by Thomas Hardy
Among the young, among the weak and old,
And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”
II
Men had not paused to answer. Foes distraught
Pierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,
Philosophies that sages long had taught,
And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,
And “Hell!” and “Shell!” were yapped at Lovingkindness.
III
The feeble folk at home had grown full-used
To “dug-outs,” “snipers,” “Huns,” from the war-adept
In the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;
To day - dreamt men in millions, when they mused -
To nightmare-men in millions when they slept.
IV
Waking to wish existence timeless, null,
Sirius they watched above where armies fell;
He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lull
Of night a boom came thencewise, like the dull
Plunge of a stone dropped into some deep well.
V
So, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowly
Were dead and damned, there sounded “War is done!”
One morrow. Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,
“Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly,
And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?”
VI
Breathless they paused. Out there men raised their glance
To where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,
As they had raised it through the four years’ dance
Of Death in the now familiar flats of France;
And murmured, “Strange, this! How? All firing stopped?”
VII
Aye; all was hushed. The about-to-fire fired not,
The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.
One checkless regiment slung a clinching shot
And turned. The Spirit of Irony smirked out, “What?
Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?”
VIII
Thenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,
No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,
No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;
Worn horses mused: “We are not whipped to-day”;
No weft-winged engines blurred the moon’s thin horn.
IX
Calm fell. From Heaven distilled a clemency;
There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;
Some could, some could not, shake off misery:
The Sinister Spirit sneered: “It had to be!”
And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”
HAUNTING FINGERS
A PHANTASY IN A MUSEUM OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
”Are you awake,
Comrades, this silent night?
Well ‘twere if all of our glossy gluey make
Lay in the damp without, and fell to fragments quite!”
”O viol, my friend,
I watch, though Phosphor nears,
And I fain would drowse away to its utter end
This dumb dark stowage after our loud melodious years!”
And they felt past handlers clutch them,
Though none was in the room,
Old players’ dead fingers touch them,
Shrunk in the tomb.
”‘Cello, good mate,
You speak my mind as yours:
Doomed to this voiceless, crippled, corpselike state,
Who, dear to famed Amphion, trapped here, long endures?”
”Once I could thrill
The populace through and through,
Wake them to passioned pulsings past their will.” . . .
(A contra-basso spake so, and the rest sighed anew.)
And they felt old muscles travel
Over their tense contours,
And with long skill unravel
Cunningest scores.
”The tender pat
Of her aery finger-tips
Upon me daily - I rejoiced thereat!”
(Thuswise a harpsicord, as from dampered lips.)
”My keys’ white shine,
Now sallow, met a hand
Even whiter. . . . Tones of hers fell forth with mine
In sowings of sound so sweet no lover could withstand!”
And its clavier was filmed with fingers
Like tapering flames - wan, cold -
Or the nebulous light that lingers
In charnel mould.
”Gayer than most
Was I,” reverbed a drum;
”The regiments, marchings, throngs, hurrahs! What a host
I stirred - even when crape mufflings gagged me well-nigh dumb!”
Trilled an aged viol:
”Much tune have I set free
To spur the dance, since my first timid trial
Where I had birth - far hence, in sun-swept Italy!”
And he feels apt touches on him
From those that pressed him then;
Who seem with their glance to con him,
Saying, “Not again!”
”A holy calm,”
Mourned a shawm’s voice subdued,
”Steeped my Cecilian rhythms when hymn and psalm
Poured from devout souls met in Sabbath sanctitude.”
”I faced the sock
Nightly,” twanged a sick lyre,
”Over ranked lights! O charm of life in mock,
O scenes that fed love, hope, wit, rapture, mirth, desire!”
Thus they, till each past player
Stroked thinner and more thin,
And the morning sky grew grayer
And day crawled in.
THE WOMAN I MET
A stranger, I threaded sunken-hearted
A lamp-lit crowd;
And anon there passed me a soul departed,
Who mutely bowed.
In my far-off youthful years I had met her,
Full-pulsed; but now, no more life’s debtor,
Onward she slid
In a shroud that furs half-hid.
“Why do you trouble me, dead woman,
Trouble me;
You whom I knew when warm and human?
- How it be
That you quitted earth and are yet upon it
Is, to any who ponder on it,
Past being read!”
”Still, it is so,” she said.
“These were my haunts in my olden sprightly
Hours of breath;
Here I went tempting frail youth nightly
To their death;
But you deemed me chaste - me, a tinselled sinner!
How thought you one with pureness in her
Could pace this street
Eyeing some man to greet?
“Well; your very simplicity made me love you
Mid such town dross,
Till I set not Heaven itself above you,
Who grew my Cross;
For you’d only nod, despite how I sighed for you;
So you tortured me, who fain would have died for you!
- What I suffered then
Would have paid for the sins of ten!
“Thus went the days. I feared you despised me
To fling me a nod
Each time, no more: till love chastised me
As with a rod
That a fresh bland boy of no assurance
Should fire me with passion beyond endurance,
While others all
I hated, and loathed their call.
“I said: ‘It is his mother’s spirit
Hovering around
To shield him, maybe!’ I used to fear it,
As still I found
My beauty left no least impression,
And remnants of pride withheld confession
Of my true trade
By speaking; so I delayed.
“I
said: ‘Perhaps with a costly flower
He’ll be beguiled.’
I held it, in passing you one late hour,
To your face: you smiled,
Keeping step with the throng; though you did not see there
A single one that rivalled me there! . . .
Well: it’s all past.
I died in the Lock at last.”
So walked the dead and I together
The quick among,
Elbowing our kind of every feather
Slowly and long;
Yea, long and slowly. That a phantom should stalk there
With me seemed nothing strange, and talk there
That winter night
By flaming jets of light.
She showed me Juans who feared their call-time,
Guessing their lot;
She showed me her sort that cursed their fall-time,
And that did not.
Till suddenly murmured she: “Now, tell me,
Why asked you never, ere death befell me,
To have my love,
Much as I dreamt thereof?”
I could not answer. And she, well weeting
All in my heart,
Said: “God your guardian kept our fleeting
Forms apart!”
Sighing and drawing her furs around her
Over the shroud that tightly bound her,
With wafts as from clay
She turned and thinned away.
LONDON, 1918.
IF IT’S EVER SPRING AGAIN
(SONG)
If it’s ever spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I when
Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen,
Seeing me not, amid their flounder,
Standing with my arm around her;
If it’s ever spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I then.
If it’s ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay crop at the prime,
And the cuckoos - two - in rhyme,
As they used to be, or seemed to,
We shall do as long we’ve dreamed to,
If it’s ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay, and bees achime.
THE TWO HOUSES
In the heart of night,
When farers were not near,
The left house said to the house on the right,
“I have marked your rise, O smart newcomer here.”
Said the right, cold-eyed:
”Newcomer here I am,
Hence haler than you with your cracked old hide,
Loose casements, wormy beams, and doors that jam.
”Modern my wood,
My hangings fair of hue;
While my windows open as they should,
And water-pipes thread all my chambers through.
”Your gear is gray,
Your face wears furrows untold.”
” - Yours might,” mourned the other, “if you held, brother,
The Presences from aforetime that I hold.
”You have not known
Men’s lives, deaths, toils, and teens;
You are but a heap of stick and stone:
A new house has no sense of the have-beens.
”Void as a drum
You stand: I am packed with these,
Though, strangely, living dwellers who come
See not the phantoms all my substance sees!
”Visible in the morning
Stand they, when dawn drags in;
Visible at night; yet hint or warning
Of these thin elbowers few of the inmates win.
”Babes new-brought-forth
Obsess my rooms; straight-stretched
Lank corpses, ere outborne to earth;
Yea, throng they as when first from the ‘Byss upfetched.
”Dancers and singers
Throb in me now as once;
Rich-noted throats and gossamered fingers
Of heels; the learned in love-lore and the dunce.
”Note here within
The bridegroom and the bride,
Who smile and greet their friends and kin,
And down my stairs depart for tracks untried.
”Where such inbe,
A dwelling’s character
Takes theirs, and a vague semblancy
To them in all its limbs, and light, and atmosphere.
”Yet the blind folk
My tenants, who come and go
In the flesh mid these, with souls unwoke,
Of such sylph-like surrounders do not know.”
” - Will the day come,”
Said the new one, awestruck, faint,
”When I shall lodge shades dim and dumb -
And with such spectral guests become acquaint?”
” - That will it, boy;
Such shades will people thee,
Each in his misery, irk, or joy,
And print on thee their presences as on me.”
ON STINSFORD HILL AT MIDNIGHT
I glimpsed a woman’s muslined form
Sing-songing airily
Against the moon; and still she sang,
And took no heed of me.
Another trice, and I beheld
What first I had not scanned,
That now and then she tapped and shook
A timbrel in her hand.
So late the hour, so white her drape,
So strange the look it lent
To that blank hill, I could not guess
What phantastry it meant.
Then burst I forth: “Why such from you?
Are you so happy now?”
Her voice swam on; nor did she show
Thought of me anyhow.
I called again: “Come nearer; much
That kind of note I need!”
The song kept softening, loudening on,
In placid calm unheed.
“What home is yours now?” then I said;
”You seem to have no care.”
But the wild wavering tune went forth
As if I had not been there.
“This world is dark, and where you are,”
I said, “I cannot be!”
But still the happy one sang on,
And had no heed of me.
THE FALLOW DEER AT THE LONELY HOUSE
One without looks in to-night
Through the curtain-chink
From the sheet of glistening white;
One without looks in to-night
As we sit and think
By the fender-brink.
We do not discern those eyes
Watching in the snow;
Lit by lamps of rosy dyes
We do not discern those eyes
Wondering, aglow,
Fourfooted, tiptoe.
THE SELFSAME SONG
A bird bills the selfsame song,
With never a fault in its flow,
That we listened to here those long
Long years ago.
A pleasing marvel is how
A strain of such rapturous rote
Should have gone on thus till now
Unchanged in a note!
- But it’s not the selfsame bird. -
No: perished to dust is he . . .
As also are those who heard
That song with me.
THE WANDERER
There is nobody on the road
But I,
And no beseeming abode
I can try
For shelter, so abroad
I must lie.
The stars feel not far up,
And to be
The lights by which I sup
Glimmeringly,
Set out in a hollow cup
Over me.
They wag as though they were
Panting for joy
Where they shine, above
all care,
And annoy,
And demons of despair -
Life’s alloy.
Sometimes outside the fence
Feet swing past,
Clock-like, and then go hence,
Till at last
There is a silence, dense,
Deep, and vast.
A wanderer, witch-drawn
To and fro,
To-morrow, at the dawn,
On I go,
And where I rest anon
Do not know!
Yet it’s meet - this bed of hay
And roofless plight;
For there’s a house of clay,
My own, quite,
To roof me soon, all day
And all night.
A WIFE COMES BACK
This is the story a man told me
Of his life’s one day of dreamery.
A woman came into his room
Between the dawn and the creeping day:
She was the years-wed wife from whom
He had parted, and who lived far away,
As if strangers they.
He wondered, and as she stood
She put on youth in her look and air,
And more was he wonderstruck as he viewed
Her form and flesh bloom yet more fair
While he watched her there;
Till she freshed to the pink and brown
That were hers on the night when first they met,
When she was the charm of the idle town
And he the pick of the club-fire set . . .
His eyes grew wet,
And he stretched his arms: “Stay - rest! - “
He cried. “Abide with me so, my own!”
But his arms closed in on his hard bare breast;
She had vanished with all he had looked upon
