John Darnielle writes his own version of a Thomas Hardy poem in the ode “Original Air-Blue Gown.”

Track: “Original Air-Blue Gown”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Voice” includes the lines “Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then // Even to the original air-blue gown!” The rest of the poem talks about Hardy waiting for a woman’s return, though he slowly begins to realize that she cannot return. He thinks he hears her voice but also worries that she is a ghost. We get the sensation that his fears are founded.

The narrator in “Original Air-Blue Gown” waits for a similar return with similar fears. They describe colorful surroundings: green horseflies, plums, and red air. All of that color leads to “dark blue shapes” that they can just make out through their eyelids and the statement “I am not afraid of death.”

When a character says that we generally think they’re talking about their own mortality, but we need to look deeper here. Hardy was describing his wife in “The Voice” and Darnielle’s narrator is definitely describing someone else’s passing. They obsess over a black-and-white boxing match and the youth and power of Cassius Clay, which shows that they’re tied up in the past. The repetition of “my God, my God, my God // he was something” helps lock the image in the listener’s mind. You can’t breeze past it any more than the narrator can.

At the end of “The Voice” Hardy’s character attempts to come to terms with reality. Darnielle’s believes that the target of his affection has returned. The backing strings intensify and lend bonus eeriness to the scene. As a callback to the earlier repetition, the narrator looks out into the clearing where either a ghost or a loved one is and says “it’s you, it’s you, it’s you.”