by Thomas Hardy
Yet gaily sing
Until the pewter ring
Those songs we sang when we went gipsying.
And lightly dance
Some triple-timed romance
In coupled figures, and forget mischance;
And mourn not me
Beneath the yellowing tree;
For I shall mind not, slumbering peacefully.
THE RECALCITRANTS
Let us off and search, and find a place
Where yours and mine can be natural lives,
Where no one comes who dissects and dives
And proclaims that ours is a curious case,
That its touch of romance can scarcely grace.
You would think it strange at first, but then
Everything has been strange in its time.
When some one said on a day of the prime
He would bow to no brazen god again
He doubtless dazed the mass of men.
None will recognize us as a pair whose claims
To righteous judgment we care not making;
Who have doubted if breath be worth the taking,
And have no respect for the current fames
Whence the savour has flown while abide the names.
We have found us already shunned, disdained,
And for re-acceptance have not once striven;
Whatever offence our course has given
The brunt thereof we have long sustained.
Well, let us away, scorned unexplained.
STARLINGS ON THE ROOF
“No smoke spreads out of this chimney-pot,
The people who lived here have left the spot,
And others are coming who knew them not.
If you listen anon, with an ear intent,
The voices, you’ll find, will be different
From the well-known ones of those who went.”
“Why did they go? Their tones so bland
Were quite familiar to our band;
The comers we shall not understand.”
“They look for a new life, rich and strange;
They do not know that, let them range
Wherever they may, they will get no change.
“They will drag their house-gear ever so far
In their search for a home no miseries mar;
They will find that as they were they are,
“That every hearth has a ghost, alack,
And can be but the scene of a bivouac
Till they move perforce — no time to pack!”
THE MOON LOOKS IN
I
I have risen again,
And awhile survey
By my chilly ray
Through your window-pane
Your upturned face,
As you think, “Ah-she
Now dreams of me
In her distant place!”
II
I pierce her blind
In her far-off home:
She fixes a comb,
And says in her mind,
“I start in an hour;
Whom shall I meet?
Won’t the men be sweet,
And the women sour!”
THE SWEET HUSSY
In his early days he was quite surprised
When she told him she was compromised
By meetings and lingerings at his whim,
And thinking not of herself but him;
While she lifted orbs aggrieved and round
That scandal should so soon abound,
(As she had raised them to nine or ten
Of antecedent nice young men)
And in remorse he thought with a sigh,
How good she is, and how bad am I! -
It was years before he understood
That she was the wicked one — he the good.
THE TELEGRAM
“O he’s suffering — maybe dying — and I not there to aid,
And smooth his bed and whisper to him! Can I nohow go?
Only the nurse’s brief twelve words thus hurriedly conveyed,
As by stealth, to let me know.
“He was the best and brightest! — candour shone upon his brow,
And I shall never meet again a soldier such as he,
And I loved him ere I knew it, and perhaps he’s sinking now,
Far, far removed from me!”
- The yachts ride mute at anchor and the fulling moon is fair,
And the giddy folk are strutting up and down the smooth parade,
And in her wild distraction she seems not to be aware
That she lives no more a maid,
But has vowed and wived herself to one who blessed the ground she
trod
To and from his scene of ministry, and thought her history known
In its last particular to him — aye, almost as to God,
And believed her quite his own.
So great her absentmindedness she droops as in a swoon,
And a movement of aversion mars her recent spousal grace,
And in silence we two sit here in our waning honeymoon
At this idle watering-place . . .
What now I see before me is a long lane overhung
With lovelessness, and stretching from the present to the grave.
And I would I were away from this, with friends I knew when young,
Ere a woman held me slave.
THE MOTH-SIGNAL
(On Egdon Heath)
“What are you still, still thinking,”
He asked in vague surmise,
“That stare at the wick unblinking
With those great lost luminous eyes?”
“O, I see a poor moth burning
In the candle-flame,” said she,
Its wings and legs are turning
To a cinder rapidly.”
“Moths fly in from the heather,”
He said, “now the days decline.”
“I know,” said she. “The weather,
I hope, will at last be fine.
“I think,” she added lightly,
”I’ll look out at the door.
The ring the moon wears nightly
May be visible now no more.”
She rose, and, little heeding,
Her husband then went on
With his attentive reading
In the annals of ages gone.
Outside the house a figure
Came from the tumulus near,
And speedily waxed bigger,
And clasped and called her Dear.
“I saw the pale-winged token
You sent through the crack,” sighed she.
“That moth is burnt and broken
With which you lured out me.
“And were I as the moth is
It might be better far
For one whose marriage troth is
Shattered as potsherds are!”
Then grinned the Ancient Briton
From the tumulus treed with pine:
“So, hearts are thwartly smitten
In these days as in mine!”
SEEN BY THE WAITS
Through snowy woods and shady
We went to play a tune
To the lonely manor-lady
By the light of the Christmas moon.
We violed till, upward glancing
To where a mirror leaned,
We saw her airily dancing,
Deeming her movements screened;
Dancing alone in the room there,
Thin-draped in her robe of night;
Her postures, glassed in the gloom there,
Were a strange phantasmal sight.
She had learnt (we heard when homing)
That her roving spouse was dead;
Why she had danced in the gloaming
We thought, but never said.
THE TWO SOLDIERS
Just at the corner of the wall
We met — yes, he and I -
Who had not faced in camp or
hall
Since we bade home good-bye,
And what once happened came back — all -
Out of those years gone by.
And that strange woman whom we knew
And loved — long dead and gone,
Whose poor half-perished residue,
Tombless and trod, lay yon!
But at this moment to our view
Rose like a phantom wan.
And in his fixed face I could see,
Lit by a lurid shine,
The drama re-enact which she
Had dyed incarnadine
For us, and more. And doubtless he
Beheld it too in mine.
A start, as at one slightly known,
And with an indifferent air
We passed, without a sign being shown
That, as it real were,
A memory-acted scene had thrown
Its tragic shadow there.
THE DEATH OF REGRET
I opened my shutter at sunrise,
And looked at the hill hard by,
And I heartily grieved for the comrade
Who wandered up there to die.
I let in the morn on the morrow,
And failed not to think of him then,
As he trod up that rise in the twilight,
And never came down again.
I undid the shutter a week thence,
But not until after I’d turned
Did I call back his last departure
By the upland there discerned.
Uncovering the casement long later,
I bent to my toil till the gray,
When I said to myself, “Ah — what ails me,
To forget him all the day!”
As daily I flung back the shutter
In the same blank bald routine,
He scarcely once rose to remembrance
Through a month of my facing the scene.
And ah, seldom now do I ponder
At the window as heretofore
On the long valued one who died yonder,
And wastes by the sycamore.
IN THE DAYS OF CRINOLINE
A plain tilt-bonnet on her head
She took the path across the leaze.
- Her spouse the vicar, gardening, said,
“Too dowdy that, for coquetries,
So I can hoe at ease.
But when she had passed into the heath,
And gained the wood beyond the flat,
She raised her skirts, and from beneath
Unpinned and drew as from a sheath
An ostrich-feathered hat.
And where the hat had hung she now
Concealed and pinned the dowdy hood,
And set the hat upon her brow,
And thus emerging from the wood
Tripped on in jaunty mood.
The sun was low and crimson-faced
As two came that way from the town,
And plunged into the wood untraced . . .
When separately therefrom they paced
The sun had quite gone down.
The hat and feather disappeared,
The dowdy hood again was donned,
And in the gloom the fair one neared
Her home and husband dour, who conned
Calmly his blue-eyed blonde.
“To-day,” he said, “you have shown good sense,
A dress so modest and so meek
Should always deck your goings hence
Alone.” And as a recompense
He kissed her on the cheek.
THE ROMAN GRAVEMOUNDS
By Rome’s dim relics there walks a man,
Eyes bent; and he carries a basket and spade;
I guess what impels him to scrape and scan;
Yea, his dreams of that Empire long decayed.
“Vast was Rome,” he must muse, “in the world’s regard,
Vast it looms there still, vast it ever will be;”
And he stoops as to dig and unmine some shard
Left by those who are held in such memory.
But no; in his basket, see, he has brought
A little white furred thing, stiff of limb,
Whose life never won from the world a thought;
It is this, and not Rome, that is moving him.
And to make it a grave he has come to the spot,
And he delves in the ancient dead’s long home;
Their fames, their achievements, the man knows not;
The furred thing is all to him — nothing Rome!
“Here say you that Caesar’s warriors lie? -
But my little white cat was my only friend!
Could she but live, might the record die
Of Caesar, his legions, his aims, his end!”
Well, Rome’s long rule here is oft and again
A theme for the sages of history,
And the small furred life was worth no one’s pen;
Yet its mourner’s mood has a charm for me.
November 1910.
THE WORKBOX
“See, here’s the workbox, little wife,
That I made of polished oak.”
He was a joiner, of village life;
She came of borough folk.
He holds the present up to her
As with a smile she nears
And answers to the profferer,
“‘Twill last all my sewing years!”
“I warrant it will. And longer too.
‘Tis a scantling that I got
Off poor John Wayward’s coffin, who
Died of they knew not what.
“The shingled pattern that seems to cease
Against your box’s rim
Continues right on in the piece
That’s underground with him.
“And while I worked it made me think
Of timber’s varied doom;
One inch where people eat and drink,
The next inch in a tomb.
“But why do you look so white, my dear,
And turn aside your face?
You knew not that good lad, I fear,
Though he came from your native place?”
“How could I know that good young man,
Though he came from my native town,
When he must have left there earlier than
I was a woman grown?”
“Ah no. I should have understood!
It shocked you that I gave
To you one end of a piece of wood
Whose other is in a grave?”
“Don’t, dear, despise my intellect,
Mere accidental things
Of that sort never have effect
On my imaginings.”
Yet still her lips were limp and wan,
Her face still held aside,
As if she had known not only John,
But known of what he died.
THE SACRILEGE
A BALLAD-TRAGEDY
(Circa 182-)
PART I
“I have a Love I love too well
Where Dunkery frowns on Exon Moor;
I have a Love I love too well,
To whom, ere she was mine,
‘Such is my love for you,’ I said,
‘That you shall have to hood your head
A silken kerchief crimson-red,
Wove finest of the fine.’
“And since this Love, for one mad moon,
On Exon Wild by Dunkery Tor,
Since this my Love for one mad moon
Did clasp me as her king,
I snatched a silk-piece red and rare
From off a stall at Priddy Fair,
For handkerchief to hood her hair
When we went gallanting.
“Full soon the four weeks neared their end
Where Dunkery frowns on Exon Moor;
And when the four weeks neared their end,
And their swift sweets outwore,
I said, ‘What shall I do to own
And keep you here with me alone
As mine for evermore?’
“And as she drowsed within my van
On Exon Wild by Dunkery Tor -
And as she drowsed within my van,
And dawning turned to day,
She heavily raised her sloe-black eyes
And murmured back in softest wise,
‘One more thing, and the charms you prize
Are yours henceforth for aye.
“‘And swear I will I’ll never go
While Dunkery frowns on Exon Moor
To meet the Cornish Wrestler Joe
For dance and dallyings.
If you’ll to yon cathedral shrine,
And finger from the chest divine
Treasure to buy me ear-drops fine,
And richly jewelled rings.’
“I said: ‘I am one who has gathered gear
From Marlbury Downs to Dunkery Tor,
Who has gathered gear for many a year
From mansion, mart and fair;
But at God’s house I’ve stayed my hand,
Hearing within me some command -
Curbed by a law not of the land
From doing damage there.’
“Whereat she pouts, this Love of mine,
As Dunkery frowns on Exon Moor,
And still she pouts, this Love of mine,
So cityward I go.
But ere I start to do the thing,
And speed my soul’s imperilling
For one who is my ravishing
And all the joy I know,
“I come to lay this charge on thee -
On Exon Wild by Dunkery Tor -
I come to lay this charge on thee