Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy published in 1917. His largest poetic collection (including as it did the wartime sequence 'Poems of War and Patriotism'),[1] Moments of Vision is (for Hardy's poetry) unusually unified in emotional tone, and is considered to include some of the finest work of his late poetic career.[2]
The key-note (and title) of the collection was given by the opening poem, with its examination of the mystery of consciousness in a material world,[3] setting the stage for the introspective meditation on human feeling that pervades much of the volume.[4] Having successfully achieved an integration of past and present in the Poems 1912-13,[5] Hardy was able to capitalise on his ability to work through long-buried emotions in the present, balancing the vitality of his past visions against the march of time.[6]
Some thirty poems related to his first wife, Emma,[7] while other notable poems included were "The Last Signal", on William Barnes,[8] and "Logs on the Hearth" about his recently deceased sister.[9]