Sometimes the sound is like a Gregorian chant, a threnody from the rustling leaves, the creaking boughs, the undulations of limbs heavy with leaves, swaying in the wind that rushes through the woods of Dorset’s Little Hintock.Īt other times, it is a low moan, a cry of pain, voiced as if in sympathy with the tragic plight of the characters who wander through these woods, searching for something lost or never quite possessed – for a Hardyian character is always driven by a restive compulsion to move.Įven in stillness, Hardy limns the minute transformations of the body – of human limbs cicatriced with tree wounds, or the trunk of one of the forest’s oldest inhabitants – pulsing with life, desire, will. In Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887), the trees sing. Hardy’s exploration of the relationship between humans and trees resonates in an epoch of environmental catastrophe Guide to the classics: steeped in the arboreal sublime, Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders carries a startling urgency
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