by Thomas Hardy
As if from fear
Of Life unreckoned
Beginning here,
It starts a sighing
Through day and night,
Though while there lying
’Twas voiceless quite.
It will sigh in the morning,
Will sigh at noon,
At the winter’s warning,
In wafts of June;
Grieving that never
Kind Fate decreed
It should for ever
Remain a seed,
And shun the welter
Of things without,
Unneeding shelter
From storm and drought.
Thus, all unknowing
For whom or what
We set it growing
In this bleak spot,
It still will grieve here
Throughout its time,
Unable to leave here,
Or change its clime;
Or tell the story
Of us to-day
When, halt and hoary,
We pass away.
THE DEAR
I plodded to Fairmile Hill-top, where
A maiden one fain would guard
From every hazard and every care
Advanced on the roadside sward.
I wondered how succeeding suns
Would shape her wayfarings,
And wished some Power might take such ones
Under Its warding wings.
The busy breeze came up the hill
And smartened her cheek to red,
And frizzled her hair to a haze. With a will
”Good-morning, my Dear!” I said.
She glanced from me to the far-off gray,
And, with proud severity,
“Good-morning to you — though I may say
I am not YOUR Dear,” quoth she:
“For I am the Dear of one not here -
One far from his native land!” -
And she passed me by; and I did not try
To make her understand.
1901
ONE WE KNEW (M. H. 1772-1857)
She told how they used to form for the country dances -
”The Triumph,” “The New-rigged Ship” -
To the light of the guttering wax in the panelled manses,
And in cots to the blink of a dip.
She spoke of the wild “poussetting” and “allemanding”
On carpet, on oak, and on sod;
And the two long rows of ladies and gentlemen standing,
And the figures the couples trod.
She showed us the spot where the maypole was yearly planted,
And where the bandsmen stood
While breeched and kerchiefed partners whirled, and panted
To choose each other for good.
She told of that far-back day when they learnt astounded
Of the death of the King of France:
Of the Terror; and then of Bonaparte’s unbounded
Ambition and arrogance.
Of how his threats woke warlike preparations
Along the southern strand,
And how each night brought tremors and trepidations
Lest morning should see him land.
She said she had often heard the gibbet creaking
As it swayed in the lightning flash,
Had caught from the neighbouring town a small child’s shrieking
At the cart-tail under the lash . . .
With cap-framed face and long gaze into the embers -
We seated around her knees -
She would dwell on such dead themes, not as one who remembers,
But rather as one who sees.
She seemed one left behind of a band gone distant
So far that no tongue could hail:
Past things retold were to her as things existent,
Things present but as a tale.
May 20, 1902.
SHE HEARS THE STORM
There was a time in former years -
While my roof-tree was his -
When I should have been distressed by fears
At such a night as this!
I should have murmured anxiously,
”The pricking rain strikes cold;
His road is bare of hedge or tree,
And he is getting old.”
But now the fitful chimney-roar,
The drone of Thorncombe trees,
The Froom in flood upon the moor,
The mud of Mellstock Leaze,
The candle slanting sooty wick’d,
The thuds upon the thatch,
The eaves-drops on the window flicked,
The clacking garden-hatch,
And what they mean to wayfarers,
I scarcely heed or mind;
He has won that storm-tight roof of hers
Which Earth grants all her kind.
A WET NIGHT
I pace along, the rain-shafts riddling me,
Mile after mile out by the moorland way,
And up the hill, and through the ewe-leaze gray
Into the lane, and round the corner tree;
Where, as my clothing clams me, mire-bestarred,
And the enfeebled light dies out of day,
Leaving the liquid shades to reign, I say,
“This is a hardship to be calendared!”
Yet sires of mine now perished and forgot,
When worse beset, ere roads were shapen here,
And night and storm were foes indeed to fear,
Times numberless have trudged across this spot
In sturdy muteness on their strenuous lot,
And taking all such toils as trifles mere.
BEFORE LIFE AND AFTER
A time there was — as one may guess
And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell -
Before the birth of consciousness,
When all went well.
None suffered sickness, love, or loss,
None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings;
None cared whatever crash or cross
Brought wrack to things.
If something ceased, no tongue bewailed,
If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung;
If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed,
No sense was stung.
But the disease of feeling germed,
And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong;
Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed
How long, how long?
NEW YEAR’S EVE
“I have finished another year,” said God,
”In grey, green, white, and brown;
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,
Sealed up the worm within the clod,
And let the last sun down.”
“And what’s the good of it?” I said.
”What reasons made you call
From formless void this earth we tread,
When nine-and-ninety can be read
Why nought should be at all?
“Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, ‘who in
This tabernacle groan’ -
If ever a joy be found herein,
Such joy no man had wished to win
If he had never known!”
Then he: “My labours — logicless -
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.
“Strange that ephemeral creatures who
By my own ordering are,
Should see the shortness of my view,
Use ethic tests I never knew,
Or made provision for!”
He sank to raptness as of yore,
And opening New Year’s Day
Wove it by rote as theretofore,
And went on working evermore
In his unweeting way.
1906.
GOD’S EDUCATION
>
I saw him steal the light away
That haunted in her eye:
It went so gently none could say
More than that it was there one day
And missing by-and-by.
I watched her longer, and he stole
Her lily tincts and rose;
All her young sprightliness of soul
Next fell beneath his cold control,
And disappeared like those.
I asked: “Why do you serve her so?
Do you, for some glad day,
Hoard these her sweets — ?” He said, “O no,
They charm not me; I bid Time throw
Them carelessly away.”
Said I: “We call that cruelty -
We, your poor mortal kind.”
He mused. “The thought is new to me.
Forsooth, though I men’s master be,
Theirs is the teaching mind!”
TO SINCERITY
O sweet sincerity! -
Where modern methods be
What scope for thine and thee?
Life may be sad past saying,
Its greens for ever graying,
Its faiths to dust decaying;
And youth may have foreknown it,
And riper seasons shown it,
But custom cries: “Disown it:
“Say ye rejoice, though grieving,
Believe, while unbelieving,
Behold, without perceiving!”
- Yet, would men look at true things,
And unilluded view things,
And count to bear undue things,
The real might mend the seeming,
Facts better their foredeeming,
And Life its disesteeming.
February 1899.
PANTHERA
(For other forms of this legend — first met with in the second century — see Origen contra Celsum; the Talmud; Sepher Toldoth Jeschu; quoted fragments of lost Apocryphal gospels; Strauss, Haeckel; etc.)
Yea, as I sit here, crutched, and cricked, and bent,
I think of Panthera, who underwent
Much from insidious aches in his decline;
But his aches were not radical like mine;
They were the twinges of old wounds — the feel
Of the hand he had lost, shorn by barbarian steel,
Which came back, so he said, at a change in the air,
Fingers and all, as if it still were there.
My pains are otherwise: upclosing cramps
And stiffened tendons from this country’s damps,
Where Panthera was never commandant. -
The Fates sent him by way of the Levant.
He had been blithe in his young manhood’s time,
And as centurion carried well his prime.
In Ethiop, Araby, climes fair and fell,
He had seen service and had borne him well.
Nought shook him then: he was serene as brave;
Yet later knew some shocks, and would grow grave
When pondering them; shocks less of corporal kind
Than phantom-like, that disarranged his mind;
And it was in the way of warning me
(By much his junior) against levity
That he recounted them; and one in chief
Panthera loved to set in bold relief.
This was a tragedy of his Eastern days,
Personal in touch — though I have sometimes thought
That touch a possible delusion — wrought
Of half-conviction carried to a craze -
His mind at last being stressed by ails and age:-
Yet his good faith thereon I well could wage.
I had said it long had been a wish with me
That I might leave a scion — some small tree
As channel for my sap, if not my name -
Ay, offspring even of no legitimate claim,
In whose advance I secretly could joy.
Thereat he warned.
”Cancel such wishes, boy!
A son may be a comfort or a curse,
A seer, a doer, a coward, a fool; yea, worse -
A criminal . . . That I could testify!”
“Panthera has no guilty son!” cried I
All unbelieving. “Friend, you do not know,”
He darkly dropt: “True, I’ve none now to show,
For THE LAW TOOK HIM. Ay, in sooth, Jove shaped it so!”
”This noon is not unlike,” he again began,
“The noon these pricking memories print on me -
Yea, that day, when the sun grew copper-red,
And I served in Judaea . . . ‘Twas a date
Of rest for arms. The Pax Romana ruled,
To the chagrin of frontier legionaries!
Palestine was annexed — though sullen yet, -
I, being in age some two-score years and ten
And having the garrison in Jerusalem
Part in my hands as acting officer
Under the Governor. A tedious time
I found it, of routine, amid a folk
Restless, contentless, and irascible. -
Quelling some riot, sentrying court and hall,
Sending men forth on public meeting-days
To maintain order, were my duties there.
”Then came a morn in spring, and the cheerful sun
Whitened the city and the hills around,
And every mountain-road that clambered them,
Tincturing the greyness of the olives warm,
And the rank cacti round the valley’s sides.
The day was one whereon death-penalties
Were put in force, and here and there were set
The soldiery for order, as I said,
Since one of the condemned had raised some heat,
And crowds surged passionately to see him slain.
I, mounted on a Cappadocian horse,
With some half-company of auxiliaries,
Had captained the procession through the streets
When it came streaming from the judgment-hall
After the verdicts of the Governor.
It drew to the great gate of the northern way
That bears towards Damascus; and to a knoll
Upon the common, just beyond the walls -
Whence could be swept a wide horizon round
Over the housetops to the remotest heights.
Here was the public execution-ground
For city crimes, called then and doubtless now
Golgotha, Kranion, or Calvaria.
”The usual dooms were duly meted out;
Some three or four were stript, transfixed, and nailed,
And no great stir occurred. A day of wont
It was to me, so far, and would have slid
Clean from my memory at its squalid close
But for an incident that followed these.
”Among the tag-rag rabble of either sex
That hung around the wretches as they writhed,
Till thrust back by our spears, one held my eye -
A weeping woman, whose strained countenance,
Sharpened against a looming livid cloud,
Was mocked by the crude rays of afternoon -
The mother of one of those who suffered there
I had heard her called when spoken roughly to
By my ranged men for pressing forward so.
It stole upon me hers was a face I knew;
Yet when, or how, I had known it, for a while
Eluded me. And then at once it came.
”Some thirty years or more before that noon
I was sub-captain of a company
Drawn from the legion of Calabria,
That marched up from Judaea north to Tyre.
We had pierced the old flat country of Jezreel,
The great Esdraelon Plain and fighting-floor
Of Jew with Canaanite, and with the host
Of Pharaoh-Necho, king of Egypt, met
We left behind Gilboa; passed by Nain;
Till bulging Tabor rose, embossed to the top
With arbute, terabinth, and locust growths.
”Encumbering me were sundry sick, so fallen
Through drinking from a swamp beside the way;
But we pressed on, till, bearing over a ridge,
We dipt into a world of pleasantness -
A vale, the fairest I had gazed upon -
Which lapped a village on its furthest slopes
Called Nazareth, brimmed round by uplands nigh.
In the midst thereof a fountain bubbled, where,
Lime-dry from marching, our glad halt we made
To rest our sick ones, and refresh us all.
”Here a day onward, towards the eventide,
Our men were piping to a Pyrrhic dance
Trod by their comrades, when the young women came
To fill their pitchers, as their custom was.
I proffered help to one — a slim girl, coy
Even as a fawn, meek, and as innocent.
Her long blue gown, the string of silver coins
That hung down by her banded beautiful hair,
Symboled in full immaculate modesty.
”Well, I was young, and hot, and readily stirred
To quick desire. ‘Twas tedious timing out
The convalescence of the soldiery;
And I beguiled the long and empty days
By blissful yieldance to her sweet allure,
Who had no arts, but what out-arted all,
The tremulous tender charm of trustfulness.
We met, and met, and under the winking stars
That passed which peoples earth — true union, yea,
To the pure eye of her simplicity.
”Meanwhile the sick found health; and we pricked on.
I made her no rash promise of return,
As some do use; I was sincere in that;
I said we sundered never to meet again -
