Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

  Ever into nought.

  POEMS OF 1912-13

  Veteris vestigia flammae

  THE GOING

  Why did you give no hint that night

  That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,

  And calmly, as if indifferent quite,

  You would close your term here, up and be gone

  Where I could not follow

  With wing of swallow

  To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!

  Never to bid good-bye,

  Or give me the softest call,

  Or utter a wish for a word, while I

  Saw morning harden upon the wall,

  Unmoved, unknowing

  That your great going

  Had place that moment, and altered all.

  Why do you make me leave the house

  And think for a breath it is you I see

  At the end of the alley of bending boughs

  Where so often at dusk you used to be;

  Till in darkening dankness

  The yawning blankness

  Of the perspective sickens me!

  You were she who abode

  By those red-veined rocks far West,

  You were the swan-necked one who rode

  Along the beetling Beeny Crest,

  And, reining nigh me,

  Would muse and eye me,

  While Life unrolled us its very best.

  Why, then, latterly did we not speak,

  Did we not think of those days long dead,

  And ere your vanishing strive to seek

  That time’s renewal? We might have said,

  ”In this bright spring weather

  We’ll visit together

  Those places that once we visited.”

  Well, well! All’s past amend,

  Unchangeable. It must go.

  I seem but a dead man held on end

  To sink down soon . . . O you could not know

  That such swift fleeing

  No soul foreseeing -

  Not even I — would undo me so!

  December 1912.

  YOUR LAST DRIVE

  Here by the moorway you returned,

  And saw the borough lights ahead

  That lit your face — all undiscerned

  To be in a week the face of the dead,

  And you told of the charm of that haloed view

  That never again would beam on you.

  And on your left you passed the spot

  Where eight days later you were to lie,

  And be spoken of as one who was not;

  Beholding it with a cursory eye

  As alien from you, though under its tree

  You soon would halt everlastingly.

  I drove not with you . . . Yet had I sat

  At your side that eve I should not have seen

  That the countenance I was glancing at

  Had a last-time look in the flickering sheen,

  Nor have read the writing upon your face,

  “I go hence soon to my resting-place;

  “You may miss me then. But I shall not know

  How many times you visit me there,

  Or what your thoughts are, or if you go

  There never at all. And I shall not care.

  Should you censure me I shall take no heed

  And even your praises I shall not need.”

  True: never you’ll know. And you will not mind.

  But shall I then slight you because of such?

  Dear ghost, in the past did you ever find

  The thought “What profit?” move me much

  Yet the fact indeed remains the same,

  You are past love, praise, indifference, blame.

  December 1912.

  THE WALK

  You did not walk with me

  Of late to the hill-top tree

  By the gated ways,

  As in earlier days;

  You were weak and lame,

  So you never came,

  And I went alone, and I did not mind,

  Not thinking of you as left behind.

  I walked up there to-day

  Just in the former way:

  Surveyed around

  The familiar ground

  By myself again:

  What difference, then?

  Only that underlying sense

  Of the look of a room on returning thence.

  RAIN ON A GRAVE

  Clouds spout upon her

  Their waters amain

  In ruthless disdain, -

  Her who but lately

  Had shivered with pain

  As at touch of dishonour

  If there had lit on her

  So coldly, so straightly

  Such arrows of rain.

  She who to shelter

  Her delicate head

  Would quicken and quicken

  Each tentative tread

  If drops chanced to pelt her

  That summertime spills

  In dust-paven rills

  When thunder-clouds thicken

  And birds close their bills.

  Would that I lay there

  And she were housed here!

  Or better, together

  Were folded away there

  Exposed to one weather

  We both, — who would stray there

  When sunny the day there,

  Or evening was clear

  At the prime of the year.

  Soon will be growing

  Green blades from her mound,

  And daises be showing

  Like stars on the ground,

  Till she form part of them -

  Ay — the sweet heart of them,

  Loved beyond measure

  With a child’s pleasure

  All her life’s round.

  Jan. 31, 1913.

  I FOUND HER OUT THERE

  I found her out there

  On a slope few see,

  That falls westwardly

  To the salt-edged air,

  Where the ocean breaks

  On the purple strand,

  And the hurricane shakes

  The solid land.

  I brought her here,

  And have laid her to rest

  In a noiseless nest

  No sea beats near.

  She will never be stirred

  In her loamy cell

  By the waves long heard

  And loved so well.

  So she does not sleep

  By those haunted heights

  The Atlantic smites

  And the blind gales sweep,

  Whence she often would gaze

  At Dundagel’s far head,

  While the dipping blaze

  Dyed her face fire-red;

  And would sigh at the tale

  Of sunk Lyonnesse,

  As a wind-tugged tress

  Flapped her cheek like a flail;

  Or listen at whiles

  With a thought-bound brow

  To the murmuring miles

  She is far from now.

  Yet her shade, maybe,

  Will creep underground

  Till it catch the sound

  Of that western sea

  As it swells and sobs

  Where she once domiciled,

  And joy in its throbs

  With the heart of a child.

  WITHOUT CEREMONY

  It was your way, my dear,

  To be gone without a word

  When callers, friends, or kin

  Had left, and I hastened in

  To rejoin you, as I inferred.

  And when you’d a mind to career

  Off anywhere — say to town -

  You were all on a sudden gone

  Before I had thought thereon,

  Or noticed your trunks were down.

  So, now that you disappear

  For ever in that swift style,

  Your meaning seems to me

  Just as it used to be:

 
“Good-bye is not worth while!”

  LAMENT

  How she would have loved

  A party to-day! -

  Bright-hatted and gloved,

  With table and tray

  And chairs on the lawn

  Her smiles would have shone

  With welcomings . . . But

  She is shut, she is shut

  From friendship’s spell

  In the jailing shell

  Of her tiny cell.

  Or she would have reigned

  At a dinner to-night

  With ardours unfeigned,

  And a generous delight;

  All in her abode

  She’d have freely bestowed

  On her guests . . . But alas,

  She is shut under grass

  Where no cups flow,

  Powerless to know

  That it might be so.

  And she would have sought

  With a child’s eager glance

  The shy snowdrops brought

  By the new year’s advance,

  And peered in the rime

  Of Candlemas-time

  For crocuses . . . chanced

  It that she were not tranced

  From sights she loved best;

  Wholly possessed

  By an infinite rest!

  And we are here staying

  Amid these stale things

  Who care not for gaying,

  And those junketings

  That used so to joy her,

  And never to cloy her

  As us they cloy! . . . But

  She is shut, she is shut

  From the cheer of them, dead

  To all done and said

  In a yew-arched bed.

  THE HAUNTER

  He does not think that I haunt here nightly:

  How shall I let him know

  That whither his fancy sets him wandering

  I, too, alertly go? -

  Hover and hover a few feet from him

  Just as I used to do,

  But cannot answer his words addressed me -

  Only listen thereto!

  When I could answer he did not say them:

  When I could let him know

  How I would like to join in his journeys

  Seldom he wished to go.

  Now that he goes and wants me with him

  More than he used to do,

  Never he sees my faithful phantom

  Though he speaks thereto.

  Yes, I accompany him to places

  Only dreamers know,

  Where the shy hares limp long paces,

  Where the night rooks go;

  Into old aisles where the past is all to him,

  Close as his shade can do,

  Always lacking the power to call to him,

  Near as I reach thereto!

  What a good haunter I am, O tell him,

  Quickly make him know

  If he but sigh since my loss befell him

  Straight to his side I go.

  Tell him a faithful one is doing

  All that love can do

  Still that his path may be worth pursuing,

  And to bring peace thereto.

  THE VOICE

  Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

  Saying that now you are not as you were

  When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

  But as at first, when our day was fair.

  Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

  Standing as when I drew near to the town

  Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

  Even to the original air-blue gown!

  Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

  Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

  You being ever consigned to existlessness,

  Heard no more again far or near?

  Thus I; faltering forward,

  Leaves around me falling,

  Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward

  And the woman calling.

  December 1912.

  HIS VISITOR

  I come across from Mellstock while the moon wastes weaker

  To behold where I lived with you for twenty years and more:

  I shall go in the gray, at the passing of the mail-train,

  And need no setting open of the long familiar door

  As before.

  The change I notice in my once own quarters!

  A brilliant budded border where the daisies used to be,

  The rooms new painted, and the pictures altered,

  And other cups and saucers, and no cozy nook for tea

  As with me.

  I discern the dim faces of the sleep-wrapt servants;

  They are not those who tended me through feeble hours and strong,

  But strangers quite, who never knew my rule here,

  Who never saw me painting, never heard my softling song

  Float along.

  So I don’t want to linger in this re-decked dwelling,

  I feel too uneasy at the contrasts I behold,

  And I make again for Mellstock to return here never,

  And rejoin the roomy silence, and the mute and manifold

  Souls of old.

  1913.

  A CIRCULAR

  As “legal representative”

  I read a missive not my own,

  On new designs the senders give

  For clothes, in tints as shown.

  Here figure blouses, gowns for tea,

  And presentation-trains of state,

  Charming ball-dresses, millinery,

  Warranted up to date.

  And this gay-pictured, spring-time shout

  Of Fashion, hails what lady proud?

  Her who before last year was out

  Was costumed in a shroud.

  A DREAM OR NO

  Why go to Saint-Juliot? What’s Juliot to me?

  I was but made fancy

  By some necromancy

  That much of my life claims the spot as its key.

  Yes. I have had dreams of that place in the West,

  And a maiden abiding

  Thereat as in hiding;

  Fair-eyed and white-shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed.

  And of how, coastward bound on a night long ago,

  There lonely I found her,

  The sea-birds around her,

  And other than nigh things uncaring to know.

  So sweet her life there (in my thought has it seemed)

  That quickly she drew me

  To take her unto me,

  And lodge her long years with me. Such have I dreamed.

  But nought of that maid from Saint-Juliot I see;

  Can she ever have been here,

  And shed her life’s sheen here,

  The woman I thought a long housemate with me?

  Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist?

  Or a Vallency Valley

  With stream and leafed alley,

  Or Beeny, or Bos with its flounce flinging mist?

  February 1913.

  AFTER A JOURNEY

  Hereto I come to interview a ghost;

  Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?

  Up the cliff, down, till I’m lonely, lost,

  And the unseen waters’ ejaculations awe me.

  Where you will next be there’s no knowing,

  Facing round about me everywhere,

  With your nut-coloured hair,

  And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

  Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;

  Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;

  What have you now found to say of our past -

  Viewed across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?

  Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?

  Things were not lastly as firstly well

  With us
twain, you tell?

  But all’s closed now, despite Time’s derision.

  I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

  To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,

  The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone

  At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,

  And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow

  That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,

  When you were all aglow,

  And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

  Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,

  The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,

  Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,

  For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.

  Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,

  The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!

  I am just the same as when

  Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

  PENTARGAN BAY.

  A DEATH-DAY RECALLED

  Beeny did not quiver,

  Juliot grew not gray,

  Thin Valency’s river

  Held its wonted way.

  Bos seemed not to utter

  Dimmest note of dirge,

  Targan mouth a mutter

  To its creamy surge.

  Yet though these, unheeding,

  Listless, passed the hour

  Of her spirit’s speeding,

  She had, in her flower,

  Sought and loved the places -

  Much and often pined

  For their lonely faces

  When in towns confined.

  Why did not Valency

  In his purl deplore

  One whose haunts were whence he

  Drew his limpid store?

  Why did Bos not thunder,

  Targan apprehend

  Body and breath were sunder

  Of their former friend?

  BEENY CLIFF