by Thomas Hardy
Where the now-visioned fountain its attenuate crystal sheds
In passive lapse that seems to ignore the yon world’s clamorous clutch,
And lays an insistent numbness on the place, like a cold hand’s touch.
And there swaggers the Shade of a straddling King, plumed, sworded, with sensual face,
And lo, too, that of his Minister, at a bold self-centred pace:
Sheer in the sun they pass; and thereupon all is still,
Save the mindless fountain tinkling on with thin enfeebled will.
WHEN DEAD
TO — — —
It will be much better when
I am under the bough;
I shall be more myself, Dear, then,
Than I am now.
No sign of querulousness
To wear you out
Shall I show there: strivings and stress
Be quite without.
This fleeting life-brief blight
Will have gone past
When I resume my old and right
Place in the Vast.
And when you come to me
To show you true,
Doubt not I shall infallibly
Be waiting you.
SINE PROLE
(MEDIAEVAL LATIN SEQUENCE-METRE)
Forth from ages thick in mystery,
Through the morn and noon of history,
To the moment where I stand
Has my line wound: I the last one —
Outcome of each spectral past one
Of that file, so many-manned!
Nothing in its time-trail marred it:
As one long life I regard it
Throughout all the years till now,
When it fain — the close seen coming —
After annals past all plumbing —
Makes to Being its parting bow.
Unlike Jahveh’s ancient nation,
Little in their line’s cessation
Moderns see for surge of sighs:
They have been schooled by lengthier vision,
View Life’s lottery with misprision,
And its dice that fling no prize!
TEN YEARS SINCE
‘Tis ten years since
I saw her on the stairs,
Heard her in house-affairs,
And listened to her cares;
And the trees are ten feet taller,
And the sunny spaces smaller
Whose bloomage would enthrall her;
And the piano wires are rustier,
The smell of bindings mustier,
And lofts and lumber dustier
Than when, with casual look
And ear, light note I took
Of what shut like a book
Those ten years since!
Nov. 1922.
EVERY ARTEMISIA
“Your eye-light wanes with an ail of care,
Frets freeze gray your face and hair.”
“I was the woman who met him,
Then cool and keen,
Whiling away
Time, with its restless scene on scene
Every day.”
“Your features fashion as in a dream
Of things that were, or used to seem.”
“I was the woman who won him:
Steadfast and fond
Was he, while I
Tepidly took what he gave, nor conned
Wherefore or why.”
“Your house looks blistered by a curse,
As if a wraith ruled there, or worse.”
“I was the woman who slighted him:
Far from my town
Into the night
He went. . . . My hair, then auburn-brown,
Pangs have wanned white.”
“Your ways reflect a monstrous gloom;
Your voice speaks from within a tomb.”
“I was the woman who buried him:
My misery
God laughed to scorn:
The people said: ‘‘Twere well if she
Had not been born!’”
“You plod to pile a monument
So madly that your breath is spent.”
“I am the woman who god him:
I build, to ease
My scalding fires,
A temple topping the Deities’
Fanes of my sires.”
THE BEST SHE COULD
Nine leaves a minute
Swim down shakily;
Each one fain would spin it
Straight to earth; but, see,
How the sharp airs win it
Slantwise away! — Hear it say,
“Now we have finished our summer show
Of what we knew the way to do:
Alas, not much! But, as things go,
As fair as any. And night-time calls,
And the curtain falls!”
Sunlight goes on shining
As if no frost were here,
Blackbirds seem designing
Where to build next year;
Yet is warmth declining:
And still the day seems to say,
“Saw you how Dame Summer drest?
Of all God taught her she bethought her!
Alas, not much! And yet the best
She could, within the too short time
Granted her prime.”
Nov. 8, 1923.
THE GRAVEYARD OF DEAD CREEDS
I lit upon the graveyard of dead creeds
In wistful wanderings through old wastes of thought,
Where bristled fennish fungi, fruiting nought,
Amid the sepulchres begirt with weeds,
Which stone by stone recorded sanct, deceased
Catholicons that had, in centuries flown,
Physicked created man through his long groan,
Ere they went under, all their potence ceased.
When in a breath-while, lo, their spectres rose
Like wakened winds that autumn summons up: —
“Out of us cometh an heir, that shall disclose
New promise!” cried they. “And the caustic cup
“We ignorantly upheld to men, be filled
With draughts more pure than those we ever distilled,
That shall make tolerable to sentient seers
The melancholy marching of the years.”
THERE SEEMED A STRANGENESS
A PHANTASY
There seemed a strangeness in the air,
Vermilion light on the land’s lean face;
I heard a Voice from I knew not where: —
“The Great Adjustment is taking place!
“I set thick darkness over you,
And fogged you all your years therein;
At last I uncloud your view,
Which I am weary of holding in.
“Men have not heard, men have not seen
Since the beginning of the world
What earth and heaven mean;
But now their curtains shall be furled,
“And they shall see what is, ere long,
Not through a glass, but face to face;
And Right shall disestablish Wrong:
The Great Adjustment is taking place.”
A NIGHT OF QUESTIONINGS
On the eve of All-Souls’ Day
I heard the dead men say
Who lie by the tottering tower,
To the dark and doubling wind
At the midnight’s turning hour,
When other speech had thinned:
“What of the world now?”
The wind whiffed back: “Men still
Who are born, do good, do ill
Here, just as in your time:
Till their years the locust hath eaten,
Leaving them bare, downbeaten;
Somewhiles in springtide rime,
Somewhiles in summer glow,
Somewhiles in winter snow: —
No more I know.”
The same eve I caught cry
To the selfsame wind,
those dry
As dust beneath the aisles
Of old cathedral piles,
Walled up in vaulted biers
Through many Christian years:
“What of the world now?”
Sighed back the circuiteer:
“Men since your time, shrined here
By deserved ordinance,
Their own craft, or by chance,
Which follows men from birth
Even until under earth,
But little difference show
When ranged in sculptured row,
Different as dyes although: —
No more I know.”
On the selfsame eve, too, said
Those swayed in the sunk sea-bed
To the selfsame wind as it played
With the tide in the starless shade
From Comorin to Horn,
And round by Wrath forlorn:
“What of the world now?”
And the wind for a second ceased,
Then whirred: “Men west and east,
As each sun soars and dips,
Go down to the sea in ships
As you went — hither and thither;
See the wonders of the deep,
As you did, ere they sleep;
But few at home care whither
They wander to and fro;
Themselves care little also! —
No more I know.”
Said, too, on the selfsame eve
The troubled skulls that heave
And fust in the flats of France,
To the wind wayfaring over
Listlessly as in trance
From the Ardennes to Dover,
“What of the world now?”
And the farer moaned: “As when
You mauled these fields, do men
Set them with dark-drawn breaths
To knave their neighbours’ deaths
In periodic spasms!
Yea, fooled by foul phantasms,
In a strange cyclic throe
Backward to type they go: —
No more I know.”
That night, too, men whose crimes
Had cut them off betimes,
Who lay within the pales
Of town and county jails
With the rope-groove on them yet,
Said to the same wind’s fret,
“What of the world now?”
And the blast in its brooding tone
Returned: “Men have not shown,
Since you were stretched that morning,
A white cap your adorning,
More lovely deeds or true
Through thus neck-knotting you;
Or that they purer grow,
Or ever will, I trow! —
No more I know.”
XENOPHANES, THE MONIST OF COLOPHON
Ann: aet: suae XCII. — A: C: CCCCLXXX.
“Are You groping Your way?
Do You do it unknowing? —
Or mark Your wind blowing?
Night tell You from day,
O Mover? Come, say!”
Cried Xenophanes.
“I mean, querying so,
Do You do it aware,
Or by rote, like a player,
Or in ignorance, nor care
Whether doing or no?”
Pressed Xenophanes
“Thus strive I to plumb
Your depths, O Great Dumb! —
Not a god, but the All
(As I read); yet a thrall
To a blind ritual,”
Sighed Xenophanes.
“If I only could bring
You to own it, close Thing,
I would write it again
With a still stronger pen
To my once neighbour-men!”
Said Xenophanes.
— Quoth the listening Years:
“You ask It in vain;
You waste sighs and tears
On these callings inane,
Which It grasps not nor hears,
O Xenophanes!
“When you penned what you thought
You were cast out, and sought
A retreat over sea
From aroused enmity:
So it always will be,
Yea, Xenophanes!
“In the lone of the nights
At Elea unseen,
Where the swinging wave smites
Of the restless Tyrrhene,
You may muse thus, serene,
Safe, Xenophanes.
“But write it not back
To your dear Colophon;
Brows still will be black
At your words, ‘All is One,’
From disputers thereon,
Know, Xenophanes.
“Three thousand years hence,
Men who hazard a clue
To this riddle immense,
And still treat it as new,
Will be scowled at, like you,
O Xenophanes!
“‘Some day I may tell,
When I’ve broken My spell,’
It snores in Its sleep
If you listen long, deep
At Its closely-sealed cell,
Wronged Xenophanes!
“Yea, on, near the end,
Its doings may mend;
Aye, when you’re forgotten,
And old cults are rotten,
And bulky codes shotten,
Xenophanes!”
1921.
LIFE AND DEATH AT SUNRISE
(NEAR DOGBURY GATE, 1867)
The hills uncap their tops
Of woodland, pasture, copse,
And look on the layers of mist
At their foot that still persist:
They are like awakened sleepers on one elbow lifted,
Who gaze around to learn if things during night have shifted.
A waggon creaks up from the fog
With a laboured leisurely jog;
Then a horseman from off the hill-tip
Comes clapping down into the dip;
While woodlarks, finches, sparrows, try to entune at one time,
And cocks and hens and cows and bulls take up the chime.
With a shouldered basket and flagon
A man meets the one with the waggon,
And both the men halt of long use.
“Well,” the waggoner says, “what’s the news?”
“ — ’Tis a boy this time. You’ve just met the doctor trotting back.
She’s doing very well. And we think we shall call him ‘Jack.’
“And what have you got covered there?”
He nods to the waggon and mare.
“Oh, a coffin for old John Thinn:
We are just going to put him in.”
“ — So he’s gone at last. He always had a good constitution.”
“ — He was ninety-odd. He could call up the French Revolution.”
NIGHT-TIME IN MID-FALL
It is a storm-strid night, winds footing swift
Through the blind profound;
I know the happenings from their sound;
Leaves totter down still green, and spin and drift;
The tree-trunks rock to their roots, which wrench and lift
The loam where they run onward underground.
The streams are muddy and swollen; eels migrate
To a new abode;
Even cross, ‘tis said, the turnpike-road;
(Men’s feet have felt their crawl, home-coming late):
The westward fronts of towers are saturate,
Church-timbers crack, and witches ride abroad.
A SHEEP FAIR
The day arrives of the autumn fair,
And torrents fall,
Though sheep in throngs are gathered there,
Ten thousand all,
Sodden, with hurdles round them reared:
And, lot by lot, the pens are cleared,
And the auctioneer wrings out his beard,
And wip
es his book, bedrenched and smeared,
And rakes the rain from his face with the edge of his hand,
As torrents fall.
The wool of the ewes is like a sponge
With the daylong rain:
Jammed tight, to turn, or lie, or lunge,
They strive in vain.
Their horns are soft as finger-nails,
Their shepherds reek against the rails,
The tied dogs soak with tucked-in tails,
The buyers’ hat-brims fill like pails,
Which spill small cascades when they shift their stand
In the daylong rain.
POSTSCRIPT
Time has trailed lengthily since met
At Pummery Fair
Those panting thousands in their wet
And woolly wear:
And every flock long since has bled,
And all the dripping buyers have sped,
And the hoarse auctioneer is dead,
Who “Going — going!” so often said,
As he consigned to doom each meek, mewed band
At Pummery Fair.
SNOW IN THE SUBURBS
Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.
A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes.
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.
The steps are a blanched slope,