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,
