The museum fossilizes the memory in the shape of a «mould», one of those countless metaphors for the imprints left by memories of which Hardy’s later poetry is so full, while at the same time suggesting something of the poet’s effort to free himself of such petrifying disembodied images.ĥFor all that, Hardy’s metaphor does little more than afford the possibility of providing the memories with a locus («lodges in me»), a possibility which the second stanza sharply refutes with its emphasis on the still unchartered territories of the «visionless wilds of space». It also establishes a hierarchy between the visible and the audible, both being eventually subsumed under the adjective «visionless», which is not quite synonymous with «visionary» in Hardy’s carefully chosen phraseology. (Hardy 430)ĤHere, the poem does not merely blur the frontier between an actual museum and a museum of the mind, most notably through the use of the indefinite article in the title. In the full-fugued song of the universe unending. Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard,
Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird That lodges in me still with its sweet singing. There’s a contralto voice I heard last night, Which over the earth before man came was winging Here’s the mould of a musical bird long passed from light,
Although it first appeared in his 1917 collection, Moments of Vision, Thomas Hardy’s short poem «In a Museum» is a case in point, as it retains some of the characteristics of the Victorian museum poem: It became, in the true sense of the word, a site of memory, that is a place where to fix memories in place. By then the new scheme for the National Gallery had also been launched, but it was only in the latter half of the nineteenth century that museuming became common practice, with the creation of the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as other major artistic sites such as the Museum and Art Gallery in Birmingham, which opened in 1886.ģWith the opening almost at one go of so many locations, the museum soon provided a new metaphor for the workings of memory in poetry. Not until a century later did the British Museum open to the general public, a fact which, as Dillon Johnston remarks, almost coincided with the coinage of the word «museuming» in 1838 (Johnston 215, n20). Imagiste» for the rest of her life (Kenner 174).ĢAlthough the Sloan Collection, later renamed the British Museum, opened in the eighteenth century, it would be wrong to regard this modernist trend as a legacy of the Enlightenment. It was there, among recently discovered fragments of Greek manuscripts or Egyptian strips of used papyrus, that some of them acquired a taste for the poem in tatters (Kenner 50-51), and there also, if we are to believe undocumented sources of the incident, that Hilda Doolittle had her name slashed by Ezra Pound and was established as «H. The British Museum, in particular, seems to have been a favourite haunt of modernist writers, both because of its treasures and its tea room. En cherchant à modeler les lieux de mémoire, hérités de la période classique, sur la répartition des salles dans un musée ou une galerie d’art, la poésie moderniste muséographique a ainsi donné une nouvelle dimension aux poèmes victoriens inspirés du musée.ġHugh Kenner’s critically acclaimed study of modernism, The Pound Era, reminds us almost on every page how inextricably linked with museums was the birth of that movement, and its attendant legend. Prenant successivement appui sur « The Municipal Gallery Re-visited » de Yeats, et « Musée des Beaux Arts » d’Auden, cet article entend démontrer que la poésie moderniste a réactivé certaines des préoccupations qui furent celles des auteurs de traités sur l’art de la mémoire dans l’Antiquité. Toutefois, ces poèmes (notamment ceux de Tennyson ou de Hardy) n’ont pas encore la complexité que la poésie anglo-irlandaise de la première moitié du XX e siècle leur conférera. La poésie de l’ère victorienne témoigne ainsi de l’importance croissante du musée comme modèle de la représentation du fonctionnement de la mémoire. Le début du XIX e siècle anglais, époque où de nombreux musées et galeries s’ouvrent, voit se multiplier les poèmes consacrés aux musées ou aux galeries.
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