by Thomas Hardy
Perhaps that soldier’s fighting
In a land that’s far away,
Or he may be idly plighting
Some foreign hussy gay;
Or perhaps his bones are whiting
In the wind to their decay! . . .
Ah! — does he mind him how
The girls he saw that day
On the bridge, were sitting singing
At the time of curfew-ringing,
“Take me, Paddy; will you now, dear?
Paddy, will you now?”
GREY’S BRIDGE.
THE YOUNG CHURCHWARDEN
When he lit the candles there,
And the light fell on his hand,
And it trembled as he scanned
Her and me, his vanquished air
Hinted that his dream was done,
And I saw he had begun
To understand.
When Love’s viol was unstrung,
Sore I wished the hand that shook
Had been mine that shared her book
While that evening hymn was sung,
His the victor’s, as he lit
Candles where he had bidden us sit
With vanquished look.
Now her dust lies listless there,
His afar from tending hand,
What avails the victory scanned?
Does he smile from upper air:
“Ah, my friend, your dream is done;
And ‘tis YOU who have begun
To understand!
I TRAVEL AS A PHANTOM NOW
I travel as a phantom now,
For people do not wish to see
In flesh and blood so bare a bough
As Nature makes of me.
And thus I visit bodiless
Strange gloomy households often at odds,
And wonder if Man’s consciousness
Was a mistake of God’s.
And next I meet you, and I pause,
And think that if mistake it were,
As some have said, O then it was
One that I well can bear!
1915.
LINES TO A MOVEMENT IN MOZART’S E-FLAT SYMPHONY
Show me again the time
When in the Junetide’s prime
We flew by meads and mountains northerly! -
Yea, to such freshness, fairness, fulness, fineness, freeness,
Love lures life on.
Show me again the day
When from the sandy bay
We looked together upon the pestered sea! -
Yea, to such surging, swaying, sighing, swelling, shrinking,
Love lures life on.
Show me again the hour
When by the pinnacled tower
We eyed each other and feared futurity! -
Yea, to such bodings, broodings, beatings, blanchings, blessings,
Love lures life on.
Show me again just this:
The moment of that kiss
Away from the prancing folk, by the strawberry-tree! -
Yea, to such rashness, ratheness, rareness, ripeness, richness,
Love lures life on.
Begun November 1898.
IN THE SEVENTIES
“Qui deridetur ab amico suo sicut ego.” — JOB.
In the seventies I was bearing in my breast,
Penned tight,
Certain starry thoughts that threw a magic light
On the worktimes and the soundless hours of rest
In the seventies; aye, I bore them in my breast
Penned tight.
In the seventies when my neighbours — even my friend -
Saw me pass,
Heads were shaken, and I heard the words, “Alas,
For his onward years and name unless he mend!”
In the seventies, when my neighbours and my friend
Saw me pass.
In the seventies those who met me did not know
Of the vision
That immuned me from the chillings of mis-prision
And the damps that choked my goings to and fro
In the seventies; yea, those nodders did not know
Of the vision.
In the seventies nought could darken or destroy it,
Locked in me,
Though as delicate as lamp-worm’s lucency;
Neither mist nor murk could weaken or alloy it
In the seventies! — could not darken or destroy it,
Locked in me.
THE PEDIGREE
I
I bent in the deep of night
Over a pedigree the chronicler gave
As mine; and as I bent there, half-unrobed,
The uncurtained panes of my window-square let in the watery light
Of the moon in its old age:
And green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it
globed
Like a drifting dolphin’s eye seen through a lapping wave.
II
So, scanning my sire-sown tree,
And the hieroglyphs of this spouse tied to that,
With offspring mapped below in lineage,
Till the tangles troubled me,
The branches seemed to twist into a seared and cynic face
Which winked and tokened towards the window like a Mage
Enchanting me to gaze again thereat.
III
It was a mirror now,
And in it a long perspective I could trace
Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each
All with the kindred look,
Whose names had since been inked down in their place
On the recorder’s book,
Generation and generation of my mien, and build, and brow.
IV
And then did I divine
That every heave and coil and move I made
Within my brain, and in my mood and speech,
Was in the glass portrayed
As long forestalled by their so making it;
The first of them, the primest fuglemen of my line,
Being fogged in far antiqueness past surmise and reason’s reach.
V
Said I then, sunk in tone,
”I am merest mimicker and counterfeit! -
Though thinking, I AM I
AND WHAT I DO I DO MYSELF ALONE.”
— The cynic twist of the page thereat unknit
Back to its normal figure, having wrought its purport wry,
The Mage’s mirror left the window-square,
And the stained moon and drift retook their places there.
1916.
THIS HEART A WOMAN’S DREAM
At midnight, in the room where he lay dead
Whom in his life I had never clearly read,
I thought if I could peer into that citadel
His heart, I should at last know full and well
What hereto had been known to him alone,
Despite our long sit-out of years foreflown,
“And if,” I said, “I do this for his memory’s sake,
It would not wound him, even if he could wake.”
So I bent over him. He seemed to smile
With a calm confidence the whole long while
That I, withdrawing his heart, held it and, bit by bit,
Perused the unguessed things found written on it.
It was inscribed like a terrestrial sphere
With quaint vermiculations close and clear -
His graving. Had I known, would I have risked the stroke
Its reading brought, and my own heart nigh broke!
Yes, there at last, eyes opened, did I see
His whole sincere symmetric history;
There were his truth, his simple singlemindedness,
Strained, maybe, by time’s storms, but there no less.
There were the daily deeds from sun to sun
In blindness, but good faith, that he had done;
There were regr
ets, at instances wherein he swerved
(As he conceived) from cherishings I had deserved.
There were old hours all figured down as bliss -
Those spent with me — (how little had I thought this!)
There those when, at my absence, whether he slept or waked,
(Though I knew not ‘twas so!) his spirit ached.
There that when we were severed, how day dulled
Till time joined us anew, was chronicled:
And arguments and battlings in defence of me
That heart recorded clearly and ruddily.
I put it back, and left him as he lay
While pierced the morning pink and then the gray
Into each dreary room and corridor around,
Where I shall wait, but his step will not sound.
WHERE THEY LIVED
Dishevelled leaves creep down
Upon that bank to-day,
Some green, some yellow, and some pale brown;
The wet bents bob and sway;
The once warm slippery turf is sodden
Where we laughingly sat or lay.
The summerhouse is gone,
Leaving a weedy space;
The bushes that veiled it once have grown
Gaunt trees that interlace,
Through whose lank limbs I see too clearly
The nakedness of the place.
And where were hills of blue,
Blind drifts of vapour blow,
And the names of former dwellers few,
If any, people know,
And instead of a voice that called, “Come in, Dears,”
Time calls, “Pass below!”
THE OCCULTATION
When the cloud shut down on the morning shine,
And darkened the sun,
I said, “So ended that joy of mine
Years back begun.”
But day continued its lustrous roll
In upper air;
And did my late irradiate soul
Live on somewhere?
LIFE LAUGHS ONWARD
Rambling I looked for an old abode
Where, years back, one had lived I knew;
Its site a dwelling duly showed,
But it was new.
I went where, not so long ago,
The sod had riven two breasts asunder;
Daisies throve gaily there, as though
No grave were under.
I walked along a terrace where
Loud children gambolled in the sun;
The figure that had once sat there
Was missed by none.
Life laughed and moved on unsubdued,
I saw that Old succumbed to Young:
‘Twas well. My too regretful mood
Died on my tongue.
THE PEACE-OFFERING
It was but a little thing,
Yet I knew it meant to me
Ease from what had given a sting
To the very birdsinging
Latterly.
But I would not welcome it;
And for all I then declined
O the regrettings infinite
When the night-processions flit
Through the mind!
SOMETHING TAPPED
Something tapped on the pane of my room
When there was never a trace
Of wind or rain, and I saw in the gloom
My weary Beloved’s face.
“O I am tired of waiting,” she said,
”Night, morn, noon, afternoon;
So cold it is in my lonely bed,
And I thought you would join me soon!”
I rose and neared the window-glass,
But vanished thence had she:
Only a pallid moth, alas,
Tapped at the pane for me.
August 1913.
THE WOUND
I climbed to the crest,
And, fog-festooned,
The sun lay west
Like a crimson wound:
Like that wound of mine
Of which none knew,
For I’d given no sign
That it pierced me through.
A MERRYMAKING IN QUESTION
“I will get a new string for my fiddle,
And call to the neighbours to come,
And partners shall dance down the middle
Until the old pewter-wares hum:
And we’ll sip the mead, cyder, and rum!”
From the night came the oddest of answers:
A hollow wind, like a bassoon,
And headstones all ranged up as dancers,
And cypresses droning a croon,
And gurgoyles that mouthed to the tune.
I SAID AND SANG HER EXCELLENCE
(Fickle Lover’s Song)
I said and sang her excellence:
They called it laud undue.
(Have your way, my heart, O!)
Yet what was homage far above
The plain deserts of my olden Love
Proved verity of my new.
“She moves a sylph in picture-land,
Where nothing frosts the air:”
(Have your way, my heart, O!)
“To all winged pipers overhead
She is known by shape and song,” I said,
Conscious of licence there.
I sang of her in a dim old hall
Dream-built too fancifully,
(Have your way, my heart, O!)
But lo, the ripe months chanced to lead
My feet to such a hall indeed,
Where stood the very She.
Strange, startling, was it then to learn
I had glanced down unborn time,
(Have your way, my heart, O!)
And prophesied, whereby I knew
That which the years had planned to do
In warranty of my rhyme.
BY RUSHY-POND.
A JANUARY NIGHT (1879)
The rain smites more and more,
The east wind snarls and sneezes;
Through the joints of the quivering door
The water wheezes.
The tip of each ivy-shoot
Writhes on its neighbour’s face;
There is some hid dread afoot
That we cannot trace.
Is it the spirit astray
Of the man at the house below
Whose coffin they took in to-day?
We do not know.
A KISS
By a wall the stranger now calls his,
Was born of old a particular kiss,
Without forethought in its genesis;
Which in a trice took wing on the air.
And where that spot is nothing shows:
There ivy calmly grows,
And no one knows
What a birth was there!
That kiss is gone where none can tell -
Not even those who felt its spell:
It cannot have died; that know we well.
Somewhere it pursues its flight,
One of a long procession of sounds
Travelling aethereal rounds
Far from earth’s bounds
In the infinite.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
They came, the brothers, and took two chairs
In their usual quiet way;
And for a time we did not think
They had much to say.
And they began and talked awhile
Of ordinary things,
Till spread that silence in the room
A pent thought brings.
And then they said: “The end has come.
Yes: it has come at last.”
And we looked down, and knew that day
A spirit had passed.
THE OXEN
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
”Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictur
ed the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
”Come; see the oxen kneel
“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
1915.
THE TRESSES
”When the air was damp
It made my curls hang slack
As they kissed my neck and back
While I footed the salt-aired track
I loved to tramp.
”When it was dry
They would roll up crisp and tight
As I went on in the light
Of the sun, which my own sprite
Seemed to outvie.
”Now I am old;
And have not one gay curl
As I had when a girl
For dampness to unfurl
Or sun uphold!”
THE PHOTOGRAPH
The flame crept up the portrait line by line
As it lay on the coals in the silence of night’s profound,
And over the arm’s incline,
And along the marge of the silkwork superfine,
And gnawed at the delicate bosom’s defenceless round.
Then I vented a cry of hurt, and averted my eyes;
The spectacle was one that I could not bear,
To my deep and sad surprise;