One of my favorite Hardy poems, though not much anthologized now,
perhaps because modern readers might not understand that the music
hall or broadside form is a deliberate part of the poem's irony,
perhaps because its dealing with class and sexual issues, which must
have been considerably daring in its time, is no longer so taboo.
The poem implies two things which by the standards of its time could
reasonably be called blasphemies: that social class is a matter of
externalities, and that prostitution is an economic phenomenon.
George Bernard Shaw dealt with these implications respectively in his
plays Mrs Warren's Profession and Pygmalion, though I don't know if
they were written before or after Hardy's poem. I suppose I could
look it up.
On Dec 20, 2007 10:41 AM, Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/joncpoeitcs/
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