A Wife in London

• Tawny


  A yellow brown colour
• Uprolled


  Moving upwards as something rolls
• Webby


  Like a web
• Waning


  Disappearing, fading
• Taper


  A shape that reduces in side towards one end, like a candle
• Glimmers


  Shimmering with light
• Smartly


  Double meaning, neat, tidy and firm but also can refer to a sharp, harsh pain
• Dazes


  Confuses / makes dizzy
• 'Tis the morrow


  It is the next day (tomorrow)
• Nears


  Comes near
• Disclose


  Tell information
• Penned in highest feather


  Written down with the most expensive feather quill pen
• Jaunts


  Trips, journeys
• Brake and burn


  Old fashioned words for green pastoral scenery (brake) and a fresh-water stream (burn)
• Speaker/Voice


  • The third-person limited narrative perspective provides a focus on the 'Wife', the subject of the poem, whilst also remaining detached from the situation. It is as if the speaker is commenting generally on the situation, particularly as the unnamed 'Wife' is not described in detail, she comes to represent the status of many women at the time of writing who were at home while their husbands were at war, fighting in far off lands. At any time, they could be delivered a letter similar to the one which the wife in the poem receives, stating that their husband had been killed in action.
• The poem 'The Wife in London' by Thomas Hardy lacks specificity and detail in some ways, which distances us from the character, but this is intended to demonstrate that she is a typical, everyday woman and many women in Britain had to suffer a similar experience
• Hardy's poem is more about the social state of Britain than any individual person, he is more critiquing the social structure and the imperialist agenda of Victorian society
• Volta


  A turning point in the poem as the wife is hit with the news that her husband 'has fallen' — a euphemism used often by soldiers to indicate death
• The news comes between two caesurae — dashes in the center of the line which creates dramatic pauses before and after the statement, providing suspense at first, and then afterward the feeling of shock
• Stanza structure


  • Regularly arranged into quintets with an ABBAB rhyme scheme, although the meter is slightly variable
  • The fourth line in each stanza always feels a little hypermetric — as if it is unnaturally shorter, therefore drawing attention to itself with its abruptness
  • This perhaps imitates the regularity of the wife's mundane and repetitive life, contrasted with the shocking news she's received
• The poem 'The Pride of Lions' by Joanna Preston is an analysis of Thomas Hardy's poem 'The Wife in London'
• Boer War (1899–1902)

  Hardy was considered an 'Anti-war poet', who spoke out against the cost of war and Imperialism on the individual — concerned in particular with the permanent psychological trauma that it caused for both soldiers and their families back home
• The poem is dated 1899, which is the same date as the start of the Boer War — a war fought in South Africa, which was one of the most costly wars ever fought in the name of the British Empire
• The British had around 500,000 men, and the Boers (the Dutch settlers in South Africa) had only 88,000, and so it was a British victory. However, many British people at the time — Hardy included — felt that the war was both a pointless waste of money and of British lives
• Hardy criticised the idea that younger Victorian men were fed propaganda and told that they would die and always be remembered as noble heroes, whereas in reality they would never be properly buried and no one would remember their names, as well as the fact that they would die fighting for a cause that they didn't personally believe in or particularly understand
• The war was partially about imperialism — maintaining the extent and influence of the British Empire — and also about claiming resources, such as gold and land. Hardy himself also felt that the Boers had a fair claim to the land, and that they were defending their homeland
• Wars around the turn of the 20th century were also becoming more brutal due to technological developments in warfare, such as the beginning of machine guns
• Tragedy


  Hardy's writing is often tragic in tone, exploring degrees of sadness and depression. In this case, the tragedy is that the wife's husband is killed, and she is placed into a state of shock
• The wife seems to have no children, and we can assume that she and her husband are still quite newly married — as there are talks of the 'new love that they would learn' at the end of the poem, implying perhaps that they have not fully settled or become comfortable with one another yet
• Hardy himself had an extremely unhappy first marriage to a woman named Emma Gilford, and so elements of the tragedy in the poem may be taken from his own circumstances — for instance, he and Emma also never had children, and she was a recluse, preferring to stay in the attic rooms of their house rather than spending time with him
• London


  In the 19th Century London was not only the capital of England, but also of the British Empire — a vast collection of countries around the world that had been colonised by Britain. It was the largest city in the world at this point, but it also had a host of problems — many intellectual Victorians felt that it was hypocritical to have such poverty and dirtiness (from pollution and industrialisation) in their own capital city, yet at the same time professing to be superior and the most civilised country in the world
• War is as difficult for the families at home to cope with as the soldiers who are out fighting — the poem provides a different perspective on war, rather than focusing on the action of battle or the emotional and physical impact on the soldiers, Hardy chooses instead to focalise his narrative around the wife who stays at home and lives alone
• The wife is deliberately unnamed, demonstrating how she universally represents the state of all wives and partners who struggle psychologically with the impact of war
• Death can be sudden, unexpected and disruptive — the poem is about grief and loss as much as it is about war, there is a sense that the woman is already extremely lonely and isolated, and then she is left to think of her husband and process his death in isolation
• The tragedy is not just that he dies, but that he also sends a letter of all the times that they will share in the future together — thoughts which are now impossible to turn into a reality
• Hardy often writes of the difference between country and city living in his poems and novels, for him the countryside is a beautiful, idyllic and peaceful place where one can live in harmony with nature. The city on the other hand — and London in particular — is large, unfriendly, dirty, mechanical and encourages people to live in a disconnected state, where they are no longer in tune with the natural environment
• There is a sad irony in that the wife, even living in a place with such a high population as London, could feel so alone and be so lacking in comfort
• Soldiers in war often use thoughts of home to keep themselves motivated — the soldier's letter arrives later than his death note, implying a greater cosmic irony to the situation; as if it isn't hard enough for the woman to process his death, because of the time delays of letters she is presented the day after with his own voice, as if still alive, full of hopes and wishes of their future together
• Themes


  • Love
  • War
  • Death
  • Life's Purpose
  • Nature
  • City vs Country
  • Industrialization
  • Loneliness
• Volta: ' He — he has fallen — in the far South Land…'


  • the final line of the first section provides a volta — a turning point in the poem as the wife is hit with the news that her husband 'has fallen'
  • a euphemism used often by soldiers to indicate death.
  • The news comes between to caesurae — dashes in the center of the line which creates dramatic pauses before and after the statement.
  • This provides suspense at first, and then afterward the feeling of shock.
  • The stanzas are regularly arranged into quintets with an ABBAB rhyme scheme, although the meter is slight.