Tracking the Lost Hours

Another friend (here's to friends) pointed me in the direction of James Wood's recent review of the new Thomas Hardy biography by Claire Tomalin (subscription required), which includes this lovely (if somewhat dispiriting) paragraph:

Has anyone described the way light changes during the morning better than Hardy does, in his poem 'The Going': 'while I / Saw morning harden upon the wall.' One can see, with the help of these lines, the light becoming more solid, more densely itself; and of course our mornings harden in a different way, too: our days tend to begin loose with possibility, and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom accrete.