Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

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Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) Page 759

by Thomas Hardy

Begun 1913: finished 1916.

  IN THE GARDEN (M. H.)

  We waited for the sun

  To break its cloudy prison

  (For day was not yet done,

  And night still unbegun)

  Leaning by the dial.

  After many a trial -

  We all silent there -

  It burst as new-arisen,

  Throwing a shade to where

  Time travelled at that minute.

  Little saw we in it,

  But this much I know,

  Of lookers on that shade,

  Her towards whom it made

  Soonest had to go.

  1915.

  THE TREE AND THE LADY

  I have done all I could

  For that lady I knew! Through the heats I have shaded her,

  Drawn to her songsters when summer has jaded her,

  Home from the heath or the wood.

  At the mirth-time of May,

  When my shadow first lured her, I’d donned my new bravery

  Of greenth: ‘twas my all. Now I shiver in slavery,

  Icicles grieving me gray.

  Plumed to every twig’s end

  I could tempt her chair under me. Much did I treasure her

  During those days she had nothing to pleasure her;

  Mutely she used me as friend.

  I’m a skeleton now,

  And she’s gone, craving warmth. The rime sticks like a skin to me;

  Through me Arcturus peers; Nor’lights shoot into me;

  Gone is she, scorning my bough!

  AN UPBRAIDING

  Now I am dead you sing to me

  The songs we used to know,

  But while I lived you had no wish

  Or care for doing so.

  Now I am dead you come to me

  In the moonlight, comfortless;

  Ah, what would I have given alive

  To win such tenderness!

  When you are dead, and stand to me

  Not differenced, as now,

  But like again, will you be cold

  As when we lived, or how?

  THE YOUNG GLASS-STAINER

  “These Gothic windows, how they wear me out

  With cusp and foil, and nothing straight or square,

  Crude colours, leaden borders roundabout,

  And fitting in Peter here, and Matthew there!

  “What a vocation! Here do I draw now

  The abnormal, loving the Hellenic norm;

  Martha I paint, and dream of Hera’s brow,

  Mary, and think of Aphrodite’s form.”

  Nov. 1893.

  LOOKING AT A PICTURE ON AN ANNIVERSARY

  But don’t you know it, my dear,

  Don’t you know it,

  That this day of the year

  (What rainbow-rays embow it!)

  We met, strangers confessed,

  But parted — blest?

  Though at this query, my dear,

  There in your frame

  Unmoved you still appear,

  You must be thinking the same,

  But keep that look demure

  Just to allure.

  And now at length a trace

  I surely vision

  Upon that wistful face

  Of old-time recognition,

  Smiling forth, “Yes, as you say,

  It is the day.”

  For this one phase of you

  Now left on earth

  This great date must endue

  With pulsings of rebirth? -

  I see them vitalise

  Those two deep eyes!

  But if this face I con

  Does not declare

  Consciousness living on

  Still in it, little I care

  To live myself, my dear,

  Lone-labouring here!

  Spring 1913.

  THE CHOIRMASTER’S BURIAL

  He often would ask us

  That, when he died,

  After playing so many

  To their last rest,

  If out of us any

  Should here abide,

  And it would not task us,

  We would with our lutes

  Play over him

  By his grave-brim

  The psalm he liked best -

  The one whose sense suits

  “Mount Ephraim” -

  And perhaps we should seem

  To him, in Death’s dream,

  Like the seraphim.

  As soon as I knew

  That his spirit was gone

  I thought this his due,

  And spoke thereupon.

  “I think,” said the vicar,

  “A read service quicker

  Than viols out-of-doors

  In these frosts and hoars.

  That old-fashioned way

  Requires a fine day,

  And it seems to me

  It had better not be.”

  Hence, that afternoon,

  Though never knew he

  That his wish could not be,

  To get through it faster

  They buried the master

  Without any tune.

  But ‘twas said that, when

  At the dead of next night

  The vicar looked out,

  There struck on his ken

  Thronged roundabout,

  Where the frost was graying

  The headstoned grass,

  A band all in white

  Like the saints in church-glass,

  Singing and playing

  The ancient stave

  By the choirmaster’s grave.

  Such the tenor man told

  When he had grown old.

  THE MAN WHO FORGOT

  At a lonely cross where bye-roads met

  I sat upon a gate;

  I saw the sun decline and set,

  And still was fain to wait.

  A trotting boy passed up the way

  And roused me from my thought;

  I called to him, and showed where lay

  A spot I shyly sought.

  “A summer-house fair stands hidden where

  You see the moonlight thrown;

  Go, tell me if within it there

  A lady sits alone.”

  He half demurred, but took the track,

  And silence held the scene;

  I saw his figure rambling back;

  I asked him if he had been.

  “I went just where you said, but found

  No summer-house was there:

  Beyond the slope ‘tis all bare ground;

  Nothing stands anywhere.

  “A man asked what my brains were worth;

  The house, he said, grew rotten,

  And was pulled down before my birth,

  And is almost forgotten!”

  My right mind woke, and I stood dumb;

  Forty years’ frost and flower

  Had fleeted since I’d used to come

  To meet her in that bower.

  WHILE DRAWING IN A CHURCH-YARD

  ”It is sad that so many of worth,

  Still in the flesh,” soughed the yew,

  “Misjudge their lot whom kindly earth

  Secludes from view.

  ”They ride their diurnal round

  Each day-span’s sum of hours

  In peerless ease, without jolt or bound

  Or ache like ours.

  ”If the living could but hear

  What is heard by my roots as they creep

  Round the restful flock, and the things said there,

  No one would weep.”

  ”‘Now set among the wise,’

  They say: ‘Enlarged in scope,

  That no God trumpet us to rise

  We truly hope.’“

  I listened to his strange tale

  In the mood that stillness brings,

  And I grew to accept as the day wore pale

  That show of things.

  FOR LIFE I HAD NEVER CA
RED GREATLY

  For Life I had never cared greatly,

  As worth a man’s while;

  Peradventures unsought,

  Peradventures that finished in nought,

  Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately

  Unwon by its style.

  In earliest years — why I know not -

  I viewed it askance;

  Conditions of doubt,

  Conditions that leaked slowly out,

  May haply have bent me to stand and to show not

  Much zest for its dance.

  With symphonies soft and sweet colour

  It courted me then,

  Till evasions seemed wrong,

  Till evasions gave in to its song,

  And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller

  Than life among men.

  Anew I found nought to set eyes on,

  When, lifting its hand,

  It uncloaked a star,

  Uncloaked it from fog-damps afar,

  And showed its beams burning from pole to horizon

  As bright as a brand.

  And so, the rough highway forgetting,

  I pace hill and dale

  Regarding the sky,

  Regarding the vision on high,

  And thus re-illumed have no humour for letting

  My pilgrimage fail.

  MEN WHO MARCH AWAY (SONG OF THE SOLDIERS)

  What of the faith and fire within us

  Men who march away

  Ere the barn-cocks say

  Night is growing gray,

  Leaving all that here can win us;

  What of the faith and fire within us

  Men who march away?

  Is it a purblind prank, O think you,

  Friend with the musing eye,

  Who watch us stepping by

  With doubt and dolorous sigh?

  Can much pondering so hoodwink you!

  Is it a purblind prank, O think you,

  Friend with the musing eye?

  Nay. We well see what we are doing,

  Though some may not see -

  Dalliers as they be -

  England’s need are we;

  Her distress would leave us rueing:

  Nay. We well see what we are doing,

  Though some may not see!

  In our heart of hearts believing

  Victory crowns the just,

  And that braggarts must

  Surely bite the dust,

  Press we to the field ungrieving,

  In our heart of hearts believing

  Victory crowns the just.

  Hence the faith and fire within us

  Men who march away

  Ere the barn-cocks say

  Night is growing gray,

  Leaving all that here can win us;

  Hence the faith and fire within us

  Men who march away.

  September 5, 1914.

  HIS COUNTRY

  [He travels southward, and looks around;]

  I journeyed from my native spot

  Across the south sea shine,

  And found that people in hall and cot

  Laboured and suffered each his lot

  Even as I did mine.

  [and cannot discern the boundary]

  Thus noting them in meads and marts

  It did not seem to me

  That my dear country with its hearts,

  Minds, yearnings, worse and better parts

  Had ended with the sea.

  [of his native country;]

  I further and further went anon,

  As such I still surveyed,

  And further yet — yea, on and on,

  And all the men I looked upon

  Had heart-strings fellow-made.

  [or where his duties to his fellow-creatures end;]

  I traced the whole terrestrial round,

  Homing the other side;

  Then said I, “What is there to bound

  My denizenship? It seems I have found

  Its scope to be world-wide.”

  [nor who are his enemies]

  I asked me: “Whom have I to fight,

  And whom have I to dare,

  And whom to weaken, crush, and blight?

  My country seems to have kept in sight

  On my way everywhere.”

  1913.

  ENGLAND TO GERMANY IN 1914

  “O England, may God punish thee!”

  - Is it that Teuton genius flowers

  Only to breathe malignity

  Upon its friend of earlier hours?

  - We have eaten your bread, you have eaten ours,

  We have loved your burgs, your pines’ green moan,

  Fair Rhine-stream, and its storied towers;

  Your shining souls of deathless dowers

  Have won us as they were our own:

  We have nursed no dreams to shed your blood,

  We have matched your might not rancorously,

  Save a flushed few whose blatant mood

  You heard and marked as well as we

  To tongue not in their country’s key;

  But yet you cry with face aflame,

  “O England, may God punish thee!”

  And foul in onward history,

  And present sight, your ancient name.

  Autumn 1914.

  ON THE BELGIAN EXPATRIATION

  I dreamt that people from the Land of Chimes

  Arrived one autumn morning with their bells,

  To hoist them on the towers and citadels

  Of my own country, that the musical rhymes

  Rung by them into space at meted times

  Amid the market’s daily stir and stress,

  And the night’s empty star-lit silentness,

  Might solace souls of this and kindred climes.

  Then I awoke; and lo, before me stood

  The visioned ones, but pale and full of fear;

  From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend,

  No carillons in their train. Foes of mad mood

  Had shattered these to shards amid the gear

  Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.

  October 18, 1914.

  AN APPEAL TO AMERICA ON BEHALF OF THE BELGIAN DESTITUTE

  Seven millions stand

  Emaciate, in that ancient Delta-land:-

  We here, full-charged with our own maimed and dead,

  And coiled in throbbing conflicts slow and sore,

  Can poorly soothe these ails unmerited

  Of souls forlorn upon the facing shore! -

  Where naked, gaunt, in endless band on band

  Seven millions stand.

  No man can say

  To your great country that, with scant delay,

  You must, perforce, ease them in their loud need:

  We know that nearer first your duty lies;

  But — is it much to ask that you let plead

  Your lovingkindness with you — wooing-wise -

  Albeit that aught you owe, and must repay,

  No man can say?

  December 1914.

  THE PITY OF IT

  I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar

  From rail-track and from highway, and I heard

  In field and farmstead many an ancient word

  Of local lineage like “Thu bist,” “Er war,”

  “Ich woll,” “Er sholl,” and by-talk similar,

  Nigh as they speak who in this month’s moon gird

  At England’s very loins, thereunto spurred

  By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.

  Then seemed a Heart crying: “Whosoever they be

  At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame

  Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,

  “Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame;

  May their familiars grow to shun their name,

  And their brood perish everlastingly.”

  April 1915.

  IN
TIME OF WARS AND TUMULTS

  “Would that I’d not drawn breath here!” some one said,

  “To stalk upon this stage of evil deeds,

  Where purposelessly month by month proceeds

  A play so sorely shaped and blood-bespread.”

  Yet had his spark not quickened, but lain dead

  To the gross spectacles of this our day,

  And never put on the proffered cloak of clay,

  He had but known not things now manifested;

  Life would have swirled the same. Morns would have dawned

  On the uprooting by the night-gun’s stroke

  Of what the yester noonshine brought to flower;

  Brown martial brows in dying throes have wanned

  Despite his absence; hearts no fewer been broke

  By Empery’s insatiate lust of power.

  1915.

  IN TIME OF “THE BREAKING OF NATIONS”

  I

  Only a man harrowing clods

  In a slow silent walk

  With an old horse that stumbles and nods

  Half asleep as they stalk.

  II

  Only thin smoke without flame

  From the heaps of couch-grass;

  Yet this will go onward the same

  Though Dynasties pass.

  III

  Yonder a maid and her wight

  Come whispering by:

  War’s annals will cloud into night

  Ere their story die.

  1915.

  CRY OF THE HOMELESS AFTER THE PRUSSIAN INVASION OF BELGIUM

  “Instigator of the ruin -

  Whichsoever thou mayst be

  Of the masterful of Europe

  That contrived our misery -

 

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