his most beautiful, and heart-breaking, poems, “Tithonus”(1859), which has its origins in classical mythology.  In the mythology, Eos, the goddess of dawn, steals Tithonus (and his brother, Ganymede) from Troy to be her consorts.  Ganymede is later stolen from her by Zeus, to be his cup-bearer, and as a consolation, Eos asks Zeus to make the beautiful Tithonus immortal.  Unfortunately, he gives him eternal life – but not eternal youth.  Tithonus wastes away, growing physically older and older, while watching Eos remain young and beautiful.  In the poem, Tennyson adds to the poignancy by making the “gift” come from Eos rather than Zeus. 

The poem is written in a regular metric pattern of four line stanzas, the first two and the last lines being in iambic trimetre and the third in iambic tetrametre.  The first two trimetres, with the short phrases, give it the tone, initially, of a casual observation, as if he is just thinking out loud as ideas occur to him; the third, longer line develops the idea with increased emotion; the fourth sums up the theme of the stanza.  Hardy uses the present tense, as if these thoughts have only occurred, or matter, to him now, which supports the idea that they have been prompted by a recent encounter with a younger woman. 

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, "Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!"

The poet looks at his reflection in the mirror and laments what age has done to his skin – one can imagine he is looking at wrinkles, a sagging jaw-line and the loss of youthful tone.  He focuses on himself with the repeated “my”.  He wishes, in an outburst of emotion conveyed in the extended metric line, that his heart – his capacity to feel love – had similarly begun to waste away.  He gives the reason in the next stanza.

For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

If his heart was unable to feel strongly any more, then he would not be bothered by people who no longer, or never did, love him (“grown cold”).  He could wait for death, lonely, but at least at peace (“with equanimity”).

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide. 

Unfortunately, Time, (personified) chooses to make him miserable by removing only one half of the whole of him as he ages.  The two sides are shown in the antithesis of the second line (“part steals/part abide”).  Late in his life (“at eve”) his body is disturbed by the same kind of feelings (“throbbings”) he had as a young man in his prime (“noontide”).  Peace in old age is denied him.

The conundrum remains unresolved, as in "At the Inn" and others of Hardy's poems.  He shows an acute awareness of the human condition, but little sense that he (or we) have any answers.  His appeal to "God" is merely a turn of phrase - Hardy was not great believer in God's providence.