1917: dorchester
genetics
i am the family face;
flesh perishes, i live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
and leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The family feature that can
in curve and voice and eye
despise the human span
Of durance—that is i;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.
Thomas Hardy, “Heredity.” The
eldest of four children growing up
in Dorset in the 1840s, Hardy
apprenticed to a local architect in
1856 and worked as a draftsman
in London in 1862. While visiting
a church in Cornwall in 1870, he
met and fell in love with his future
wife, immortalized in his novel
a Pair of Blue Eyes as well as in
the poem “Beeny Cliff”: “O the opal
and the sapphire of that wandering
western sea,/And the woman riding
high above with bright hair flapping
free.” Hardy published Jude the
Obscure in 1895.
