I agree that it’s not a big deal but that it probably would be (would have been) ideal if everything were included in one long thread in chronological order. I suspect that horse has already left the Hardy-esque barn, though, and this wonderful discussion cannot be rethreaded now.

Hardy seems to be a master at intensifying the emotion of a poem by the use of rather incongruous forms, “light” song forms conveying despair, as in, maybe most memorably, “The Voice,” where the elaborate form and “light and bubbly” three-syllable rhymes only intensify the personal memories of his dead wife:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you were not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me …