'In my memory / Again and again I see it strangely dark / And vacant of a life but simply withdrawn.' Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The Chalk Pit by Edward Thomas suggests several ways of looking at the correlation between memory and writing. The line is both visually stimulating and "strangely dark". It communicates a void or absence of physical activity but, at the same time, Thomas makes it clear that this vacancy is recent and that the movement has “just receded.” The poem is about temporality and the impossible act of revisiting a precise moment in any way other than through the "dark" reconstruction of memory. This symbiosis between physical experience and what the poet is able to “see…strangely” through memory equally dominates Thomas Hardy's later poetry. Here, Hardy's painful awareness of the progression of time characterizes his poems with remorse, shaping a strangeness in his writing whereby the "shifting shadows" of the imagination are more connected to reality than the points from which they arise. Thomas' poet Adlestrop establishes a relationship between memory and writing that is maintained throughout the poem. His language is precise, anchoring the verse to an isolated moment. It tells us like “Yes.” I remember Adlestrop - / The name, because one afternoon / In the heat the express train stopped there / Unusually. It was the end of June." The verse focuses on the awareness of the inevitable progress of time. By structuring three beats for each line of his four-line stanzas, Thomas creates a coherent regularity, moving the poem forward quickly. This sense of movement is important, as the first verse is essentially about progression. The movement of the train, the progression of the language, and the poet's recognition of the passage of time all suggest a linear flow of time that has little to do with the experiences of the individual. However, the poem equally presents an interlude in this progression. . The train itself has stopped, and Thomas reflects this pause in his explosive line at the word "Adlestrop" and the hesitant caesura that follows. Furthermore, despite the regular form of the poem, the imagery it evokes does not follow a linear sequence but is panoramic. The poem begins with the speculation of a sign, moves on to the form and meaning of the word itself, and finally to a wider enjoyment of the '...sweet meadow and dry haystacks' beneath '...the high clouds in the sky' . Thomas's images reflect the narrator's wandering gaze, but perhaps more striking is his shift from visual perception to sensory experience. The afternoon is characterized by 'heat' and Thomas's traveling companion is defined by clearing his throat. Therefore, there is a shift from the mechanical progression of meter to a deeper and more expansive perception of human experience. The language of the poem weaves a surprisingly aural soundscape and begs to be read aloud. While the alliterative “And willows, willow grass and grass” of the third stanza denotes a forward movement, the clarity of the final stanza “And for that minute a blackbird sang” is piercing in its cacophony, mimicking the precision of his singing and causing a moment of pause in Tommaso's writing. This transition from a linear perception to an external perception is striking as it denotes a movement from the rigidity of time to a "minute" where experiences are not "obscured" as in The Chalk Pit, but attuned to the clarity of the senses and in which the poet can 'see'. Here we can recall the famous allegory of Virginia Woolf's life "...not like a series of concert lampssymmetrically arranged" but as a "luminous halo" enclosing intersecting threads of experience. The stopping of the train in Thomas's opening line and the pause of the running engine suggest a movement away from the concept of such "concert lamps" as the The poet's perception is open to the complex levels of existence. However, Thomas makes it clear that this "minute" is not unfolding as he writes. The initial word "Yes" is intriguing in that it seems to answer a previous question, indicating a discourse is at once compellingly inclusive and strangely cryptic. Although Thomas's response suggests a personal conversation, it simultaneously distances the reader from the moment described, as it is only accessible through Thomas's writing. The very act of reading denotes an engagement with the past since writing and reading cannot exist at the same time. This gives new meaning to Thomas's "minute" of pause, as it demonstrates how memory emerges separately from the shared physical world as an entirely personal and subjective mental process for the individual. This distinction between physical experience and memory is central to Hardy's thinking. The shadow on the stone. Although not completed until 1916, the poem belongs to a series of so-called "1912-13 poems" that Hardy composed after the death of his ex-wife Emma. With this knowledge in mind, it is difficult not to read the poem as an autobiographical account of Hardy's grief. From this perspective the "shifting shadows" that fall on the "druid's stone" in Hardy's garden stimulate his personal memory of "...the shadow which a famous head and shoulders / Cast there while gardening." However, the poem engages with the broader nature of memory and the process by which it works. Hardy's "imagination" is key here as it highlights the role of imagination in remembering, or more precisely, reconstructing past events. The very title of the poem is inspired by this process. 'The Shadow on the Stone' describes the interaction between weight and shadow and in doing so draws a distinction between the physical and the non-physical, or more precisely, between action and memory. Like Thomas's engagement with a broader sphere of human perception, Hardy describes both the physical immediacy of a moment of impression and the coincident reality of the mental process stimulated by the moment. In Memory and Writing, Philip Davis examines the parallels between Hardy's poetry and the writings of W. K. Clifford that Hardy had read. In his Lectures and Essays, Clifford attempts to reconcile Hume's empiricism with Kant's idealism and postulates that the mental world is composed of the same basic elements as the material world from which it derives. For Clifford, “Actions that occur in the brain differ in no way from other material actions except in their complexity.” This view is striking in that it elevates the importance of imagination to that of the sensory world. When read alongside Clifford's writings, Hardy's verse takes on a timelessness similar to the moment of pause created in Thomas's Adlestrop. . Davis points out that Hardy was "...deeply attracted to the idea that there is a parallel between matter and mind." Yet, in The Shadow on the Stone, this is taken to a new intensity as the "shadow" takes on more substance than the stone on which it falls. Hardy's frequent half-rhymes between the third and seventh lines of each stanza and his omission of this rhyme in the second add a sense of uncertainty or lack of solidarity. Thus, the poem induces a "displacement" in multiple senses as the tree's physical movements cause an imagined presence that appears more real than the invasive "falling of a leaf" that threatens to "fade away" Hardy's "dream." This transition between different levels of perception,.