by Thomas Hardy
New Year’s Eve, 1922.
SO, TIME
(THE SAME THOUGHT RESUMED)
So, Time,
Royal, sublime;
Heretofore held to be
Master and enemy,
Thief of my Love’s adornings,
Despoiling her to scornings: —
The sound philosopher
Now sets him to aver
You are nought
But a thought
Without reality.
Young, old,
Passioned, cold,
All the loved-lost thus
Are beings continuous,
In dateless dure abiding,
Over the present striding
With placid permanence
That knows not transience:
Firm in the Vast,
First, last;
Afar, yet close to us.
AN INQUIRY
A PHANTASY
Circumdederunt me dolores mortis. — Ps. xviii.
I said to It: “We grasp not what you meant,
(Dwelling down here, so narrowly pinched and pent)
By crowning Death the King of the Firmament:
— The query I admit to be
One of unwonted size,
But it is put you sorrowingly,
And not in idle-wise.”
“Sooth, since you ask me gravely,” It replied,
“Though too incisive questions I have decried,
This shows some thought, and may be justified.
I’ll gauge its value as I go
Across the Universe,
And bear me back in a moment or so
And say, for better or worse.”
Many years later, when It came again,
“That matter an instant back which brought you pain,”
It said, “and you besought me to explain:
Well, my forethoughtless modes to you
May seem a shameful thing,
But — I’d no meaning, that I knew,
In crowning Death as King!”
THE FAITHFUL SWALLOW
When summer shone
Its sweetest on
An August day,
“Here evermore,”
I said, “I’ll stay;
Not go away
To another shore
As fickle they!”
December came:
‘Twas not the same!
I did not know
Fidelity
Would serve me so.
Frost, hunger, snow;
And now, ah me,
Too late to go!
IN SHERBORNE ABBEY
(17**)
The moon has passed to the panes of the south-aisle wall,
And brought the mullioned shades and shines to fall
On the cheeks of a woman and man in a pew there, pressed
Together as they pant, and recline for rest.
Forms round them loom, recumbent like their own,
Yet differing; for they are chiselled in frigid stone;
In doublets are some; some mailed, as whilom ahorse they leapt:
And stately husbands and wives, side by side as they anciently slept.
“We are not like those,” she murmurs. “For ever here set!”
“True, Love,” he replies. “We two are not marble yet.”
“And, worse,” said she; “not husband and wife!”
“But we soon shall be” (from him) “if we’ve life!”
A silence. A trotting of horses is heard without.
The lovers scarce breathe till its echo has quite died out.
“It was they! They have passed, anyhow!”
“Our horse, slily hid by the conduit,
They’ve missed, or they’d rushed to impound it!”
“And they’ll not discover us now.”
“Will not, until ‘tis too late,
And we can outface them straight!”
“Why did you make me ride in your front?” says she.
“To outwit the law. That was my strategy.
As I was borne off on the pillion behind you,
Th’abductor was you, Dearest, let me remind you;
And seizure of me by an heiress is no felony,
Whatever to do it with me as the seizer may be.”
Another silence sinks. And a cloud comes over the moon:
The print of the panes upon them enfeebles, as fallen in a swoon,
Until they are left in darkness unbroke and profound,
As likewise are left their chill and chiselled neighbours around.
A Family tradition.
THE PAIR HE SAW PASS
O sad man, now a long dead man,
To whom it was so real,
I picture, as ‘twere yesterday,
How you would tell the tale!
Just wived were you, you sad dead man,
And “settling down,” you’d say,
And had rigged the house you had reared for yourself
And the mate now yours alway.
You had eyed and tried each door and lock,
And cupboard, and bell, and glass,
When you glanced across to the road without,
And saw a carriage pass.
It bowled along from the old town-gate;
Two forms its freight, and those
Were a just-joined pair, as you discerned
By the favours and the bows.
And one of the pair you saw was a Fair
Whom you had wooed awhile,
And the other you saw, with a creeping awe,
Was yourself, in bridegroom style.
“And there we rode as man and wife
In the broad blaze of the sun,”
Would you aver; yea, you with her
You had left for another one.
“The morning,” you said, my friend long dead,
“Was ordinary and fine;
And yet there gleamed, it somehow seemed,
At moments, a strange shine.”
You hailed a boy from your garden-plot,
And sent him along the way
To the parish church; whence word was brought
No marriage had been that day.
You mused, you said; till you heard anon
That at that hour she died
Whom once, instead of your living wife,
You had meant to make your bride. . . .
You, dead man, dwelt in your new-built house
With no great spirit or will,
And after your soon decease your spouse
Re-mated: she lives there still.
Which should be blamed, if either can,
The teller does not know
For your mismatch, O weird-wed man,
Or what you thought was so.
From an old draft.
THE MOCK WIFE
It’s a dark drama, this; and yet I know the house, and date;
That is to say, the where and when John Channing met his fate.
The house was one in High Street, seen of burghers still alive,
The year was some two centuries bygone; seventeen-hundred and five
And dying was Channing the grocer. All the clocks had struck eleven,
And the watchers saw that ere the dawn his soul would be in Heaven;
When he said on a sudden: “I should like to kiss her before I go, —
For one last time!” They looked at each other and murmured, “Even so.”
She’d just been haled to prison, his wife; yea, charged with shaping his death:
By poison, ‘twas told; and now he was nearing the moment of his last breath:
He, witless that his young housemate was suspect of such a crime,
Lay thinking that his pangs were but a malady of the time.
Outside the room they pondered gloomily, wondering what to do,
As still he craved her kiss — the dying man who nothing knew:
“Guilty she may not be,” they said; “so why
should we torture him
In these his last few minutes of life? Yet how indulge his whim?”
And as he begged there piteously for what could not be done,
And the murder-charge had flown about the town to every one,
The friends around him in their trouble thought of a hasty plan,
And straightway set about it. Let denounce them all who can.
“O will you do a kindly deed — it may be a soul to save;
At least, great misery to a man with one foot in the grave?”
Thus they to the buxom woman not unlike his prisoned wife;
“The difference he’s past seeing; it will soothe his sinking life.”
Well, the friendly neighbour did it; and he kissed her; held her fast;
Kissed her again and yet again. “I — knew she’d — come at last! —
Where have you been? — Ah, kept away! — I’m sorry — overtried —
God bless you!” And he loosed her, fell back tiredly, and died.
His wife stood six months after on the scaffold before the crowd,
Ten thousand of them gathered there; fixed, silent, and hard-browed.
To see her strangled and burnt to dust, as was the verdict then
On women truly judged, or false, of doing to death their men.
Some of them said as they watched her burn: “I am glad he never knew,
Since a few hold her as innocent — think such she could not do!
Glad, too, that (as they tell) he thought she kissed him ere he died.”
And they seemed to make no question that the cheat was justified.
THE FIGHT ON DURNOVER MOOR
(183*)
We’d loved, we two, some while,
And that had come which comes when men too much beguile;
And without more ado
My lady said: “O shame! Get home, and hide!” But he was true.
Yes: he was true to me,
And helped me some miles homealong; and vowing to come
Before the weeks were three,
And do in church a deed should strike all scandal dumb.
And when we had traipsed to Grey’s great Bridge, and pitched my box
On its cope, to breathe us there,
He cried: “What wrangle’s that in yonder moor? Those knocks,
Gad, seem not to be fair!
“And a woman on her knees! . . . I’ll go. . . . There’s surely something wrong!”
I said: “You are tired and spent
With carrying my heavy things so far and long!”
But he would go, and went.
And there I stood, steadying my box, and screened from none,
Upon the crown of the bridge,
Ashamed o’ my shape, as lower and lower slipped the sun
Down behind Pummery Ridge. . . .
“O you may long wait so!
Your young man’s done — aye, dead!” they by and by ran and cried.
“You shouldn’t have let him go
And join that whorage, but have kept him at your side!
“It was another wench,
Biggening as you, that he championed: yes, he came on straight
With a warmth no words could quench
For her helpless face, as soon as ever he eyed her state,
“And fought her fancy-lad, who had used her far from well,
So soon to make her moan,
Aye, closed with him in fight, till at a blow yours fell,
His skull against a stone.
“She’d followed him there, this man who’d won her, and overwon,
So, when he set to twit her
Yours couldn’t abide him — him all other fighters shun,
For he’s a practised hitter.
“Your man moved not, and the constables came for the other; so he,
He’ll never make her his wife
Any more than yours will you; for they say that at least ‘twill be
Across the water for life.”
“O what has she brought about!”
I groaned; “this woman met here in my selfsame plight;
She’s put another yielding heart’s poor candle out
By dogging her man to-night!
“He might never have done her his due
Of amends! But mine had bidden the banns for marrying me!
Why did we rest on this bridge; why rush to a quarrel did he
With which he had nothing to do!”
But vain were bursts of blame:
We twain stood like and like, though strangers till that hour,
Foredoomed to tread our paths beneath like gaze and glower,
Bear a like blushful name.
Almost the selfsame day
It fell that her time and mine came on, — a lad and a lass:
The father o’ mine was where the worms waggle under the grass,
Of hers, at Botany Bay.
LAST LOOK ROUND ST. MARTIN’S FAIR
The sun is like an open furnace door,
Whose round revealed retort confines the roar
Of fires beyond terrene;
The moon presents the lustre-lacking face
Of a brass dial gone green,
Whose hours no eye can trace.
The unsold heathcroppers are driven home
To the shades of the Great Forest whence they come
By men with long cord-waistcoats in brown monochrome.
The stars break out, and flicker in the breeze,
It seems, that twitches the trees. —
From its hot idol soon
The fickle unresting earth has turned to a fresh patroon —
The cold, now brighter, moon.
The woman in red, at the nut-stall with the gun,
Lights up, and still goes on:
She’s redder in the flare-lamp than the sun
Showed it ere it was gone.
Her hands are black with loading all the day,
And yet she treats her labour as ‘twere play,
Tosses her ear-rings, and talks ribaldry
To the young men around as natural gaiety,
And not a weary work she’d readily stay,
And never again nut-shooting see,
Though crying, “Fire away!”
THE CARICATURE
Of the Lady Lu there were stories told,
For she was a woman of comely mould,
In heart-experience old.
Too many a man for her whimful sake
Had borne with patience chill and ache,
And nightly lain awake!
This epicure in pangs, in her tooth
For more of the sweet, with a calm unruth
Cast eyes on a painter-youth.
Her junior he; and the bait of bliss
Which she knew to throw — not he to miss —
She threw, till he dreamed her his.
To her arts not blind, he yet sued long,
As a songster jailed by a deed of wrong
Will shower the doer with song;
Till tried by tones now smart, now suave,
He would flee in ire, to return a slave
Who willingly forgave.
When no! One day he left her door,
“I’ll ease mine agony!” he swore,
“And bear this thing no more!
“I’ll practise a plan!” Thereon he took
Her portrait from his sketching-book,
And, though his pencil shook,
He moulded on the real its mock;
Of beauteous brow, lip, eye, and lock
Composed a laughingstock.
Amazed at this satire of his long lure,
Whenever he scanned it he’d scarce endure
His laughter. ‘Twas his cure.
And, even when he woke in the night,
And chanced to think of the comic sight,
He laughed till exhausted quite.
“Why do you laugh?” she said one day
As he g
azed at her in a curious way.
“Oh — for nothing,” said he. “Mere play.”
— A gulf of years then severed the twain;
Till he heard — a painter of high attain —
She was dying on her domain.
“And,” dryly added the friend who told,
“You may know or not that, in semblance cold,
She loved once, loved whole-souled;
“And that you were the man? Did you break your vow?
Well, well; she is good as gone by now . . .
But you hit her, all allow!”
Ah, the blow past bearing that he received!
In his bachelor quiet he grieved and grieved;
How cruel; how self-deceived!
Did she ever know? . . . Men pitied his state
As the curse of his own contrivance ate
Like canker into his fate.
For ever that thing of his evil craft
Uprose on his grief — his mocking draught —
Till, racked, he insanely laughed.
Thence onward folk would muse in doubt
What gloomed him so as he walked about,
But few, or none, found out.
A LEADER OF FASHION
Never has she known
The way a robin will skip and come,
With an eye half bold, half timorsome,
To the table’s edge for a breakfast crumb:
Nor has she seen
A streak of roseate gently drawn
Across the east, that means the dawn,
When, up and out, she foots it on:
Nor has she heard
The rustle of the sparrow’s tread
To roost in roof-holes near her head