The two houses

Abstract

The house is one of the most pervasive images used by both Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas in their writings on the past. Edward Thomas remarks in a letter to Gordon Bottomley: 'So far the best things I have done have been about houses. I have quite a long series - I discover, tho I did not design it.' Although this remark refers only to the prevalence of the house image in his prose his later poetry was to be equally prolific in the use of such imagery. Hardy has not noted this tendency in his work yet he, too, frequently resorts to the use of house imagery in his poetry. Both Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas share a mutual concern with the persistence of the past and in the work of both writers the image of the house plays a significant role in this regard. It is a nodal point upon which several of their different views on the inter-relatedness of past and present inevitably converge.