Poems of 1912–1913 are an elegiac sequence written by Thomas Hardy in response to the death of his wife Emma, in November 1912. An unsentimental meditation upon a complex marriage, the sequence's emotional honesty and direct style made its poems some of the most effective and best-loved lyrics in the English language. In intensely personal poetic verse. Hardy addresses what the loss of a loved one means to the self: the ambiguous curse that forces one to abide faithfully to the memories of the dead, as well as reflection on and regret for the imperfections of their life together, pervade the poetry that Hardy produced as he reflected on the meaning of his own life in the new century. He wrote 15 poems named by the year of her death. Illustrative examples Three poems from Poems of 1912-1913, "Without Ceremony," "Beeny Cliff," and "At Castle Boterel", together represent experiences that Hardy and Emma had shared prior to their marriage. Consequently, these poems are Hardy's memory of that earlier time, placed in connection with his recent loss. "Without Ceremony" is about Emma's spontaneous nature. While it may perhaps be related to the last time she entertained guests who stayed longer than they should have, more significantly it conveys Hardy's sense (like many people in mourning) that he never had a proper chance to say good-bye to Emma. The lack of ceremony of her departure from life it details resonated with the estrangement of their marriage, which saw his growing indifference matched by her unpredictable attempts at independence. The resulting bitterness infusing Hardy's feelings was one of the motivations behind his subsequent pilgrimage to the places where he and Emma had first met, to recapture something of those happier times in his poetry. "Beeny Cliff" is one such poem. It begins with an idealised celebration of the young Emma's beauty, as first encountered at Beeny; before switching decades on to the present and her permanent absence. Hardy used the waves, "engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say" (ln. 5) that crashed against the cliff, as a metaphor for time, which moves forward mechanically, routinely, and without any concern for people. In the poem, Hardy is again on the cliff where he and Emma had once stood, and the landscape is the same, but the waves—or time—has taken Emma to a place where she no longer "cares for Beeny, and will laugh there