Memory & Loss
Memory & Loss
Place and memory are deeply connected. Returning to a place — or even thinking about it — can trigger powerful emotions of loss, longing or grief. In this lesson we study three poems where place carries the weight of memory: Hardy’s “Where the Picnic was,” Fanthorpe’s “First Flight” and Jennings’s “Absence.” Each poet explores how a place can feel different once the people or emotions connected to it have gone.
Where the Picnic was — Thomas Hardy
Hardy (1840–1928) was a novelist and poet who often wrote about loss, regret and the passage of time. In “Where the Picnic was,” the speaker returns to a hilltop where a group once had a picnic. The weather is now bleak — “winter mire” — and the place feels emptied of its former happiness. The speaker finds the remains of the fire (“stick-ends, charred, / Still strew the sward”) and reflects that the people who shared the picnic have scattered: some have moved away, some have died.
Hardy uses the landscape as a pathetic fallacy for grief. The “winter mire” reflects the speaker’s emotional coldness, and the “charred sticks” are a physical remnant of a warm moment that has literally burned out. The poem is structured in short, clipped lines and unequal stanzas that shrink as it goes on, giving it a controlled, restrained quality — as though the speaker is holding back deeper emotion.
The charred sticks in Hardy’s poem work as a symbol of memory: they are the physical evidence of a past gathering, now cold and dead. The place itself has not changed, but its meaning has been transformed by loss. This idea — that place holds the ghost of what happened there — runs through all three poems in this lesson.
Hardy wrote many poems about loss and the passing of time, especially after the death of his first wife Emma in 1912. Although “Where the Picnic was” is not specifically about Emma, it fits Hardy’s characteristic mode of revisiting places that once held happiness and finding them emptied. His Dorset landscapes are never just scenery — they are saturated with memory and emotional significance.
First Flight — U A Fanthorpe
Fanthorpe (1929–2009) was a British poet known for her witty, humane observations of everyday life. “First Flight” describes the experience of leaving a place by aeroplane — watching the landscape shrink below as the plane takes off. The poem captures the strange sensation of seeing a familiar place from above: “earth slithers / Off at an angle,” and motorways, reservoirs and building sites shrink into a pattern.
The poem uses a gradual shift in perspective as the plane climbs. At ground level, the place is detailed and personal; from the air, it becomes abstract and impersonal. This spatial distancing becomes an emotional metaphor: leaving a place physically mirrors the way memories fade — details blur and what felt huge becomes small. Fanthorpe’s tone is not grief-stricken like Hardy’s but nervous and wry, and the poem ends far above everything the speaker knows: “At this height nothing lives.”
Absence — Elizabeth Jennings
Jennings (1926–2001) was part of “The Movement,” a group of 1950s British poets who valued clarity, restraint and emotional honesty. “Absence” is a short, intense poem about how a place changes when a loved person is no longer there. The speaker revisits the garden where the couple last met: the lawns are still tended and the fountains still play, so nothing looks different. The final lines show that calm surface breaking — “An earthquake tremor: fountain, birds and grass / Were shaken by my thinking of your name.”
Jennings uses a tight quintain structure — three five-line stanzas rhyming ABABA — and restrained language. The tone stays calm until the last stanza, where an “earthquake tremor” breaks through. “Absence” suggests that place and people are inseparable: the landscape is diminished not because it has physically changed but because the speaker’s perception of it has been altered by loss. The word “savage” carries the shock: it forces violence into a gentle garden and names what the loss feels like.
Jennings’s “Absence” turns the usual relationship between place and emotion around. The garden has not changed at all, and that is exactly why the loss hurts: “It was because the place was just the same / That made your absence seem a savage force.” By the end, it is the speaker’s own thought that shakes the scene. This insight — that we project our emotions onto places — is central to the theme of memory and loss in the anthology.
Hardy vs Jennings: Both return to a place transformed by absence. Hardy uses a specific object (charred sticks) as a symbol of memory; Jennings uses the whole landscape. Hardy’s tone is bleaker (pathetic fallacy, “winter mire”); Jennings is more philosophical, recognising that she herself has changed the landscape through her grief.
Fanthorpe vs Hardy: Both experience loss of a place, but differently. Fanthorpe’s loss is physical and spatial (the ground shrinks away during takeoff); Hardy’s is temporal (the same place at a different, sadder time). Fanthorpe captures the strangeness of departure; Hardy captures the sorrow of return.
Form: Hardy’s short lines and shrinking stanzas contain emotion; Fanthorpe’s rising viewpoint mirrors the plane’s climb; Jennings’s tight five-line stanzas compress feeling into the smallest possible space. All three poets use restraint rather than outpouring.