What is the significance of time in Hardy's "At Castle Boterel"?

This poem, consisting of seven stanzas each of five lines (a quintet), comes from Hardy's 1912-13 sequence of poems, which were written to commemorate the death of his first wife, Emma Gifford, in 1912. Hardy and Gifford became estranged before Gifford's death, and Hardy was involved with another woman, Florence Dugdale, whom he married in 1914. In these poems, Hardy revisits and reflects upon his first marriage. It is unsurprising, therefore, that in "At Castle Boterel", a poem musing on things past, time becomes the dominant motif. The first stanza locates us in the present day ("As I drive to the junction of lane and highway", line 1) but it is not long before the speaker is "look[ing] behind at the fading byway" (line 3). What follows is a deeper and deeper tunnelling into the past which mirrors the speaker's deeper and deeper appreciation of the power of time. The "drizzle" which "bedrenches the waggonette" (line 2) of the present day is contrasted with the "dry March weather" (line 7) of the past, the alliterated "dr" acting as a link between the then and the now. The speaker recalls himself and his companion climbing the road up this hill many years ago, but this memory of the speaker's own personal past takes on a much greater significance as the poem asks: "Was there ever / A time of such quality, since or before, / In that hill's story?" (lines 16-18). Here the past grows in scale; we are asked to consider not just the speaker's life but the whole "story" of the ancient landscape which surrounds him. What is more, we look not only to all the time "before" this pair made the journey described, but also all the time "since", logically including up to the very present day in which we find ourselves reading these words written over a hundred years ago. This lends the poem a startling immediacy, and places what it describes at the centre of a story stretching from the distant past to the very current moment. The speaker thus maps out the vast sweep of time in order to focus in, like a laser beam, on this one particular event and underline its importance. And yet he is also acutely aware: "It filled but a minute” (line 16). The brevity of this line reflects the brevity of the moment itself, its impermanence. At the same time, the fact that it comes as a break in the middle of the line (a caesura), and thus unsettles the poem’s meter, suggests its significance. This paradox - between the power of the memory for the speaker and its actual insignificance in the grander scheme of time - is crucial to how this poem works and what it attempts to evoke in the reader or listener. Whilst for the speaker there may never have been “a time of such quality”, he knows also that this is the case only “to one mind” (line 18), i.e. his; “thousands more” have made this same journey up this same hill. From this, the poem takes a yet larger view of the scope of time, for even these thousands of people are only a small part of all that is “transitory in Earth’s long order” (line 23). Here, time assumes its greatest weight, from being a case purley of personal human memory to encompassing the story of the universe itself. In touching upon the “transitory”, the speaker acknowledges his and his companion’s smallness in the face of time: the “primaeval rocks” (line 21), which have been there much longer than them and will still be there after they have gone, will simply “record in colour and cast / [...] that we two passed” (lines 24-5). There is an interplay here between time and mortality, and indeed it is his companion’s passing, her death, which has acted as a catalyst for the speaker’s retrospection. But, whilst he accepts his own insignificance, he is nonetheless clear that the “rocks” will “record” their journey; they have made an indelible impression upon the world by having existed. This is an attempt to rescue meaning from the indifference of time, and the poem itself might be understood in much the same way. To write about this memory is to capture it, to somehow preserve it against time’s onward march, and of course to turn an event into literature is to endow it with significance. Poetry, therefore, might offer a solution where human memory and mortality fail, for in the speaker’s present, the image of the past is “shrinking, shrinking” (line 31) and he can only “look back at it amid the rain / For the very last time” (lines 32-3). The past inevitably recedes, the speaker seems to accept, but his very acceptance - his writing of what has been and can no longer be - is perhaps also his way of confronting “Time’s unflinching rigour” (line 26).