At Castle Boterel Summary & Analysis
by Thomas Hardy

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"At Castle Boterel" is an elegy from "Poems 1912-13," a sequence in which Thomas Hardy reflects on his years with his late wife Emma Gifford. In this poem, Hardy revisits a road they walked together early in their courtship, reminiscing on the beauty of the moment they shared and reckoning with the loss of the "girlish form" he loved. The poem suggests that love imprints certain moments in the memory, but that even the sweetest memories can't last forever. Because life is fleeting, moreover, it's important to confront the past in order to make the most of the future. Along with the rest of the "Poems 1912-13" sequence, "At Castle Boterel" appears in the collection Satires of Circumstance (1914).

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