Thomas Hardy was an outstanding technician of every aspect of poetic music from the placing of a syllable to the architecture of a stanza. He also carried on into his poetry his novelist-self’s unflinching expeditions into the world’s darkness, demonstrating in verse too a healing power in constructive and steadfast pessimism on a par with the catharsis we take away from an evening at the Greek tragic theatre, calling his poems ‘explorations of reality’. By the time of his death in 1928, Hardy had some ten collections and nearly a thousand poems to his name, some of them acknowledged now as among the finest in English: from the beautifully momentous scena of the aged bird in ‘The Darkling Thrush’ whose song at dusk Hardy imagined heralding the new century against all the odds, through wonderful love poems, like ‘Beeny Cliff’ and ‘Thoughts of Phena’, to the robustly virtuoso pacing in his parable-like re-staging of the encounter of the Titanic and the iceberg in ‘The Convergence of the Twain’