Thomas Hardy

“ And her, white-muslined, waiting there
In the porch with high-expectant heart,
While still the thin mechanic air
Went on inside.
At whiles would flit
Swart bats, whose wings, be-webbed and tanned,
Whirred like the wheels of ancient clocks:
She laughed a hailing as she scanned
Me in the gloom, the tuneful box
Intoning it.
Lifelong to be
I thought it. That there watched hard by
A spirit who sang to the indoor tune,
“O make the most of what is nigh!” ”

“ AFTER THREE HUNDRED YEARS Bright baffling Soul, least capturable of themes,
Thou, who display’dst a life of common-place,
Leaving no intimate word or personal trace
Of high design outside the artistry
Of thy penned dreams,
Still shalt remain at heart unread eternally. ”

“ Who lifts that mirror
And throws our mind back on us, and our heart,
Until we start?
That mirror
Works well in these night hours of ache;
Why in that mirror
Are tincts we never see ourselves once take
When the world is awake?
That mirror
Can test each mortal when unaware;
Yea, that strange mirror
May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair,
Glassing it—where?
p. 2THE VOICE OF THINGS Forty Augusts—aye, and several more—ago,
When I paced the headlands loosed from dull employ,
The waves huzza’d like a multitude below
In the sway of an all-including joy
Without cloy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Who shall unseal the years, the years!—
O the doom that gave no token,
When nothing of bale saw we:
O the doom by someone spoken,
O the heart by someone broken,
The heart whose sweet reverberances are all time leaves to me. ”

“ And the trees are bare,
And the waterways sigh
That a year has drawn by,
And Two are out there.
III
The wind drops to die
Like the phantom of Care
Too frail for a cry,
And heart brings to eye
That Three are out there. ”

“ Which over the earth before man came was winging;
There’s a contralto voice I heard last night,
That lodges in me still with its sweet singing.
II
Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird
Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending
Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard,
In the full-fugued song of the universe unending. ”

“ A play so sorely shaped and blood-bespread.”
Yet had his spark not quickened, but lain dead
To the gross spectacles of this our day,
And never put on the proffered cloak of clay,
He had but known not things now manifested;
Life would have swirled the same. ”

“ 257AFTERWARDS When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
“He was a man who used to notice such things”? ”

“ And the Spirits Ironic laughed behind the wainscot,
And the Spirits of Pity sighed.
“It’s good,” said the Spirits Ironic, “to tickle their minds
With a portent of their wedlock’s after-grinds.”
And the Spirits of Pity sighed behind the wainscot,
“It’s a portent we cannot abide!
“More, what shall happen to prove the truth of the portent?”
p. 180—“Oh; in brief, they will fade till old,
And their loves grow numbed ere death, by the cark of care.”
—“But nought see we that asks for portents there?—
’Tis the lot of all.”—“Well, no less true is a portent
That it fits all mortal mould.” ”

“ And the same man pilgrims now hereby who pilgrimed here that day.
Let so much be said of the date-day’s sameness;
But the tree that neighbours the track,
And stoops like a pedlar afflicted with lameness,
Knew of no sogged wound or windcrack. ”

“ Could move his foeman more—now Death’s deaf thrall—
He wiped his steel, and, with a call
Like turtledove to dove, swift broke
Into the copse, where under an oak
His horse cropt, held by a page.
p. 41“All’s over, Sweet,” he cried
To the wife, thus guised; for the young page was she.
“’Tis as we hoped and said ’t would be.
He never guessed . . . We mount and ride
To where our love can reign uneyed.
He’s clay, and we are free.” ”

“ We have loved your burgs, your pines’ green moan,
Fair Rhine-stream, and its storied towers;
Your shining souls of deathless dowers
Have won us as they were our own:
We have nursed no dreams to shed your blood,
We have matched your might not rancorously,
Save a flushed few whose blatant mood
You heard and marked as well as we
To tongue not in their country’s key ”

“ When the wind skims irritably past,
The current clucks smartly into each hollow place
That years of flood have scrabbled in the pier’s sodden base;
The floating-lily leaves rot fast.
On a roof stand the swallows ranged in wistful waiting rows,
Till they arrow off and drop like stones
Among the eyot-withies at whose foot the river flows;
And beneath the roof is she who in the dark world shows
As a lattice-gleam when midnight moans.
p. 114ROYAL SPONSORS “The king and the queen will stand to the child ”

“ Ah, but he played staunchly—that fiddler—whoever he was,
With the innocent heart and the soul-touching string:
May he find the Fair Haven! For did he not smile with good cause?
Yes; gamuts that graced forty years’-flight were not a small thing!
p. 132THE BALLET They crush together—a rustling heap of flesh—
Of more than flesh, a heap of souls; and then
They part, enmesh,
And crush together again,
Like the pink petals of a too sanguine rose
Frightened shut just when it blows. ”

“ With symphonies soft and sweet colour
It courted me then,
Till evasions seemed wrong,
p. 222Till evasions gave in to its song,
And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller
Than life among men. ”

“ Who laughed at the fly-blown pictures there.
“Here are the lovely ships that we,
Mother, are by and by going to see!
When we get there it’s ’most sure to be fine,
And the band will play, and the sun will shine!” ”

“ And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,
“He hears it not now, but used to notice such things”? ”

“ We did not know him . . . Well, good-day. Death comes to all.”
p. 26So, like a strange bright bird we sometimes find
To mingle with the barn-door brood awhile,
Then vanish from their homely domicile—
Into man’s poesy, we wot not whence,
Flew thy strange mind,
Lodged there a radiant guest, and sped for ever thence. ”

“ Her eyes may have meetings with mine.
p. 143A BACKWARD SPRING The trees are afraid to put forth buds,
And there is timidity in the grass;
The plots lie gray where gouged by spuds,
And whether next week will pass
Free of sly sour winds is the fret of each bush
Of barberry waiting to bloom. ”

“ 90IN HER PRECINCTS Her house looked cold from the foggy lea,
And the square of each window a dull black blur
Where showed no stir:
Yes, her gloom within at the lack of me
Seemed matching mine at the lack of her.
The black squares grew to be squares of light
As the eyeshade swathed the house and lawn,
And viols gave tone;
There was glee within. And I found that night
The gloom of severance mine alone. ”

“ Thoughts perhaps bent on a love-stratagem,
Softening yet more the already soft face!
p. 127Is the fair woman who carried that sunshade
A skeleton just as her property is,
Laid in the chink that none may scan?
And does she regret—if regret dust can—
The vain things thought when she flourished this?
Swanage Cliffs.
p. 128THE AGEING HOUSE When the walls were red
That now are seen
To be overspread
With a mouldy green,
A fresh fair head
Would often lean
From the sunny casement
And scan the scene,
While blithely spoke the wind to the little sycamore tree. ”

“ They read, helped out by a frail-wick’d gleam,
Some rhythmic text;
But one sits with them whom they don’t mark,
One I’m wishing could not be there.
No: not whom you knew and name. And now
I discern gay diners in a mansion-place,
p. 123And the guests dropping wit—pert, prim, or choice,
And the hostess’s tender and laughing face,
And the host’s bland brow;
I cannot help hearing a hollow voice,
And I’d fain not hear it there.
No: it’s not from the stranger you met once. Ah,
Yet a goodlier scene than that succeeds;
People on a lawn—quite a crowd of them. ”

“ Waiting for him to see us before we are clay.
Yes; waiting, waiting, for God to know it” . . .
“To know what?” questioned I.
“To know how things have been going on earth and below it:
p. 175It is clear he must know some day.”
I thereon asked them why.
“Since he made us humble pioneers
Of himself in consciousness of Life’s tears,
It needs no mighty prophecy
To tell that what he could mindlessly show
His creatures, he himself will know.
“By some still close-cowled mystery
We have reached feeling faster than he,
But he will overtake us anon,
If the world goes on.” ”

“ Is warfare wherein honour is not!
Rama laments
Its dead innocents:
p. 241Herod breathes: “Sly slaughter
Shall rule! Let us, by modes once called accurst,
Overhead, under water,
Stab first.”
1915.
p. 242A CALL TO NATIONAL SERVICE Up and be doing, all who have a hand
To lift, a back to bend. It must not be
In times like these that vaguely linger we
To air our vaunts and hopes; and leave our land
Untended as a wild of weeds and sand.
—Say, then, “I come!” and go, O women and men
Of palace, ploughshare, easel, counter, pen;
That scareless, scathless, England still may stand. ”

“ In the churchyard at the moon’s half-height,
And so strange a kiss
Shall be mine, I wis,
That you’ll cease to know
If the wounds you show
Be there or no!”
p. 174FRAGMENT At last I entered a long dark gallery,
Catacomb-lined; and ranged at the side
Were the bodies of men from far and wide
Who, motion past, were nevertheless not dead.
“The sense of waiting here strikes strong;
Everyone’s waiting, waiting, it seems to me;
What are you waiting for so long?—
What is to happen?” I said. ”

“ 15HEREDITY I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion. ”

“ After waiting so many a year
To wait longer, and go as a sprite
From the tomb at the mid of some night
Was the right, radiant way to appear;
Not as one wanzing weak
From life’s roar and reek,
His rest still to seek:
Yea, beglimpsed through the quaint quarried glass
Of green moonlight, by me greener made,
When they’d cry, perhaps, “There sits his shade
p. ”

“ But are not of?
p. 177HONEYMOON TIME AT AN INN At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn,
The moon was at the window-square,
Deedily brooding in deformed decay—
The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze;
At the shiver of morning a little before the false dawn
So the moon looked in there.
Her speechless eyeing reached across the chamber,
Where lay two souls opprest,
One a white lady sighing, “Why am I sad!” ”

“ Or sun uphold!”
p. 82THE 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. ”

“ No bowing wakes a congregation’s wonder.
He must do without you now,
Stir you no more anyhow
To yearning concords taught you in your glory;
p. 46While, your strings a tangled wreck,
Once smart drawn,
Ten worm-wounds in your neck,
Purflings wan
With dust-hoar, here alone I sadly con
Your present dumbness, shape your olden story.
1916.
p. 47THE STATUE OF LIBERTY This statue of Liberty, busy man,
Here erect in the city square,
I have watched while your scrubbings, this early morning,
Strangely wistful,
And half tristful,
Have turned her from foul to fair ”

“ And that braggarts must
Surely bite the dust,
Press we to the field ungrieving,
In our heart of hearts believing
Victory crowns the just.
Hence the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
Leaving all that here can win us;
Hence the faith and fire within us
Men who march away.
September 5, 1914.
p. 227HIS COUNTRY [He travels southward, and looks around;]
I journeyed from my native spot
Across the south sea shine,
And found that people in hall and cot
Laboured and suffered each his lot
Even as I did mine. ”

“ Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
II
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die. ”

“ Time calls, “Pass below!”
p. 69THE 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? ”

“ And sang.
p. 195THE ENEMY’S PORTRAIT He saw the portrait of his enemy, offered
At auction in a street he journeyed nigh,
That enemy, now late dead, who in his life-time
Had injured deeply him the passer-by.
“To get that picture, pleased be God, I’ll try,
And utterly destroy it; and no more
Shall be inflicted on man’s mortal eye
A countenance so sinister and sore!”
And so he bought the painting. Driving homeward,
“The frame will come in useful,” he declared,
“The rest is fuel.” ”