Verified answer

Hardy's poetry laid bare -- in a more compressed, more obvious way -- much of what was suggested by his narratives -- that life is suffering and pain, that humans are hopelessly overmatched by the coldness of the cosmos that we're thrust into.

So much happens in the novels and stories ... so much talk, so much description, so much event ... that they leave themselves open for readers to pick and choose more palatable, less gloomy interpretations. Generally the poems don't permit this.

One example is Hardy's well-known "Ah, Are You Digging At My Grave" -- where a recently deceased woman is asking who is digging at her grave -- who has come to mourn and remember her. Is it her lover? No, he's gone off to marry someone else. Her family? Nope, they've moved on. Her enemy? No, she's written the woman off; what's the use of hating a dead person?

Then who? It turns out to be her little dog. This causes the dead woman to reflect on the animal's loyalty:

That one true heart was left behind!

What feeling do we ever find

To equal among human kind

A dog's fidelity!"

This reassuring faith in man's best friend is casually crushed by the dog's rejoinder:

"Mistress, I dug upon your grave

To bury a bone, in case

I should be hungry near this spot

When passing on my daily trot.

I am sorry, but I quite forgot

It was your resting place."

----------

That pretty much sums up Hardy's worldview. The world is a cold place. We are fatty candles that gutter and smoke for a short time and then are snuffed, leaving nothing behind but ashes and smoke, never to be remembered.

In a poem like The Ruined Maid, Hardy talks about a country girl who has left her life on the farm to become a prostitute (or perhaps a kept woman) in the city.

This was a common theme in later Victorian poetry; but poets were supposed to concentrate on how the girl who leaves behind her rustic innocence finds nothing but rejection, exploitation, and misery in her new life of pleasure. This is the message of work as early as Thomas Hood's Bridge of Sighs and as late as Watts' Found Drowned.

Hardy takes an opposite tack. The Ruined Maid is quite happy with the shallow luxuries of her new lifestyle: it is the innocent country girl she meets who is bitter, bedraggled, and uneducated in this poem.

Hardy's poem is much closer to the facts of the later nineteenth century (his treatment of the same topic in Tess of the Durbervilles is more ruthless still). The girls who worked in the sex industry in the new cities were often used ruthlessly, and their working lives - though comfortable - could be very short. But overall ten good years as a kept woman in Manchester or Liverpool was a better fate than fifty years of slow and stupid starvation as cheap farm labour:- which was the realistic alternative for most country girls born after the industrial revolution had stripped all the talented young men from the traditional farming areas.

As has always been common in mainstream literature, certain things were not talked about in polite Victorian society: including the way that a fallen woman could have a better life than an honest one during the era of the purity leagues.

Hardy - in poems like The Ruined Maid (and many others) - tells the truth, rather than the reassuring fiction.

This is why he was popular with suffragists, and other proto-feminist groups - but vilified by decent middle-class purity leaguers and their husbands.

Especially by their husbands.