Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

  The song would be joyous and cheerful the moon;

  But she will see never this gate, path, or bough,

  Nor I find a joy in the scene or the tune.

  THE SUN ON THE BOOKCASE

  (Student’s Love-song)

  Once more the cauldron of the sun

  Smears the bookcase with winy red,

  And here my page is, and there my bed,

  And the apple-tree shadows travel along.

  Soon their intangible track will be run,

  And dusk grow strong

  And they be fled.

  Yes: now the boiling ball is gone,

  And I have wasted another day . . .

  But wasted — WASTED, do I say?

  Is it a waste to have imaged one

  Beyond the hills there, who, anon,

  My great deeds done

  Will be mine alway?

  WHEN I SET OUT FOR LYONNESSE

  When I set out for Lyonnesse,

  A hundred miles away,

  The rime was on the spray,

  And starlight lit my lonesomeness

  When I set out for Lyonnesse

  A hundred miles away.

  What would bechance at Lyonnesse

  While I should sojourn there

  No prophet durst declare,

  Nor did the wisest wizard guess

  What would bechance at Lyonnesse

  While I should sojourn there.

  When I came back from Lyonnesse

  With magic in my eyes,

  None managed to surmise

  What meant my godlike gloriousness,

  When I came back from Lyonnesse

  With magic in my eyes.

  A THUNDERSTORM IN TOWN

  (A Reminiscence)

  She wore a new “terra-cotta” dress,

  And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,

  Within the hansom’s dry recess,

  Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless

  We sat on, snug and warm.

  Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,

  And the glass that had screened our forms before

  Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:

  I should have kissed her if the rain

  Had lasted a minute more.

  THE TORN LETTER

  I

  I tore your letter into strips

  No bigger than the airy feathers

  That ducks preen out in changing weathers

  Upon the shifting ripple-tips.

  II

  In darkness on my bed alone

  I seemed to see you in a vision,

  And hear you say: “Why this derision

  Of one drawn to you, though unknown?”

  III

  Yes, eve’s quick mood had run its course,

  The night had cooled my hasty madness;

  I suffered a regretful sadness

  Which deepened into real remorse.

  IV

  I thought what pensive patient days

  A soul must know of grain so tender,

  How much of good must grace the sender

  Of such sweet words in such bright phrase.

  V

  Uprising then, as things unpriced

  I sought each fragment, patched and mended;

  The midnight whitened ere I had ended

  And gathered words I had sacrificed.

  VI

  But some, alas, of those I threw

  Were past my search, destroyed for ever:

  They were your name and place; and never

  Did I regain those clues to you.

  VII

  I learnt I had missed, by rash unheed,

  My track; that, so the Will decided,

  In life, death, we should be divided,

  And at the sense I ached indeed.

  VIII

  That ache for you, born long ago,

  Throbs on; I never could outgrow it.

  What a revenge, did you but know it!

  But that, thank God, you do not know.

  BEYOND THE LAST LAMP

  (Near Tooting Common)

  I

  While rain, with eve in partnership,

  Descended darkly, drip, drip, drip,

  Beyond the last lone lamp I passed

  Walking slowly, whispering sadly,

  Two linked loiterers, wan, downcast:

  Some heavy thought constrained each face,

  And blinded them to time and place.

  II

  The pair seemed lovers, yet absorbed

  In mental scenes no longer orbed

  By love’s young rays. Each countenance

  As it slowly, as it sadly

  Caught the lamplight’s yellow glance

  Held in suspense a misery

  At things which had been or might be.

  III

  When I retrod that watery way

  Some hours beyond the droop of day,

  Still I found pacing there the twain

  Just as slowly, just as sadly,

  Heedless of the night and rain.

  One could but wonder who they were

  And what wild woe detained them there.

  IV

  Though thirty years of blur and blot

  Have slid since I beheld that spot,

  And saw in curious converse there

  Moving slowly, moving sadly

  That mysterious tragic pair,

  Its olden look may linger on -

  All but the couple; they have gone.

  V

  Whither? Who knows, indeed . . . And yet

  To me, when nights are weird and wet,

  Without those comrades there at tryst

  Creeping slowly, creeping sadly,

  That lone lane does not exist.

  There they seem brooding on their pain,

  And will, while such a lane remain.

  THE FACE AT THE CASEMENT

  If ever joy leave

  An abiding sting of sorrow,

  So befell it on the morrow

  Of that May eve . . .

  The travelled sun dropped

  To the north-west, low and lower,

  The pony’s trot grew slower,

  And then we stopped.

  ”This cosy house just by

  I must call at for a minute,

  A sick man lies within it

  Who soon will die.

  ”He wished to marry me,

  So I am bound, when I drive near him,

  To inquire, if but to cheer him,

  How he may be.”

  A message was sent in,

  And wordlessly we waited,

  Till some one came and stated

  The bulletin.

  And that the sufferer said,

  For her call no words could thank her;

  As his angel he must rank her

  Till life’s spark fled.

  Slowly we drove away,

  When I turned my head, although not

  Called; why so I turned I know not

  Even to this day.

  And lo, there in my view

  Pressed against an upper lattice

  Was a white face, gazing at us

  As we withdrew.

  And well did I divine

  It to be the man’s there dying,

  Who but lately had been sighing

  For her pledged mine.

  Then I deigned a deed of hell;

  It was done before I knew it;

  What devil made me do it

  I cannot tell!

  Yes, while he gazed above,

  I put my arm about her

  That he might see, nor doubt her

  My plighted Love.

  The pale face vanished quick,

  As if blasted, from the casement,

  And my shame and self-abasement

  Began their prick.

  And they prick on, ceaselessly,

  For that stab in Love’s fierce fashion

 
; Which, unfired by lover’s passion,

  Was foreign to me.

  She smiled at my caress,

  But why came the soft embowment

  Of her shoulder at that moment

  She did not guess.

  Long long years has he lain

  In thy garth, O sad Saint Cleather:

  What tears there, bared to weather,

  Will cleanse that stain!

  Love is long-suffering, brave,

  Sweet, prompt, precious as a jewel;

  But O, too, Love is cruel,

  Cruel as the grave.

  LOST LOVE

  I play my sweet old airs -

  The airs he knew

  When our love was true -

  But he does not balk

  His determined walk,

  And passes up the stairs.

  I sing my songs once more,

  And presently hear

  His footstep near

  As if it would stay;

  But he goes his way,

  And shuts a distant door.

  So I wait for another morn

  And another night

  In this soul-sick blight;

  And I wonder much

  As I sit, why such

  A woman as I was born!

  MY SPIRIT WILL NOT HAUNT THE MOUND

  My spirit will not haunt the mound

  Above my breast,

  But travel, memory-possessed,

  To where my tremulous being found

  Life largest, best.

  My phantom-footed shape will go

  When nightfall grays

  Hither and thither along the ways

  I and another used to know

  In backward days.

  And there you’ll find me, if a jot

  You still should care

  For me, and for my curious air;

  If otherwise, then I shall not,

  For you, be there.

  WESSEX HEIGHTS (1896)

  There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand

  For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,

  Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,

  I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

  In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man’s friend -

  Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to

  mend:

  Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,

  But mind-chains do not clank where one’s next neighbour is the sky.

  In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -

  Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:

  They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -

  Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

  Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,

  And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause

  Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,

  Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

  I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there’s a figure against the

  moon,

  Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;

  I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now

  passed

  For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

  There’s a ghost at Yell’ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the

  night,

  There’s a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a

  shroud of white,

  There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,

  I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

  As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,

  I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;

  Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;

  Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

  So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,

  Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,

  Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,

  And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

  IN DEATH DIVIDED

  I

  I shall rot here, with those whom in their day

  You never knew,

  And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay,

  Met not my view,

  Will in your distant grave-place ever neighbour you.

  II

  No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower,

  While earth endures,

  Will fall on my mound and within the hour

  Steal on to yours;

  One robin never haunt our two green covertures.

  III

  Some organ may resound on Sunday noons

  By where you lie,

  Some other thrill the panes with other tunes

  Where moulder I;

  No selfsame chords compose our common lullaby.

  IV

  The simply-cut memorial at my head

  Perhaps may take

  A Gothic form, and that above your bed

  Be Greek in make;

  No linking symbol show thereon for our tale’s sake.

  V

  And in the monotonous moils of strained, hard-run

  Humanity,

  The eternal tie which binds us twain in one

  No eye will see

  Stretching across the miles that sever you from me.

  THE PLACE ON THE MAP

  I

  I look upon the map that hangs by me -

  Its shires and towns and rivers lined in varnished artistry -

  And I mark a jutting height

  Coloured purple, with a margin of blue sea.

  II

  — ’Twas a day of latter summer, hot and dry;

  Ay, even the waves seemed drying as we walked on, she and I,

  By this spot where, calmly quite,

  She informed me what would happen by and by.

  III

  This hanging map depicts the coast and place,

  And resuscitates therewith our unexpected troublous case

  All distinctly to my sight,

  And her tension, and the aspect of her face.

  IV

  Weeks and weeks we had loved beneath that blazing blue,

  Which had lost the art of raining, as her eyes to-day had too,

  While she told what, as by sleight,

  Shot our firmament with rays of ruddy hue.

  V

  For the wonder and the wormwood of the whole

  Was that what in realms of reason would have joyed our double soul

  Wore a torrid tragic light

  Under order-keeping’s rigorous control.

  VI

  So, the map revives her words, the spot, the time,

  And the thing we found we had to face before the next year’s prime;

  The charted coast stares bright,

  And its episode comes back in pantomime.

  WHERE THE PICNIC WAS

  Where we made the fire,

  In the summer time,

  Of branch and briar

  On the hill to the sea

  I slowly climb

  Through winter mire,

  And scan and trace

  The forsaken place

  Quite readily.

  Now a cold wind blows,

  And the grass is gray,

  But the spot still shows

  As a burnt circle — aye,

  And stick-ends, charred,

  Still strew the sward

  Whereon I stand,

  Last relic of the band

  Who came that day!


  Yes, I am here

  Just as last year,

  And the sea breathes brine

  From its strange straight line

  Up hither, the same

  As when we four came.

  - But two have wandered far

  From this grassy rise

  Into urban roar

  Where no picnics are,

  And one — has shut her eyes

  For evermore.

  THE SCHRECKHORN

  (With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)

  (June 1897)

  Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim;

  Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams

  Upon my nearing vision, less it seems

  A looming Alp-height than a guise of him

  Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,

  Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,

  Of semblance to his personality

  In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.

  At his last change, when Life’s dull coils unwind,

  Will he, in old love, hitherward escape,

  And the eternal essence of his mind

  Enter this silent adamantine shape,

  And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows

  When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?

  A SINGER ASLEEP

  (Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837-1909)

  I

  In this fair niche above the unslumbering sea,

  That sentrys up and down all night, all day,

  From cove to promontory, from ness to bay,

  The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be Pillowed eternally.