Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

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Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) Page 740

by Thomas Hardy


  To wake my place-enthusiasms of old!”

  Till a voice passed: “Behind that granite mien

  Lurks the imposing beauty of a Queen.”

  I looked anew; and saw the radiant form

  Of Her who soothes in stress, who steers in storm,

  On the grave influence of whose eyes sublime

  Men count for the stability of the time.

  GEORGE MEREDITH 1828-1909

  Forty years back, when much had place

  That since has perished out of mind,

  I heard that voice and saw that face.

  He spoke as one afoot will wind

  A morning horn ere men awake;

  His note was trenchant, turning kind.

  He was of those whose wit can shake

  And riddle to the very core

  The counterfeits that Time will break . . .

  Of late, when we two met once more,

  The luminous countenance and rare

  Shone just as forty years before.

  So that, when now all tongues declare

  His shape unseen by his green hill,

  I scarce believe he sits not there.

  No matter. Further and further still

  Through the world’s vaporous vitiate air

  His words wing on — as live words will.

  May 1909.

  YELL’HAM-WOOD’S STORY

  Coomb-Firtrees say that Life is a moan,

  And Clyffe-hill Clump says “Yea!”

  But Yell’ham says a thing of its own:

  It’s not “Gray, gray

  Is Life alway!”

  That Yell’ham says,

  Nor that Life is for ends unknown.

  It says that Life would signify

  A thwarted purposing:

  That we come to live, and are called to die,

  Yes, that’s the thing

  In fall, in spring,

  That Yell’ham says:-

  ”Life offers — to deny!”

  1902.

  A YOUNG MAN’S EPIGRAM ON EXISTENCE

  A senseless school, where we must give

  Our lives that we may learn to live!

  A dolt is he who memorizes

  Lessons that leave no time for prizes.

  16 W. P. V., 1866.

  SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

  This collection of poems was published in 1914 and includes the 18 poem sequence ‘Poems of 1912-13’. Satires and Circumstances is widely regarded to be the greatest achievement of Hardy’s poetic career. With many poems being inspired by the tragic loss of his wife Emma, the collection includes some of the most powerful poems ever to portray the theme of bereavement.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE

  CHANNEL FIRING

  THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

  THE GHOST OF THE PAST

  AFTER THE VISIT

  TO MEET, OR OTHERWISE

  THE DIFFERENCE

  THE SUN ON THE BOOKCASE

  WHEN I SET OUT FOR LYONNESSE

  A THUNDERSTORM IN TOWN

  THE TORN LETTER

  BEYOND THE LAST LAMP

  THE FACE AT THE CASEMENT

  LOST LOVE

  MY SPIRIT WILL NOT HAUNT THE MOUND

  WESSEX HEIGHTS (1896)

  IN DEATH DIVIDED

  THE PLACE ON THE MAP

  WHERE THE PICNIC WAS

  A SINGER ASLEEP

  A PLAINT TO MAN

  GOD’S FUNERAL

  SPECTRES THAT GRIEVE

  AH, ARE YOU DIGGING ON MY GRAVE?

  SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCES IN FIFTEEN GLIMPSES

  SELF-UNCONSCIOUS

  THE DISCOVERY

  TOLERANCE

  BEFORE AND AFTER SUMMER

  AT DAY-CLOSE IN NOVEMBER

  THE YEAR’S AWAKENING

  UNDER THE WATERFALL

  THE SPELL OF THE ROSE

  ST. LAUNCE’S REVISITED

  THE GOING

  YOUR LAST DRIVE

  THE WALK

  RAIN ON A GRAVE

  I FOUND HER OUT THERE

  WITHOUT CEREMONY

  LAMENT

  THE HAUNTER

  THE VOICE

  HIS VISITOR

  A CIRCULAR

  A DREAM OR NO

  AFTER A JOURNEY

  A DEATH-DAY RECALLED

  BEENY CLIFF

  AT CASTLE BOTEREL

  PLACES

  THE PHANTOM HORSEWOMAN

  MISCELLANEOUS PIECES

  THE WISTFUL LADY

  THE WOMAN IN THE RYE

  THE CHEVAL-GLASS

  THE RE-ENACTMENT

  HER SECRET

  SHE CHARGED ME

  THE NEWCOMER’S WIFE

  A CONVERSATION AT DAWN

  A KING’S SOLILOQUY ON THE NIGHT OF HIS FUNERAL

  THE CORONATION

  AQUAE SULIS

  SEVENTY-FOUR AND TWENTY

  THE ELOPEMENT

  I ROSE UP AS MY CUSTOM IS

  A WEEK

  HAD YOU WEPT

  BEREFT, SHE THINKS SHE DREAMS

  IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM

  IN THE SERVANTS’ QUARTERS

  THE OBLITERATE TOMB

  REGRET NOT ME

  THE RECALCITRANTS

  STARLINGS ON THE ROOF

  THE MOON LOOKS IN

  THE SWEET HUSSY

  THE TELEGRAM

  THE MOTH-SIGNAL

  SEEN BY THE WAITS

  THE TWO SOLDIERS

  THE DEATH OF REGRET

  IN THE DAYS OF CRINOLINE

  THE ROMAN GRAVEMOUNDS

  THE WORKBOX

  THE SACRILEGE

  THE ABBEY MASON

  THE JUBILEE OF A MAGAZINE

  THE SATIN SHOES

  EXEUNT OMNES

  A POET

  POSTSCRIPT “MEN WHO MARCH AWAY” (SONG OF THE SOLDIERS)

  IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE

  Plunging and labouring on in a tide of visions,

  Dolorous and dear,

  Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters

  Stretching around,

  Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape

  Yonder and near,

  Blotted to feeble mist. And the coomb and the upland

  Foliage-crowned,

  Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flat

  Stroked by the light,

  Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial

  Meadow or mound.

  What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost

  Under my sight,

  Hindering me to discern my paced advancement

  Lengthening to miles;

  What were the re-creations killing the daytime

  As by the night?

  O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,

  Some as with smiles,

  Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled

  Over the wrecked

  Cheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish,

  Harrowed by wiles.

  Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them -

  Halo-bedecked -

  And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,

  Rigid in hate,

  Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,

  Dreaded, suspect.

  Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons

  Further in date;

  Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion

  Vibrant, beside

  Lamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth’s crust

  Now corporate.

  Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect

  Gnawed by the tide,

  Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there

  Guilelessly glad -

  Wherefore they knew not — touched by the fringe of an ecstasy

  Scantly descried.

  L
ater images too did the day unfurl me,

  Shadowed and sad,

  Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,

  Laid now at ease,

  Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow

  Sepulture-clad.

  So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,

  Over the leaze,

  Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;

  — Yea, as the rhyme

  Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness

  Captured me these.

  For, their lost revisiting manifestations

  In their own time

  Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,

  Seeing behind

  Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling

  Sweet, sad, sublime.

  Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser

  Stare of the mind

  As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast

  Body-borne eyes,

  Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them

  As living kind.

  Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying

  In their surmise,

  “Ah — whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought

  Round him that looms

  Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,

  Save a few tombs?”

  CHANNEL FIRING

  That night your great guns, unawares,

  Shook all our coffins as we lay,

  And broke the chancel window-squares,

  We thought it was the Judgment-day

  And sat upright. While drearisome

  Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

  The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

  The worms drew back into the mounds,

  The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;

  It’s gunnery practice out at sea

  Just as before you went below;

  The world is as it used to be:

  “All nations striving strong to make

  Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

  They do no more for Christes sake

  Than you who are helpless in such matters.

  “That this is not the judgment-hour

  For some of them’s a blessed thing,

  For if it were they’d have to scour

  Hell’s floor for so much threatening . . .

  “Ha, ha. It will be warmer when

  I blow the trumpet (if indeed

  I ever do; for you are men,

  And rest eternal sorely need).”

  So down we lay again. “I wonder,

  Will the world ever saner be,”

  Said one, “than when He sent us under

  In our indifferent century!”

  And many a skeleton shook his head.

  “Instead of preaching forty year,”

  My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

  “I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

  Again the guns disturbed the hour,

  Roaring their readiness to avenge,

  As far inland as Stourton Tower,

  And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

  April 1914.

  THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

  (Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)

  I

  In a solitude of the sea

  Deep from human vanity,

  And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

  II

  Steel chambers, late the pyres

  Of her salamandrine fires,

  Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

  III

  Over the mirrors meant

  To glass the opulent

  The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

  IV

  Jewels in joy designed

  To ravish the sensuous mind

  Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

  V

  Dim moon-eyed fishes near

  Gaze at the gilded gear

  And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?” . . .

  VI

  Well: while was fashioning

  This creature of cleaving wing,

  The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

  VII

  Prepared a sinister mate

  For her — so gaily great -

  A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

  VIII

  And as the smart ship grew

  In stature, grace, and hue,

  In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

  IX

  Alien they seemed to be:

  No mortal eye could see

  The intimate welding of their later history,

  X

  Or sign that they were bent

  By paths coincident

  On being anon twin halves of one august event,

  XI

  Till the Spinner of the Years

  Said “Now!” And each one hears,

  And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

  THE GHOST OF THE PAST

  We two kept house, the Past and I,

  The Past and I;

  I tended while it hovered nigh,

  Leaving me never alone.

  It was a spectral housekeeping

  Where fell no jarring tone,

  As strange, as still a housekeeping

  As ever has been known.

  As daily I went up the stair

  And down the stair,

  I did not mind the Bygone there -

  The Present once to me;

  Its moving meek companionship

  I wished might ever be,

  There was in that companionship

  Something of ecstasy.

  It dwelt with me just as it was,

  Just as it was

  When first its prospects gave me pause

  In wayward wanderings,

  Before the years had torn old troths

  As they tear all sweet things,

  Before gaunt griefs had torn old troths

  And dulled old rapturings.

  And then its form began to fade,

  Began to fade,

  Its gentle echoes faintlier played

  At eves upon my ear

  Than when the autumn’s look embrowned

  The lonely chambers here,

  The autumn’s settling shades embrowned

  Nooks that it haunted near.

  And so with time my vision less,

  Yea, less and less

  Makes of that Past my housemistress,

  It dwindles in my eye;

  It looms a far-off skeleton

  And not a comrade nigh,

  A fitful far-off skeleton

  Dimming as days draw by.

  AFTER THE VISIT

  (To F. E. D.)

  Come again to the place

  Where your presence was as a leaf that skims

  Down a drouthy way whose ascent bedims

  The bloom on the farer’s face.

  Come again, with the feet

  That were light on the green as a thistledown ball,

  And those mute ministrations to one and to all

  Beyond a man’s saying sweet.

  Until then the faint scent

  Of the bordering flowers swam unheeded away,

  And I marked not the charm in the changes of day

  As the cloud-colours came and went.

  Through the dark corridors

  Your walk was so soundless I did not know

  Your form from a phantom’s of long ago

  Said to pass on the ancient floors,

  Till you drew from the shade,

  And I saw the large luminous living eyes

  Regard me in fixed inquiring-wise

  As those of a soul that weighed,

  Scarce consciously,

  The eter
nal question of what Life was,

  And why we were there, and by whose strange laws

  That which mattered most could not be.

  TO MEET, OR OTHERWISE

  Whether to sally and see thee, girl of my dreams,

  Or whether to stay

  And see thee not! How vast the difference seems

  Of Yea from Nay

  Just now. Yet this same sun will slant its beams

  At no far day

  On our two mounds, and then what will the difference weigh!

  Yet I will see thee, maiden dear, and make

  The most I can

  Of what remains to us amid this brake Cimmerian

  Through which we grope, and from whose thorns we ache,

  While still we scan

  Round our frail faltering progress for some path or plan.

  By briefest meeting something sure is won;

  It will have been:

  Nor God nor Daemon can undo the done,

  Unsight the seen,

  Make muted music be as unbegun,

  Though things terrene

  Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.

  So, to the one long-sweeping symphony

  From times remote

  Till now, of human tenderness, shall we

  Supply one note,

  Small and untraced, yet that will ever be

  Somewhere afloat

  Amid the spheres, as part of sick Life’s antidote.

  THE DIFFERENCE

  I

  Sinking down by the gate I discern the thin moon,

  And a blackbird tries over old airs in the pine,

  But the moon is a sorry one, sad the bird’s tune,

  For this spot is unknown to that Heartmate of mine.

  II

  Did my Heartmate but haunt here at times such as now,

 

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