One wonders, of course, whether Hardy was aware at the time that these were premonitory rumbles of symphonies yet to be composed. As to the vexed question of the gender of the voice behind each of the titles, each reader will arrive at his or her own answer. The She and His suggest a portrait painter or photographer capturing the young woman s image, then wondering what thoughts lie beneath that anguished surface. The persona, in each case, is clearly a young woman speaking directly to us in an interior monologue, without any male consciousness mediating. All these unnamed shes are manifestations of the male poet s attempting to comprehend the female perspective.
Male ego does seem to lie at the heart of each situation.
In a reversal of the poor man and the lady, in She at His Funeral the poor woman remains to offer up her love on the altar of the dead rich man. In Her Confession, the rejected male lover struggles to understand the mentality of a beautiful woman who, although attracted to him, refuses to commit herself to him. In the second poem, the female, imagining herself dead and her lover in another relationship, upbraids him for forgetting her so easily, and so easily dismissing her when something about the second woman reminds him of her. The persona dismisses life as a fitful masquerade because such behaviour is common, reducing the one dead to A Thought. The injustice of lover here does not anger us so much as make us feel the poignancy of the situation.