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 -
