Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

by Thomas Hardy

  Through one who evoked you often. Then at last

  Your raiser was borne off, and I mourned you had passed

  From my life with your late outsetter;

  Till I said, “‘Tis better!”

  But you waylaid me. I rose and went as a ghost goes,

  And said, eyes-full “I’ll never hear it again!

  It is overmuch for scathed and memoried men

  When sitting among strange people

  Under their steeple.”

  Now, a new stirrer of tones calls you up before me

  And wakes your speech, as she of Endor did

  (When sought by Saul who, in disguises hid,

  Fell down on the earth to hear it)

  Samuel’s spirit.

  So, your quired oracles beat till they make me tremble

  As I discern your mien in the old attire,

  Here in these turmoiled years of belligerent fire

  Living still on — and onward, maybe,

  Till Doom’s great day be!

  Sunday, August 13, 1916.

  AT THE WORD “FAREWELL”

  She looked like a bird from a cloud

  On the clammy lawn,

  Moving alone, bare-browed

  In the dim of dawn.

  The candles alight in the room

  For my parting meal

  Made all things withoutdoors loom

  Strange, ghostly, unreal.

  The hour itself was a ghost,

  And it seemed to me then

  As of chances the chance furthermost

  I should see her again.

  I beheld not where all was so fleet

  That a Plan of the past

  Which had ruled us from birthtime to meet

  Was in working at last:

  No prelude did I there perceive

  To a drama at all,

  Or foreshadow what fortune might weave

  From beginnings so small;

  But I rose as if quicked by a spur

  I was bound to obey,

  And stepped through the casement to her

  Still alone in the gray.

  “I am leaving you . . . Farewell!” I said,

  As I followed her on

  By an alley bare boughs overspread;

  ”I soon must be gone!”

  Even then the scale might have been turned

  Against love by a feather,

  - But crimson one cheek of hers burned

  When we came in together.

  FIRST SIGHT OF HER AND AFTER

  A day is drawing to its fall

  I had not dreamed to see;

  The first of many to enthrall

  My spirit, will it be?

  Or is this eve the end of all

  Such new delight for me?

  I journey home: the pattern grows

  Of moonshades on the way:

  “Soon the first quarter, I suppose,”

  Sky-glancing travellers say;

  I realise that it, for those,

  Has been a common day.

  THE RIVAL

  I determined to find out whose it was -

  The portrait he looked at so, and sighed;

  Bitterly have I rued my meanness

  And wept for it since he died!

  I searched his desk when he was away,

  And there was the likeness — yes, my own!

  Taken when I was the season’s fairest,

  And time-lines all unknown.

  I smiled at my image, and put it back,

  And he went on cherishing it, until

  I was chafed that he loved not the me then living,

  But that past woman still.

  Well, such was my jealousy at last,

  I destroyed that face of the former me;

  Could you ever have dreamed the heart of woman

  Would work so foolishly!

  HEREDITY

  I am the family face;

  Flesh perishes, I live on,

  Projecting trait and trace

  Through time to times anon,

  And leaping from place to place

  Over oblivion.

  The years-heired feature that can

  In curve and voice and eye

  Despise the human span

  Of durance — that is I;

  The eternal thing in man,

  That heeds no call to die.

  YOU WERE THE SORT THAT MEN FORGET

  You were the sort that men forget;

  Though I — not yet! -

  Perhaps not ever. Your slighted weakness

  Adds to the strength of my regret!

  You’d not the art — you never had

  For good or bad -

  To make men see how sweet your meaning,

  Which, visible, had charmed them glad.

  You would, by words inept let fall,

  Offend them all,

  Even if they saw your warm devotion

  Would hold your life’s blood at their call.

  You lacked the eye to understand

  Those friends offhand

  Whose mode was crude, though whose dim purport

  Outpriced the courtesies of the bland.

  I am now the only being who

  Remembers you

  It may be. What a waste that Nature

  Grudged soul so dear the art its due!

  SHE, I, AND THEY

  I was sitting,

  She was knitting,

  And the portraits of our fore-folk hung around;

  When there struck on us a sigh;

  ”Ah — what is that?” said I:

  “Was it not you?” said she. “A sigh did sound.”

  I had not breathed it,

  Nor the night-wind heaved it,

  And how it came to us we could not guess;

  And we looked up at each face

  Framed and glazed there in its place,

  Still hearkening; but thenceforth was silentness.

  Half in dreaming,

  ”Then its meaning,”

  Said we, “must be surely this; that they repine

  That we should be the last

  Of stocks once unsurpassed,

  And unable to keep up their sturdy line.”

  1916.

  NEAR LANIVET, 1872

  There was a stunted handpost just on the crest,

  Only a few feet high:

  She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,

  At the crossways close thereby.

  She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,

  And laid her arms on its own,

  Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,

  Her sad face sideways thrown.

  Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day

  Made her look as one crucified

  In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,

  And hurriedly “Don’t,” I cried.

  I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said,

  As she stepped forth ready to go,

  “I am rested now. — Something strange came into my head;

  I wish I had not leant so!”

  And wordless we moved onward down from the hill

  In the west cloud’s murked obscure,

  And looking back we could see the handpost still

  In the solitude of the moor.

  “It struck her too,” I thought, for as if afraid

  She heavily breathed as we trailed;

  Till she said, “I did not think how ‘twould look in the shade,

  When I leant there like one nailed.”

  I, lightly: “There’s nothing in it. For YOU, anyhow!”

  — ”O I know there is not,” said she . . .

  “Yet I wonder . . . If no one is bodily crucified now,

  In spirit one may be!”

  And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see

  In the running of Time’s far glass

  Her crucified, as she had won
dered if she might be

  Some day. — Alas, alas!

  JOYS OF MEMORY

  When the spring comes round, and a certain day

  Looks out from the brume by the eastern copsetrees

  And says, Remember,

  I begin again, as if it were new,

  A day of like date I once lived through,

  Whiling it hour by hour away;

  So shall I do till my December,

  When spring comes round.

  I take my holiday then and my rest

  Away from the dun life here about me,

  Old hours re-greeting

  With the quiet sense that bring they must

  Such throbs as at first, till I house with dust,

  And in the numbness my heartsome zest

  For things that were, be past repeating

  When spring comes round.

  TO THE MOON

  ”What have you looked at, Moon,

  In your time,

  Now long past your prime?”

  “O, I have looked at, often looked at

  Sweet, sublime,

  Sore things, shudderful, night and noon

  In my time.”

  ”What have you mused on, Moon,

  In your day,

  So aloof, so far away?”

  “O, I have mused on, often mused on

  Growth, decay,

  Nations alive, dead, mad, aswoon,

  In my day!”

  ”Have you much wondered, Moon,

  On your rounds,

  Self-wrapt, beyond Earth’s bounds?”

  “Yea, I have wondered, often wondered

  At the sounds

  Reaching me of the human tune

  On my rounds.”

  ”What do you think of it, Moon,

  As you go?

  Is Life much, or no?”

  “O, I think of it, often think of it

  As a show

  God ought surely to shut up soon,

  As I go.”

  COPYING ARCHITECTURE IN AN OLD MINSTER

  (Wimborne)

  How smartly the quarters of the hour march by

  That the jack-o’-clock never forgets;

  Ding-dong; and before I have traced a cusp’s eye,

  Or got the true twist of the ogee over,

  A double ding-dong ricochetts.

  Just so did he clang here before I came,

  And so will he clang when I’m gone

  Through the Minster’s cavernous hollows — the same

  Tale of hours never more to be will he deliver

  To the speechless midnight and dawn!

  I grow to conceive it a call to ghosts,

  Whose mould lies below and around.

  Yes; the next “Come, come,” draws them out from their posts,

  And they gather, and one shade appears, and another,

  As the eve-damps creep from the ground.

  See — a Courtenay stands by his quatre-foiled tomb,

  And a Duke and his Duchess near;

  And one Sir Edmund in columned gloom,

  And a Saxon king by the presbytery chamber;

  And shapes unknown in the rear.

  Maybe they have met for a parle on some plan

  To better ail-stricken mankind;

  I catch their cheepings, though thinner than

  The overhead creak of a passager’s pinion

  When leaving land behind.

  Or perhaps they speak to the yet unborn,

  And caution them not to come

  To a world so ancient and trouble-torn,

  Of foiled intents, vain lovingkindness,

  And ardours chilled and numb.

  They waste to fog as I stir and stand,

  And move from the arched recess,

  And pick up the drawing that slipped from my hand,

  And feel for the pencil I dropped in the cranny

  In a moment’s forgetfulness.

  TO SHAKESPEARE AFTER THREE HUNDRED YEARS

  Bright baffling Soul, least capturable of themes,

  Thou, who display’dst a life of common-place,

  Leaving no intimate word or personal trace

  Of high design outside the artistry

  Of thy penned dreams,

  Still shalt remain at heart unread eternally.

  Through human orbits thy discourse to-day,

  Despite thy formal pilgrimage, throbs on

  In harmonies that cow Oblivion,

  And, like the wind, with all-uncared effect

  Maintain a sway

  Not fore-desired, in tracks unchosen and unchecked.

  And yet, at thy last breath, with mindless note

  The borough clocks but samely tongued the hour,

  The Avon just as always glassed the tower,

  Thy age was published on thy passing-bell

  But in due rote

  With other dwellers’ deaths accorded a like knell.

  And at the strokes some townsman (met, maybe,

  And thereon queried by some squire’s good dame

  Driving in shopward) may have given thy name,

  With, “Yes, a worthy man and well-to-do;

  Though, as for me,

  I knew him but by just a neighbour’s nod, ‘tis true.

  ”I’ faith, few knew him much here, save by word,

  He having elsewhere led his busier life;

  Though to be sure he left with us his wife.”

  — ”Ah, one of the tradesmen’s sons, I now recall . . .

  Witty, I’ve heard . . .

  We did not know him . . . Well, good-day. Death comes to all.”

  So, like a strange bright bird we sometimes find

  To mingle with the barn-door brood awhile,

  Then vanish from their homely domicile -

  Into man’s poesy, we wot not whence,

  Flew thy strange mind,

  Lodged there a radiant guest, and sped for ever thence.

  1916.

  QUID HIC AGIS?

  I

  When I weekly knew

  An ancient pew,

  And murmured there

  The forms of prayer

  And thanks and praise

  In the ancient ways,

  And heard read out

  During August drought

  That chapter from Kings

  Harvest-time brings;

  - How the prophet, broken

  By griefs unspoken,

  Went heavily away

  To fast and to pray,

  And, while waiting to die,

  The Lord passed by,

  And a whirlwind and fire

  Drew nigher and nigher,

  And a small voice anon

  Bade him up and be gone, -

  I did not apprehend

  As I sat to the end

  And watched for her smile

  Across the sunned aisle,

  That this tale of a seer

  Which came once a year

  Might, when sands were heaping,

  Be like a sweat creeping,

  Or in any degree

  Bear on her or on me!

  II

  When later, by chance

  Of circumstance,

  It befel me to read

  On a hot afternoon

  At the lectern there

  The selfsame words

  As the lesson decreed,

  To the gathered few

  From the hamlets near -

  Folk of flocks and herds

  Sitting half aswoon,

  Who listened thereto

  As women and men

  Not overmuch

  Concerned at such -

  So, like them then,

  I did not see

  What drought might be

  With me, with her,

  As the Kalendar

  Moved on, and Time

  Devoured our prime.

  III

  But now, at last,

  When our glory has
passed,

  And there is no smile

  From her in the aisle,

  But where it once shone

  A marble, men say,

  With her name thereon

  Is discerned to-day;

  And spiritless

  In the wilderness

  I shrink from sight

  And desire the night,

  (Though, as in old wise,

  I might still arise,

  Go forth, and stand

  And prophesy in the land),

  I feel the shake

  Of wind and earthquake,

  And consuming fire

  Nigher and nigher,

  And the voice catch clear,

  “What doest thou here?”

  The Spectator 1916. During the War.

  ON A MIDSUMMER EVE

  I idly cut a parsley stalk,

  And blew therein towards the moon;

  I had not thought what ghosts would walk

  With shivering footsteps to my tune.

  I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand

  As if to drink, into the brook,

  And a faint figure seemed to stand

  Above me, with the bygone look.

  I lipped rough rhymes of chance, not choice,

  I thought not what my words might be;

  There came into my ear a voice

  That turned a tenderer verse for me.

  TIMING HER

  (Written to an old folk-tune)

  Lalage’s coming:

  Where is she now, O?

  Turning to bow, O,

  And smile, is she,

  Just at parting,

  Parting, parting,

  As she is starting

  To come to me?

  Where is she now, O,

  Now, and now, O,

  Shadowing a bough, O,

  Of hedge or tree

  As she is rushing,

  Rushing, rushing,

  Gossamers brushing

  To come to me?

  Lalage’s coming;