Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)
Page 771
Something it says
To their glancing eyes
That must distress
The frail and lame,
And the strong of frame
Gladden or surprise.
Do signs on its face
Declare how far
Feet have to trace
Before they gain
Some blest champaign
Where no gins are?
THE LAMENT OF THE LOOKING-GLASS
Words from the mirror softly pass
To the curtains with a sigh:
“Why should I trouble again to glass
These smileless things hard by,
Since she I pleasured once, alas,
Is now no longer nigh!”
“I’ve imaged shadows of coursing cloud,
And of the plying limb
On the pensive pine when the air is loud
With its aerial hymn;
But never do they make me proud
To catch them within my rim!
“I flash back phantoms of the night
That sometimes flit by me,
I echo roses red and white -
The loveliest blooms that be -
But now I never hold to sight
So sweet a flower as she.”
CROSS-CURRENTS
They parted - a pallid, trembling I pair,
And rushing down the lane
He left her lonely near me there;
- I asked her of their pain.
“It is for ever,” at length she said,
”His friends have schemed it so,
That the long-purposed day to wed
Never shall we two know.”
“In such a cruel case,” said I,
”Love will contrive a course?”
“ - Well, no . . . A thing may underlie,
Which robs that of its force;
“A thing I could not tell him of,
Though all the year I have tried;
This: never could I have given him love,
Even had I been his bride.
“So, when his kinsfolk stop the way
Point-blank, there could not be
A happening in the world to-day
More opportune for me!
“Yet hear - no doubt to your surprise -
I am sorry, for his sake,
That I have escaped the sacrifice
I was prepared to make!”
THE OLD NEIGHBOUR AND THE NEW
‘Twas to greet the new rector I called I here,
But in the arm-chair I see
My old friend, for long years installed here,
Who palely nods to me.
The new man explains what he’s planning
In a smart and cheerful tone,
And I listen, the while that I’m scanning
The figure behind his own.
The newcomer urges things on me;
I return a vague smile thereto,
The olden face gazing upon me
Just as it used to do!
And on leaving I scarcely remember
Which neighbour to-day I have seen,
The one carried out in September,
Or him who but entered yestreen.
THE CHOSEN
“‘Ĺű µÃĹŠ±»»·³¿Á¿Å¼µ½±
“A woman for whom great gods might strive!”
I said, and kissed her there:
And then I thought of the other five,
And of how charms outwear.
I thought of the first with her eating eyes,
And I thought of the second with hers, green-gray,
And I thought of the third, experienced, wise,
And I thought of the fourth who sang all day.
And I thought of the fifth, whom I’d called a jade,
And I thought of them all, tear-fraught;
And that each had shown her a passable maid,
Yet not of the favour sought.
So I traced these words on the bark of a beech,
Just at the falling of the mast:
“After scanning five; yes, each and each,
I’ve found the woman desired - at last!”
“ - I feel a strange benumbing spell,
As one ill-wished!” said she.
And soon it seemed that something fell
Was starving her love for me.
“I feel some curse. O, five were there?”
And wanly she swerved, and went away.
I followed sick: night numbed the air,
And dark the mournful moorland lay.
I cried: “O darling, turn your head!”
But never her face I viewed;
“O turn, O turn!” again I said,
And miserably pursued.
At length I came to a Christ-cross stone
Which she had passed without discern;
And I knelt upon the leaves there strown,
And prayed aloud that she might turn.
I rose, and looked; and turn she did;
I cried, “My heart revives!”
“Look more,” she said. I looked as bid;
Her face was all the five’s.
All the five women, clear come back,
I saw in her - with her made one,
The while she drooped upon the track,
And her frail term seemed well-nigh run.
She’d half forgot me in her change;
”Who are you? Won’t you say
Who you may be, you man so strange,
Following since yesterday?”
I took the composite form she was,
And carried her to an arbour small,
Not passion-moved, but even because
In one I could atone to all.
And there she lies, and there I tend,
Till my life’s threads unwind,
A various womanhood in blend -
Not one, but all combined.
THE INSCRIPTION
(A TALE)
Sir John was entombed, and the crypt was closed, and she,
Like a soul that could meet no more the sight of the sun,
Inclined her in weepings and prayings continually,
As his widowed one.
And to pleasure her in her sorrow, and fix his name
As a memory Time’s fierce frost should never kill,
She caused to be richly chased a brass to his fame,
Which should link them still;
For she bonded her name with his own on the brazen page,
As if dead and interred there with him, and cold, and numb,
(Omitting the day of her dying and year of her age
Till her end should come;)
And implored good people to pray “Of their Charytie
For these twaine Soules,” - yea, she who did last remain
Forgoing Heaven’s bliss if ever with spouse should she
Again have lain.
Even there, as it first was set, you may see it now,
Writ in quaint Church text, with the date of her death left bare,
In the aged Estminster aisle, where the folk yet bow
Themselves in prayer.
Thereafter some years slid, till there came a day
When it slowly began to be marked of the standers-by
That she would regard the brass, and would bend away
With a drooping sigh.
Now the lady was fair as any the eye might scan
Through a summer day of roving - a type at whose lip
Despite her maturing seasons, no meet man
Would be loth to sip.
And her heart was stirred with a lightning love to its pith
For a newcomer who, while less in years, was one
Full eager and able to make her his own forthwith,
Restrained of none.
But she answered Nay, death-white; and still as he urged
She adversely spake, overmuch as she loved the while,
Till he pressed for
why, and she led with the face of one scourged
To the neighbouring aisle,
And showed him the words, ever gleaming upon her pew,
Memorizing her there as the knight’s eternal wife,
Or falsing such, debarred inheritance due
Of celestial life.
He blenched, and reproached her that one yet undeceased
Should bury her future - that future which none can spell;
And she wept, and purposed anon to inquire of the priest
If the price were hell
Of her wedding in face of the record. Her lover agreed,
And they parted before the brass with a shudderful kiss,
For it seemed to flash out on their impulse of passionate need,
”Mock ye not this!”
Well, the priest, whom more perceptions moved than one,
Said she erred at the first to have written as if she were dead
Her name and adjuration; but since it was done
Nought could be said
Save that she must abide by the pledge, for the peace of her soul,
And so, by her life, maintain the apostrophe good,
If she wished anon to reach the coveted goal
Of beatitude.
To erase from the consecrate text her prayer as there prayed
Would aver that, since earth’s joys most drew her, past doubt,
Friends’ prayers for her joy above by Jesu’s aid
Could be done without.
Moreover she thought of the laughter, the shrug, the jibe
That would rise at her back in the nave when she should pass
As another’s avowed by the words she had chosen to inscribe
On the changeless brass.
And so for months she replied to her Love: “No, no”;
While sorrow was gnawing her beauties ever and more,
Till he, long-suffering and weary, grew to show
Less warmth than before.
And, after an absence, wrote words absolute:
That he gave her till Midsummer morn to make her mind clear;
And that if, by then, she had not said Yea to his suit,
He should wed elsewhere.
Thence on, at unwonted times through the lengthening days
She was seen in the church - at dawn, or when the sun dipt
And the moon rose, standing with hands joined, blank of gaze,
Before the script.
She thinned as he came not; shrank like a creature that cowers
As summer drew nearer; but still had not promised to wed,
When, just at the zenith of June, in the still night hours,
She was missed from her bed.
“The church!” they whispered with qualms; “where often she sits.”
They found her: facing the brass there, else seeing none,
But feeling the words with her finger, gibbering in fits;
And she knew them not one.
And so she remained, in her handmaids’ charge; late, soon,
Tracing words in the air with her finger, as seen that night -
Those incised on the brass - till at length unwatched one noon,
She vanished from sight.
And, as talebearers tell, thence on to her last-taken breath
Was unseen, save as wraith that in front of the brass made moan;
So that ever the way of her life and the time of her death
Remained unknown.
And hence, as indited above, you may read even now
The quaint church-text, with the date of her death left bare,
In the aged Estminster aisle, where folk yet bow
Themselves in prayer.
October 30, 1907.
THE MARBLE-STREETED TOWN
I reach the marble-streeted town,
Whose “Sound” outbreathes its air
Of sharp sea-salts;
I see the movement up and down
As when she was there.
Ships of all countries come and go,
The bandsmen boom in the sun
A throbbing waltz;
The schoolgirls laugh along the Hoe
As when she was one.
I move away as the music rolls:
The place seems not to mind
That she - of old
The brightest of its native souls -
Left it behind!
Over this green aforedays she
On light treads went and came,
Yea, times untold;
Yet none here knows her history -
Has heard her name.
PLYMOUTH (1914?).
A WOMAN DRIVING
How she held up the horses’ heads,
Firm-lipped, with steady rein,
Down that grim steep the coastguard treads,
Till all was safe again!
With form erect and keen contour
She passed against the sea,
And, dipping into the chine’s obscure,
Was seen no more by me.
To others she appeared anew
At times of dusky light,
But always, so they told, withdrew
From close and curious sight.
Some said her silent wheels would roll
Rutless on softest loam,
And even that her steeds’ footfall
Sank not upon the foam.
Where drives she now? It may be where
No mortal horses are,
But in a chariot of the air
Towards some radiant star.
A WOMAN’S TRUST
If he should live a thousand years
He’d find it not again
That scorn of him by men
Could less disturb a woman’s trust
In him as a steadfast star which must
Rise scathless from the nether spheres:
If he should live a thousand years
He’d find it not again.
She waited like a little child,
Unchilled by damps of doubt,
While from her eyes looked out
A confidence sublime as Spring’s
When stressed by Winter’s loiterings.
Thus, howsoever the wicked wiled,
She waited like a little child
Unchilled by damps of doubt.
Through cruel years and crueller
Thus she believed in him
And his aurore, so dim;
That, after fenweeds, flowers would blow;
And above all things did she show
Her faith in his good faith with her;
Through cruel years and crueller
Thus she believed in him!
BEST TIMES
We went a day’s excursion to the stream,
Basked by the bank, and bent to the ripple-gleam,
And I did not know
That life would show,
However it might flower, no finer glow.
I walked in the Sunday sunshine by the road
That wound towards the wicket of your abode,
And I did not think
That life would shrink
To nothing ere it shed a rosier pink.
Unlooked for I arrived on a rainy night,
And you hailed me at the door by the swaying light,
And I full forgot
That life might not
Again be touching that ecstatic height.
And that calm eve when you walked up the stair,
After a gaiety prolonged and rare,
No thought soever
That you might never
Walk down again, struck me as I stood there.
Rewritten from an old draft.
THE CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE
While he was here in breath and bone,
To speak to and to see,
Would I had known - more clearly known -
What that man did for me
When the wind scraped a minor lay,
And the spent west
from white
To gray turned tiredly, and from gray
To broadest bands of night!
But I saw not, and he saw not
What shining life-tides flowed
To me-ward from his casual jot
Of service on that road.
He would have said: “‘Twas nothing new;
We all do what we can;
‘Twas only what one man would do
For any other man.”
Now that I gauge his goodliness
He’s slipped from human eyes;
And when he passed there’s none can guess,
Or point out where he lies.
INTRA SEPULCHRUM
What curious things we said,
What curious things we did
Up there in the world we walked till dead
Our kith and kin amid!
How we played at love,
And its wildness, weakness, woe;
Yes, played thereat far more than enough
As it turned out, I trow!
Played at believing in gods
And observing the ordinances,
I for your sake in impossible codes
Right ready to acquiesce.
Thinking our lives unique,
Quite quainter than usual kinds,
We held that we could not abide a week
The tether of typic minds.
- Yet people who day by day
Pass by and look at us
From over the wall in a casual way
Are of this unconscious.
And feel, if anything,
That none can be buried here
Removed from commonest fashioning,
Or lending note to a bier:
No twain who in heart-heaves proved