Im going to look at these in detail and see if there is any potential for me to use these in my adaptation.
The Ruined Maid -
This poem focuses on a maid who becomes 'ruined' when she looses her virginity, meaning a lack of future for her. This poem looks at how a woman changes when she becomes 'ruined' and how it affects her life. This is quite a shocking term to use in modern society so this may be quite challenging to adapt to modern day. This may be quite fun and exciting to do.
At Castle Boterel -
This poem looks at a more natural world, contrasting weather and love. I have found this extract from an essay which really captures what the poem is about.
'"At Castle Boterel", one of the greatest of Hardy's Poems of 1912-13, is an intensely personal poem, yet expresses universal truths on the subjects of loss, reclamation and time. An example of Hardy at his most emotionally evocative and philosophically profound, it chronicles his spiritual, intellectual and emotional journey following the death of his wife.
The background to the composition of "At Castle Boterel" is that of a physical journey itself - Hardy's pilgrimage to Cornwall. In the poem this journey is juxtaposed with a past journey, separated by time but not space, taken in a parallel March many years before. The comparative weather conditions belie Hardy's nostalgia for the past: the bleakness of the present "drizzle" and "fading byway" draws a sharp contrast with the "dry March weather" of the former journey. The use of the vivid present in "We climb the road" emphasises the clarity of the memory, blurring, as in many of the Poems of 1912-13, the boundaries between past and present, memory and reality.'