Thomas Hardy

“ Thou watch’dst each night the planets lift and lower;
Thou gleam’dst to Joshua’s pausing sun and moon,
And brav’dst the tokening sky when Cæsar’s power
Approached its bloody end: yea, saw’st that Noon
When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour. ”

“ That are as puppets in a playing hand?—
When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land,
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas? ”

“ “The Earth, say’st thou? The Human race?
By Me created? Sad its lot?
Nay: I have no remembrance of such place:
Such world I fashioned not.”—
p. ”

“ Points in my path when the dark might have stolen on me, artless, unrueing—
p. 449Ere I had learnt that the world was a welter of futile doing:
Such had been times when I well might have passed, and the ending have come! ”

“ Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,
Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom, and fear,
Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; ”

“ They cannot keep the skies serene;
How happy days are made to be
“Eludes great Man’s sagacity
No less than ours, O tribes in treen!
Men know but little more than we
How happy days are made to be.” ”

“ 346ON A FINE MORNING Whence comes Solace?—Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Nor from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.
p. 347II
Thus do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its irisèd embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man. ”

“ And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.
p. 287Anon the book is closed,
With “It is finished!” And at the alley’s end
He turns, and soon on me his glances bend;
And, as from earth, comes speech—small, muted, yet composed.
“How fares the Truth now?—Ill?
—Do pens but slily further her advance?
May one not speed her but in phrase askance?
Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?
“Still rule those minds on earth
At whom sage Milton’s wormwood words were hurled:
‘Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?” ”

“ And Time-wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.
p. 342II
Hark, how the peoples surge and sigh,
And laughters fail, and greetings die:
Hopes dwindle; yea,
Faiths waste away,
Affections and enthusiasms numb ”

“ On housebacks pink, green, ochreous—where a slit
Shoreward ’twixt row and row revealed the classic blue through it.
And thereacross waved fishwives’ high-hung smocks,
Chrome kerchiefs, scarlet hose, darned underfrocks;
Since when too oft my dreams of thee, O Queen, that frippery mocks:
Whereat I grieve, Superba! . . . Afterhours
Within Palazzo Doria’s orange bowers
Went far to mend these marrings of thy soul-subliming powers.
p. 271But, Queen, such squalid undress none should see,
Those dream-endangering eyewounds no more be
Where lovers first behold thy form in pilgrimage to thee. ”

“ When false things are brought low,
And swift things have grown slow,
Feigning like froth shall go,
Faith be for aye. ”

“ 399THE DARKLING THRUSH I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings from broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires. ”

“ But love can not make smart
Again this year his heart
Who no heart hath.
Black is night’s cope;
But death will not appal
One who, past doubtings all,
Waits in unhope.
p. 445II
“Considerabam ad dexteram, et videbam; et non erat qui cognosceret me . . . Non est qui requirat animam meam.”—Ps. cxli.
When the clouds’ swoln bosoms echo back the shouts of the many and strong
That things are all as they best may be, save a few to be right ere long,
p. ”

“ By bonds of every bond the best,
If hours be years. The twain are blest
Do eastern stars slope never west,
Nor pallid ashes follow fire:
If hours be years the twain are blest,
For now they solace swift desire.
p. 379THE DREAM-FOLLOWER A dream of mine flew over the mead
To the halls where my old Love reigns ”

“ I fared Yell’ham-Firs way, where dimly
Came wheeling around me
Those phantoms obscure and insistent
That shadows unchain.
p. 300Till airs from the needle-thicks brought me
A low lamentation,
As ’twere of a tree-god disheartened,
Perplexed, or in pain.
And, heeding, it awed me to gather
That Nature herself there
Was breathing in aërie accents,
With dirgeful refrain,
Weary plaint that Mankind, in these late days,
Had grieved her by holding
Her ancient high fame of perfection
In doubt and disdain . . . ”

“ That aims the best
Were looking like the worst.
p. 454VII
Enkindled by my votive work
No burning faith I find;
The deeper thinkers sneer and smirk,
And give my toil no mind;
From nod and wink
I read they think
That I am fool and blind.
VIII
My gift to God seems futile, quite;
The world moves as erstwhile ”

“ Ah! know’st thou not her secret yet, her vainly veiled deficience,
Whence it comes that all unwittingly she wounds the lives she loves?
That sightless are those orbs of hers?—which bar to her omniscience
Brings those fearful unfulfilments, that red ravage through her zones
Whereat all creation groans.
V
“She whispers it in each pathetic strenuous slow endeavour,
When in mothering she unwittingly sets wounds on what she loves ”

“ XI
Let men rejoice, let men deplore.
The lurid Deity of heretofore
Succumbs to one of saner nod;
The Battle-god is god no more.
p. 267POEMS OF PILGRIMAGE p. 269GENOA AND THE MEDITERRANEAN
(March, 1887) O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea,
Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee
When from Torino’s track I saw thy face first flash on me. ”

“ Those who our grandsires be
Lie here embraced by deeper death than we;
Nor shape nor thought of theirs canst thou descry
With keenest backward eye.
IV
“They bide as quite forgot;
They are as men who have existed not ”

“ Whereof each arch, entablature, and dome
Lies bare in all its gaunt anatomy.
And cracking frieze and rotten metope
Express, as though they were an open tome
p. 279Top-lined with caustic monitory gnome;
“Dunces, Learn here to spell Humanity!”
And yet within these ruins’ very shade
The singing workmen shape and set and join
Their frail new mansion’s stuccoed cove and quoin
With no apparent sense that years abrade,
Though each rent wall their feeble works invade
Once shamed all such in power of pier and groin. ”

“ When I have placed no sunshine in the air
Or glow on earth to-day?”
p. 433“’Tis in the comedy of things
That such should be,” returned the one of Doom;
“Charge now the scene with brightest blazonings,
And he shall call them gloom.”
She gave the word: the sun outbroke,
All Froomside shone, the hedgebirds raised a song;
And later Hodge, upon the midday stroke,
Returned the lane along,
Low murmuring: “O this bitter scene,
And thrice accurst horizon hung with gloom!
How deadly like this sky, these fields, these treen,
To trappings of the tomb!”
The Beldame then: “The fool and blind! ”

“ My eyes, too, heretofore all glasses scorning,
Have just a touch of rheum . . .
“Now sounds ‘The Girl I’ve left behind me,’—Ah,
The years, the ardours, wakened by that tune!
Time was when, with the crowd’s farewell ‘Hurrah!’
’Twould lift me to the moon.
p. 241“But now it’s late to leave behind me one
Who if, poor soul, her man goes underground,
Will not recover as she might have done
In days when hopes abound.
“She’s waving from the wharfside, palely grieving,
As down we draw . . . ”

“ The Girl you leave behind you is a grandmother,
Things may not be as then.”
p. 242THE GOING OF THE BATTERY
WIVES’ LAMENT
(November 2, 1899) I
O it was sad enough, weak enough, mad enough—
Light in their loving as soldiers can be—
First to risk choosing them, leave alone losing them
Now, in far battle, beyond the South Sea! . . .
p. 243II
—Rain came down drenchingly; but we unblenchingly
Trudged on beside them through mirk and through mire,
They stepping steadily—only too readily!—
Scarce as if stepping brought parting-time nigher. ”

“ An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom. ”

“ I subtly could cover;
‘Every best thing,’ said they, ‘to best purpose
Her powers preordain.’—
“No more such! . . . My species are dwindling,
My forests grow barren,
My popinjays fail from their tappings,
My larks from their strain.
“My leopardine beauties are rarer,
My tusky ones vanish,
My children have aped mine own slaughters
To quicken my wane.
“Let me grow, then, but mildews and mandrakes,
And slimy distortions,
Let nevermore things good and lovely
To me appertain ”

“ May be discerned a wrong
Dying as of self-slaughter; whereat I
Would raise my voice in song.
FOOTNOTES
[253] The “Race” is the turbulent sea-area off the Bill of Portland, where contrary tides meet.
[290] Pronounce “Loddy.”
[457] On a lonely table-land above the Vale of Blackmore, between High-Stoy and Bubb-Down hills, and commanding in clear weather views that extend from the English to the Bristol Channel, stands a pillar, apparently mediæval, called Cross-and-Hand or Christ-in-Hand. Among other stories of its origin a local tradition preserves the one here given. ”

“ With nevermore this too remorseful air upon her face,
As of angel fallen from grace?”
p. 313II
—“Her look is but her story: construe not its symbols keenly:
In her wonderworks yea surely has she wounded where she loves.
The sense of ills misdealt for blisses blanks the mien most queenly,
Self-smitings kill self-joys ”

“ Your talking quite fits ’ee for high compa-ny!”—
“Some polish is gained with one’s ruin,” said she.
—“Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak,
But now I’m bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!”—
“We never do work when we’re ruined,” said she. ”

“ And left a waste within.
p. 358HER REPROACH Con the dead page as ’twere live love: press on!
Cold wisdom’s words will ease thy track for thee;
Aye, go; cast off sweet ways, and leave me wan
To biting blasts that are intent on me.
p. 359But if thy object Fame’s far summits be,
Whose inclines many a skeleton o’erlies
That missed both dream and substance, stop and see
How absence wears these cheeks and dims these eyes! ”

“ For a kiss from thee!
p. 480CARDINAL BEMBO’S EPITAPH ON RAPHAEL Here’s one in whom Nature feared—faint at such vying—
Eclipse while he lived, and decease at his dying.
p. 481RETROSPECT p. 483“I HAVE LIVED WITH SHADES” I
I have lived with shades so long,
And talked to them so oft,
Since forth from cot and croft
I went mankind among,
That sometimes they
In their dim style
Will pause awhile
To hear my say ”

“ Those banks and beds whose shape your eye
Has planned in line so true,
New hands will change, unreasoning why
Such shape seemed best to you.
p. 431“Within your house will strangers sit,
And wonder how first it came ”

“ In our sight up above!’”
p. 441THE SELF-UNSEEING Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.
p. 442She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.
Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!
p. 443DE PROFUNDIS I
“Percussus sum sicut foenum, et aruit cor meum.”
—Ps. ci
Wintertime nighs;
But my bereavement-pain
It cannot bring again:
Twice no one dies. ”