188 4 / THOMAS HARDY
20
Ah, no; the years O! And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
They change to a high new house, He, she, all of them?aye, Clocks and carpets and chairs
25
On the lawn all day, And brightest things that are theirs. . . . Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.
1917
In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'1
i Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. 2 5 Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass. io3 Yonder a maid and her wight0 Come whispering by: War's annals will cloud into night Ere their story die. man 1915 1916,1917
He Never Expected Much [or]
A CONSIDERATION
(A reflection) On my Eighty-Sixth Birthday
Well, World, you have kept faith with me, Kept faith with me; Upon the whole you have proved to be Much as you said you were. 5
Since as a child I used to lie Upon the leaze? and watch the sky, pasture Never, I own, expected I
That life would all be fair.
1. Cf. 'Thou art my battle axe and weapon of war: for with thee will 1 break in pieces the nations' (leremiah 51.20). The poem was written during World War I.
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JOSEP H CONRA D / 188 5 Twas then you said, and since have said, 10 Times since have said, In that mysterious voice you shed From clouds and hills around: 'Many have loved me desperately, Many with smooth serenity, 15 While some have shown contempt of me Till they dropped underground. 20'I do not promise overmuch, Child; overmuch; Just neutral-tinted haps? and such,' You said to minds like mine. Wise warning for your credit's sake! Which I for one failed not to take, And hence could stem such strain and ache As each year might assign. happenings 1926 1928
JOSEPH CONRAD 1857-1924
Joseph Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland (then under Russian rule), son of a Polish patriot who suffered exile in Russia for his Polish nationalist activities and died in 1869, leaving Conrad to be brought up by a maternal uncle. At the age of fifteen he amazed his family and friends by announcing his passionate desire to go to sea; he was eventually allowed to go to Marseilles, France, in 1874, and from there he made a number of voyages on French merchant ships to Martinique and other islands in the Caribbean. In 1878 he signed on an English ship that brought him to the east coast English port of Lowestoft, where (still as an ordinary seaman) he joined the crew of a small coasting vessel plying between Lowestoft and Newcastle. In six voyages between these two ports he learned English. Thus launched on a career in the British merchant service, Conrad sailed on a variety of British ships to East Asia, Australia, India, South America, and Africa, eventually gaining his master's certificate in 1886, the year he became a naturalized British subject. He received his first command in 1888, and in 1890 took a steamboat up the Congo River in nightmarish circumstances (described in Heart of Darkness, 1899) that permanently afflicted his health and his imagination.
In the early 1890s he was already thinking of turning some of his Malayan experiences into English fiction, and in 1892?93, when serving as first mate on the Torrens sailing from London to Adelaide, he revealed to a sympathetic passenger that he had begun a novel (Almayer's Folly), while on the return journey he impressed the young novelist John Galsworthy, who was on board, with his conversation. Conrad found it difficult to obtain a command, and this difficulty, together with the interest aroused by Almayer's Folly when it was published in 1895, helped turn him away from the sea to a career as a writer. He settled in London and in 1896 married an Englishwoman. This son of a Polish patriot turned merchant seaman turned writer was henceforth? after twenty years at sea?an English novelist.
In his travels through Asian, African, and Caribbean landscapes that eventually made their way into his fiction, Conrad witnessed at close range the workings of
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188 6 / JOSEPH CONRAD
European empires, including the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, and German, that at the time controlled most of the earth's surface and were extracting from it vast quantities of raw materials and profiting from forced or cheap labor. In the essay 'Geography and Some Explorers,' Conrad describes the imperial exploitation he observed in Africa as 'the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration.' What he saw of the uses and abuses of imperial power helped make him deeply skeptical. Marlow, the intermediate narrator of Heart of Darkness, reflects: 'The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it. . . .' And yet in this novella, the ideas at the back of colonialism's ruthless greed and violence are hardly shown to redeem anything at all.
Conrad's questioning of the ethics of empire, perhaps harkening back to his childhood experience as a Pole under Russian occupation, is part of his many-faceted exploration of the ethical ambiguities in human experience. In his great novel Lord Jim (1900), which like Heart of Darkness uses the device of an intermediate narrator, he probes the meaning of a gross failure of duty on the part of a romantic and idealistic young sailor, and by presenting the hero's history from a series of different points of view sustains the ethical questioning to the end. By deploying intermediate narrators and multiple points of view in his fiction, he suggests the complexity of experience and the difficulty of judging human actions.
Although Conrad's plots and exotic settings recall imperial romance and Victorian tales of adventure, he helped develop modern narrative strategies?frame narration, fragmented perspective, flashbacks and flash- forwards, psychologically laden symbolism? that disrupt chronology, render meaning indeterminate, reveal
