Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)

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Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) Page 764

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

 

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