Summary
“Afterwards” is written from the perspective of a speaker speculating about the aftermath of his own death. In the first stanza, he sets the scene of his death as one in which the Present has closed its doors to him. His “tremulous stay,” or the brief and vulnerable years of his life on earth, have now come to an end (1). At the same time, spring returns, with the “glad green leaves” of May (2). The speaker wonders if his survivors will remember that he used to notice the lovely natural details of springtime.
The second stanza continues along in a similar vein. The speaker shifts his speculations from the springtime to the dusk, describing the silent flight of a hawk across the shadowy night, to land upon a bush. He imagines that someone else, watching the hawk, might remember that the speaker would have been familiar with such flights, or even with that very hawk.
In the third stanza, the speaker imagines dying in the middle of the night, as the moths fly through the warm air and the hedgehog moves secretively across the lawn. Here the speaker’s speculation takes on a darker tone. He imagines that one of his survivors might remark that the speaker attempted to protect “innocent creatures” like the hedgehog from harm, but ultimately he was unable to do much to protect them, and now he has died (11-12).
In the fourth stanza, he imagines his survivors going out to look at the stars after hearing that the speaker has died. Looking up at the heavens, he wonders if they will remember that he was once fascinated with mysteries like the night sky. In the fifth, he describes the ringing of church bells which will announce his death, and, at the same time, the night breeze which will pause for a moment and then rise again, like another bell. He wonders if his survivors will remark that he can no longer hear this meaningful sequence of sounds, but once he would have noticed it.
Analysis
Thomas Hardy wrote “Afterwards” as the last poem in his 1917 collection Moments of Vision. At the time, Hardy was 77, and believed he was unlikely to publish another collection of poetry before his death; ironically, he ended up living for another 11 years and publishing several more collections. Nevertheless, “Afterwards” is often read as a kind of epitaph, a statement written in memory of someone who has died. Of course, this is a strange epitaph because its subject is also its author; Hardy here writes in anticipation of his own death.
“Afterwards” is thus a somewhat strange poem, because, rather than remembering someone who has actually died, its speaker speculates on how he might be remembered when he himself dies. Hardy plays with the expectations around the poetic genre of the epitaph in order to write a poem more concerned with the idea of memory and mourning than with mourning the memory of a particular person. By constructing three out of its five stanzas as questions, “Afterwards” emphasizes the instability of memory, suggesting that regardless of who we are while we are alive, we have little control over how we are remembered. The poem also emphasizes this unpredictability around death by beginning all but the first and last stanzas with the word “If,” emphasizing the speaker’s complete lack of control over when he dies while suggesting a more general ambiguity at the heart of the poem.
In general, the poem speaks about death in pointedly euphemistic terms. The poem’s opening line, “When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay” requires quite a bit of decoding before it can be read as describing death. The word “postern” is an antiquated, or out of date, word, as is typical of Hardy’s writing; here, the unfamiliarity of the diction serves to obscure the literal meaning of the first line. The second stanza is even vaguer. In the broader context of the poem, the word “it” in “If it be in the dusk” refers to the time of the author’s death. Yet the syntax of this stanza is intentionally vague, so that “it” can also be read as referring instead to the swooping flight of the “dewfall-hawk” (6). By refraining from referring to death explicitly, the poem avoids being overwhelmed by such a heavy theme. Instead, death fades into the background just enough to be balanced by more peaceful natural images, like the flight of a bird. Indeed, even the title of the poem avoids referring to death as a catastrophic ending, focusing instead on a world which continues to exist even after what appears to be an absolute ending.
Thus, despite its dark theme, the tone of “Afterwards” is ultimately less pessimistic than that of many of Hardy’s other poems. Unlike “The Convergence of the Twain,” or even “The Darkling Thrush,” “Afterwards” encounters the world without cynicism. Although it centers the death of its main character, it imagines a broader world which will continue on. The first stanza is set during spring, and includes the joyful images of “glad green leaves” as “Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk.” By invoking the spring while describing a death, the poem emphasizes that growth and rejuvenation always co-exist with loss.
The most pessimistic and melancholic moment in “Afterwards” is the third stanza. Here, the speaker refers to death with a more familiar euphemism, as a “passing.” In a way, the first two stanzas have built towards this darker moment. The first stanza discusses a death in the brightness of a spring day, the second in a dim twilight. Here, the speaker imagines his death in “some nocturnal blackness,” the time at which rejuvenation seems most distant (9). In fitting with this less hopeful setting, the third stanza is the only place in the poem where the speaker is remembered in a negative, rather than a neutral light. The “one” who remembers him says, “He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm/ But he could do little for them; and now he is gone” (11-12). This statement is the only dialogue in the poem to take up more than one line, as though this cynical observation overwhelms the voice of the speaker in a way that more neutral observations about his character do not. His is also the only statement to remember the speaker as someone acting upon the world, rather than merely an observer of it. This stanza thus seems to suggest that, once we imagine ourselves as actively affecting the world, death becomes more devastating because it dictates that our impact on the world will be brief.
Yet, despite this cynical message in relation to the speaker, the third stanza also emphasizes the existence of a lively and beautiful natural world. The “nocturnal blackness” in which the speaker dies invokes the archetypal poetic association between death and night, one in which night is understood as empty, dark, and cold. Yet the poem goes on to refer to that same night as “mothy and warm” (9). “Afterwards” thus overlays two contrasting senses of night in one line: night can be symbolic of death, but it is also simply a part of the day, in which living things continue on, and which gives way to morning eventually. The “mothy and warm” night suggests an earth which is almost itself a living, breathing body, one which keeps itself warm and is visited by the gentle fluttering of moths. We watch as a “hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn” (10). This hedgehog outlived the speaker, and continues to “come to no harm” even though the speaker can no longer do anything for him. Indeed, this rich natural world suggests that the speaker could “do little” for “innocent creatures” not because he was weak, but merely because the natural world does not need human assistance to flourish (11-12).
So what role does “Afterwards” imagine for human beings? The rest of the stanzas make clear that the poem understands the very act of noticing as inherently significant. The first three stanzas are studded with precise visual imagery which point to a highly observant speaker. He notices that the leaves are “delicate-filmed as new-spun silk,” a simile which points simultaneously to both the very first leaves of spring, and the delicate cocoon of a silkworm (3). The poem here doesn’t just emphasize that nature is beautiful; it suggests that understanding the beauty of nature requires careful attention to detail, and the consistent observation to discover beautiful new things just as they emerge. The second stanza invokes a similarly subtle image when it compares the flight of the “dewfall-hawk” to “an eyelid’s soundless blink” (5-6). Here, the human body is even implicated in the delicate and easily missed natural world.
The poem repeatedly emphasizes sight as the primary means of noticing things about the world, from the reference to the “eyelid” in the second stanza, to the use of the expression “had an eye for” in the fourth (16). In both of these examples, the poem links observation to the human body, the physical eye. The fourth stanza emphasizes that link when the speaker refers to his survivors as “those who will meet my face no more” (15). The poem here employs synecdoche by having the “face” stand in for the whole person. The face is so important in “Afterwards” because it is the center for observation, the place where most of our sensory organs are located. Sight is especially important because the eyes don’t just allow us to see the world, they also let other people perceive our emotions more clearly, as in the famous idiom “the eyes are the window to the soul.” In a poem so interested in noticing, the speaker’s face is important because it lets him observe so much about the world. At the same time, it's important to his survivors because his face was how they encountered and knew him.
The last two stanzas emphasize not just the capacity to make observations, but the ability to make connections between observations. This theme is implicit earlier in the poem, because the speaker’s comparisons between leaf and silk, or eyelid and hawk, all suggest not just a capacity to observe the world’s subtle details, but to draw connections between them. In both of these examples, the speaker uses simile, making an explicit comparison with the word “like,” rather than metaphor, which would elide the act of comparison in favor of emphasizing the images themselves. In the fourth stanza, Hardy begins to clarify why those connections can be so important. When the speaker looks up to the stars, he is able to connect his physical body, his face and eyes, with the “mysteries” of the heavens (16). The human capacity to feel a connection between ourselves and the natural world more broadly allows the speaker to transcend the limits of his own body, to experience the vast mystery of the heavens in the same way he experienced May’s “glad green leaves” (2).
In the final stanza, the poem gears this transcendent connection towards death itself. The speaker makes a connection between the “bell of quittance,” which announces his death, and a “crossing breeze,” which pauses and then rises again like the sound of another bell (17-18). The survivor’s remark here is both ironic and redemptive. On the one hand, the dead speaker cannot make this beautiful connection between bell and wind which might have been a balm to the tragedy of his death. Yet the acknowledgment that he “used to notice such things” also reminds the reader that the speaker’s observational capacities didn’t just let him perceive the natural world, but would also have allowed him to understand his own death as part of that world. Although death ended his capacity to notice, his capacity to notice also would have allowed him to accept his own death as part of the order of things.
Although the speaker never explicitly refers to writing, the way “Afterwards” prioritizes observation suggests Hardy as both novelist and poet. The little details the speaker notices aren’t symbolically significant, but rather important in and of themselves—more important, even, than actually trying to protect “innocent creatures” (11). Hardy’s use of simile and antiquated diction implies that he is not interested in taking a back seat as a writer in order to emphasize these natural details. Instead, these details are at least partially important because they are something to write about. By writing poetry, Hardy could both practice active observation and ensure that he would be remembered as someone who noticed things about the world. Writing also hinges on connections; this poem, with its repeating structure, implicitly draws connections between each similarly structured phrase. Writing, by making the kinds of connections that allow the speaker to transcend the limits of his own body by the end of the poem, becomes the way in which this poem embodies its own ideals.
