That is why a Druid stone is so fitting in Hardy’s poem. Britain’s landscape has its share of rocky mysteries (such as Stonehenge), but sometimes a stone is just a stone. Hardy is anything but cavalier with word choice, so it’s worth pausing over the specificity of “the Druid stone.” Druid stones can be small or huge structures though often natural, they’re also thought, with varying degrees of whimsy, to have been made by the Druids, who lived in Celtic Britain. It is one of Hardy’s finer short lyrics, and its plot is true to its title: “I went by the Druid stone, / That broods in the garden white and lone,” Hardy begins, when suddenly a few trees in his garden, bent in the wind “with a rhythmic swing,” make a pattern of “shifting shadows” that he imagines are cast on the stone by some ghostly form of Emma. Hardy published “ The Shadow on the Stone” in Moments of Vision (1917), but he began the first draft in 1913, and its themes, no less than its timing, place it comfortably alongside the Poems of 1912-1913 sequence.
Allusive yet direct, lyrical yet understated, elegant yet clear, the poems brilliantly straddle the end of one century and the beginning of another.
He views the springtime of their courtship from the winter of her death, and he grounds the intense sentimentality of Victorian poetry in the more cynical style of a Modernist. Plainly titled Poems of 1912–1913, Hardy’s poems about Emma show two eras reaching into each other in every way. Yet her death rekindled an affection that thrived-and despaired-in nostalgia, and in the two years after, Hardy, who is still mainly famous for his novels, wrote one of the greatest elegiac sequences in English. Decades later, their marriage had long since cooled into neglect and estrangement, not a little due to Hardy, who slept by her coffin out of enormous regret over lost time: their bedroom was no warmer when Emma was alive (in fact, Emma had taken to sleeping in the attic). When he wrote about losing Emma, he was dwelling on the Victorian era, when they fell in love-and when Romanticism was still tempering into realism.
But while Hardy grieved in the 20th century, he grew up in the 19th. By the winter of 1912, with Modernity swiftly colonizing English culture, such an operatic gesture was something of a throwback. Emma Hardy lay dead in a coffin at the foot of Thomas Hardy’s bed for three nights before her disconsolate widower finally had her buried.
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