by Thomas Hardy
And the shore’s sibilant tune.
So, it had been more due,
My friend,
Perhaps, had you not pulled this flower
From the craggy nook it knew,
And set it in an alien bower;
But left it where it grew!
COULD I BUT WILL
(SONG: Verses 1, 3, key major; verse 2, key minor)
Could I but will,
Will to my bent,
I’d have afar ones near me still,
And music of rare ravishment,
In strains that move the toes and heels!
And when the sweethearts sat for rest
The unbetrothed should foot with zest
Ecstatic reels.
Could I be head,
Head-god, “Come, now,
Dear girl,” I’d say, “whose flame is fled,
Who liest with linen-banded brow,
Stirred but by shakes from Earth’s deep core - “
I’d say to her: “Unshroud and meet
That Love who kissed and called thee Sweet! -
Yea, come once more!”
Even half-god power
In spinning dooms
Had I, this frozen scene should flower,
And sand-swept plains and Arctic glooms
Should green them gay with waving leaves,
Mid which old friends and I would walk
With weightless feet and magic talk
Uncounted eves.
SHE REVISITS ALONE THE CHURCH OF HER MARRIAGE
I have come to the church and chancel,
Where all’s the same!
- Brighter and larger in my dreams
Truly it shaped than now, meseems,
Is its substantial frame.
But, anyhow, I made my vow,
Whether for praise or blame,
Here in this church and chancel
Where all’s the same.
Where touched the check-floored chancel
My knees and his?
The step looks shyly at the sun,
And says, “‘Twas here the thing was done,
For bale or else for bliss!”
Of all those there I least was ware
Would it be that or this
When touched the check-floored chancel
My knees and his!
Here in this fateful chancel
Where all’s the same,
I thought the culminant crest of life
Was reached when I went forth the wife
I was not when I came.
Each commonplace one of my race,
Some say, has such an aim -
To go from a fateful chancel
As not the same.
Here, through this hoary chancel
Where all’s the same,
A thrill, a gaiety even, ranged
That morning when it seemed I changed
My nature with my name.
Though now not fair, though gray my hair,
He loved me, past proclaim,
Here in this hoary chancel,
Where all’s the same.
AT THE ENTERING OF THE NEW YEAR
I (OLD STYLE)
Our songs went up and out the chimney,
And roused the home-gone husbandmen;
Our allemands, our heys, poussettings,
Our hands-across and back again,
Sent rhythmic throbbings through the casements
On to the white highway,
Where nighted farers paused and muttered,
”Keep it up well, do they!”
The contrabasso’s measured booming
Sped at each bar to the parish bounds,
To shepherds at their midnight lambings,
To stealthy poachers on their rounds;
And everybody caught full duly
The notes of our delight,
As Time unrobed the Youth of Promise
Hailed by our sanguine sight.
II (NEW STYLE)
We stand in the dusk of a pine-tree limb,
As if to give ear to the muffled peal,
Brought or withheld at the breeze’s whim;
But our truest heed is to words that steal
From the mantled ghost that looms in the gray,
And seems, so far as our sense can see,
To feature bereaved Humanity,
As it sighs to the imminent year its say:-
”O stay without, O stay without,
Calm comely Youth, untasked, untired;
Though stars irradiate thee about
Thy entrance here is undesired.
Open the gate not, mystic one;
Must we avow what we would close confine?
With thee, good friend, we would have converse none,
Albeit the fault may not be thine.”
December 31. During the War.
THEY WOULD NOT COME
I travelled to where in her lifetime
She’d knelt at morning prayer,
To call her up as if there;
But she paid no heed to my suing,
As though her old haunt could win not
A thought from her spirit, or care.
I went where my friend had lectioned
The prophets in high declaim,
That my soul’s ear the same
Full tones should catch as aforetime;
But silenced by gear of the Present
Was the voice that once there came!
Where the ocean had sprayed our banquet
I stood, to recall it as then:
The same eluding again!
No vision. Shows contingent
Affrighted it further from me
Even than from my home-den.
When I found them no responders,
But fugitives prone to flee
From where they had used to be,
It vouched I had been led hither
As by night wisps in bogland,
And bruised the heart of me!
AFTER A ROMANTIC DAY
The railway bore him through
An earthen cutting out from a city:
There was no scope for view,
Though the frail light shed by a slim young moon
Fell like a friendly tune.
Fell like a liquid ditty,
And the blank lack of any charm
Of landscape did no harm.
The bald steep cutting, rigid, rough,
And moon-lit, was enough
For poetry of place: its weathered face
Formed a convenient sheet whereon
The visions of his mind were drawn.
THE TWO WIVES
(SMOKER’S CLUB-STORY)
I waited at home all the while they were boating together -
My wife and my near neighbour’s wife:
Till there entered a woman I loved more than life,
And we sat and sat on, and beheld the uprising dark weather,
With a sense that some mischief was rife.
Tidings came that the boat had capsized, and that one of the ladies
Was drowned - which of them was unknown:
And I marvelled - my friend’s wife? - or was it my own
Who had gone in such wise to the land where the sun as the shade is?
- We learnt it was his had so gone.
Then I cried in unrest: “He is free! But no good is releasing
To him as it would be to me!”
” - But it is,” said the woman I loved, quietly.
“How?” I asked her. “ - Because he has long loved me too without ceasing,
And it’s just the same thing, don’t you see.”
I KNEW A LADY
(CLUB SONG)
I knew a lady when the days
Grew long, and evenings goldened;
But I was not emboldened
By her prompt eyes and winning ways.
And when old Winter nipt the haws,
”Another’s wife I’ll
be,
And then you’ll care for me,”
She said, “and think how sweet I was!”
And soon she shone as another’s wife:
As such I often met her,
And sighed, “How I regret her!
My folly cuts me like a knife!”
And then, to-day, her husband came,
And moaned, “Why did you flout her?
Well could I do without her!
For both our burdens you are to blame!”
A HOUSE WITH A HISTORY
There is a house in a city street
Some past ones made their own;
Its floors were criss-crossed by their feet,
And their babblings beat
From ceiling to white hearth-stone.
And who are peopling its parlours now?
Who talk across its floor?
Mere freshlings are they, blank of brow,
Who read not how
Its prime had passed before
Their raw equipments, scenes, and says
Afflicted its memoried face,
That had seen every larger phase
Of human ways
Before these filled the place.
To them that house’s tale is theirs,
No former voices call
Aloud therein. Its aspect bears
Their joys and cares
Alone, from wall to wall.
A PROCESSION OF DEAD DAYS
I see the ghost of a perished day;
I know his face, and the feel of his dawn:
‘Twas he who took me far away
To a spot strange and gray:
Look at me, Day, and then pass on,
But come again: yes, come anon!
Enters another into view;
His features are not cold or white,
But rosy as a vein seen through:
Too soon he smiles adieu.
Adieu, O ghost-day of delight;
But come and grace my dying sight.
Enters the day that brought the kiss:
He brought it in his foggy hand
To where the mumbling river is,
And the high clematis;
It lent new colour to the land,
And all the boy within me manned.
Ah, this one. Yes, I know his name,
He is the day that wrought a shine
Even on a precinct common and tame,
As ‘twere of purposed aim.
He shows him as a rainbow sign
Of promise made to me and mine.
The next stands forth in his morning clothes,
And yet, despite their misty blue,
They mark no sombre custom-growths
That joyous living loathes,
But a meteor act, that left in its queue
A train of sparks my lifetime through.
I almost tremble at his nod -
This next in train - who looks at me
As I were slave, and he were god
Wielding an iron rod.
I close my eyes; yet still is he
In front there, looking mastery.
In the similitude of a nurse
The phantom of the next one comes:
I did not know what better or worse
Chancings might bless or curse
When his original glossed the thrums
Of ivy, bringing that which numbs.
Yes; trees were turning in their sleep
Upon their windy pillows of gray
When he stole in. Silent his creep
On the grassed eastern steep . . .
I shall not soon forget that day,
And what his third hour took away!
HE FOLLOWS HIMSELF
In a heavy time I dogged myself
Along a louring way,
Till my leading self to my following self
Said: “Why do you hang on me
So harassingly?”
“I have watched you, Heart of mine,” I cried,
”So often going astray
And leaving me, that I have pursued,
Feeling such truancy
Ought not to be.”
He said no more, and I dogged him on
From noon to the dun of day
By prowling paths, until anew
He begged: “Please turn and flee! -
What do you see?”
“Methinks I see a man,” said I,
”Dimming his hours to gray.
I will not leave him while I know
Part of myself is he
Who dreams such dree!”
“I go to my old friend’s house,” he urged,
”So do not watch me, pray!”
“Well, I will leave you in peace,” said I,
”Though of this poignancy
You should fight free:
“Your friend, O other me, is dead;
You know not what you say.”
- “That do I! And at his green-grassed door
By night’s bright galaxy
I bend a knee.”
- The yew-plumes moved like mockers’ beards,
Though only boughs were they,
And I seemed to go; yet still was there,
And am, and there haunt we
Thus bootlessly.
THE SINGING WOMAN
There was a singing woman
Came riding across the mead
At the time of the mild May weather,
Tameless, tireless;
This song she sung: “I am fair, I am young!”
And many turned to heed.
And the same singing woman
Sat crooning in her need
At the time of the winter weather;
Friendless, fireless,
She sang this song: “Life, thou’rt too long!”
And there was none to heed.
WITHOUT, NOT WITHIN HER
It was what you bore with you, Woman,
Not inly were,
That throned you from all else human,
However fair!
It was that strange freshness you carried
Into a soul
Whereon no thought of yours tarried
Two moments at all.
And out from his spirit flew death,
And bale, and ban,
Like the corn-chaff under the breath
Of the winnowing-fan.
O I WON’T LEAD A HOMELY LIFE
(To an old air)
“O I won’t lead a homely life
As father’s Jack and mother’s Jill,
But I will be a fiddler’s wife,
With music mine at will!
Just a little tune,
Another one soon,
As I merrily fling my fill!”
And she became a fiddler’s Dear,
And merry all day she strove to be;
And he played and played afar and near,
But never at home played he
Any little tune
Or late or soon;
And sunk and sad was she!
IN THE SMALL HOURS
I lay in my bed and fiddled
With a dreamland viol and bow,
And the tunes flew back to my fingers
I had melodied years ago.
It was two or three in the morning
When I fancy-fiddled so
Long reels and country-dances,
And hornpipes swift and slow.
And soon anon came crossing
The chamber in the gray
Figures of jigging fieldfolk -
Saviours of corn and hay -
To the air of “Haste to the Wedding,”
As after a wedding-day;
Yea, up and down the middle
In windless whirls went they!
There danced the bride and bridegroom,
And couples in a train,
Gay partners time and travail
Had longwhiles stilled amain! . . .
It seemed a thing for w
eeping
To find, at slumber’s wane
And morning’s sly increeping,
That Now, not Then, held reign.
THE LITTLE OLD TABLE
Creak, little wood thing, creak,
When I touch you with elbow or knee;
That is the way you speak
Of one who gave you to me!
You, little table, she brought -
Brought me with her own hand,
As she looked at me with a thought
That I did not understand.
- Whoever owns it anon,
And hears it, will never know
What a history hangs upon
This creak from long ago.
VAGG HOLLOW
Vagg Hollow is a marshy spot on the old Roman Road near Ilchester, where “things” are seen. Merchandise was formerly fetched inland from the canal-boats at Load-Bridge by waggons this way.
“What do you see in Vagg Hollow,
Little boy, when you go
In the morning at five on your lonely drive?”
“ - I see men’s souls, who follow
Till we’ve passed where the road lies low,
When they vanish at our creaking!
“They are like white faces speaking
Beside and behind the waggon -
One just as father’s was when here.
The waggoner drinks from his flagon,
(Or he’d flinch when the Hollow is near)
But he does not give me any.
“Sometimes the faces are many;
But I walk along by the horses,
He asleep on the straw as we jog;
And I hear the loud water-courses,
And the drops from the trees in the fog,
And watch till the day is breaking.
“And the wind out by Tintinhull waking;
I hear in it father’s call
As he called when I saw him dying,