by Thomas Hardy
Into your arms, who coaxed and grew my lover, —
Ah, to make me weep
Since those claspings cared for so
Ever so long ago!
Though not now as when you freshly knew me,
But a fading form,
Shape the kiss you’d briskly blow up to me
While our love was warm,
And my cheek unstained by tears,
As in these last years!
LAST WEEK IN OCTOBER
The trees are undressing, and fling in many places —
On the gray road, the roof, the window-sill —
Their radiant robes and ribbons and yellow laces;
A leaf each second so is flung at will,
Here, there, another and another, still and still.
A spider’s web has caught one while downcoming,
That stays there dangling when the rest pass on;
Like a suspended criminal hangs he, mumming
In golden garb, while one yet green, high yon,
Trembles, as fearing such a fate for himself anon.
COME NOT; YET COME!
(SONG)
In my sage moments I can say,
Come not near,
But far in foreign regions stay,
So that here
A mind may grow again serene and clear.
But the thought withers. Why should I
Have fear to earn me
Fame from your nearness, though thereby
Old fires new burn me,
And lastly, maybe, tear and overturn me!
So I say, Come: deign again shine
Upon this place,
Even if unslackened smart be mine
From that sweet face,
And I faint to a phantom past all trace.
THE LATER AUTUMN
Gone are the lovers, under the bush
Stretched at their ease;
Gone the bees,
Tangling themselves in your hair as they rush
On the line of your track,
Leg-laden, back
With a dip to their hive
In a prepossessed dive.
Toadsmeat is mangy, frosted, and sere;
Apples in grass
Crunch as we pass,
And rot ere the men who make cyder appear.
Couch-fires abound
On fallows around,
And shades far extend
Like lives soon to end.
Spinning leaves join the remains shrunk and brown
Of last year’s display
That lie wasting away,
On whose corpses they earlier as scorners gazed down
From their aery green height:
Now in the same plight
They huddle; while yon
A robin looks on.
LET ME BELIEVE
(SONG)
Let me believe it, dearest,
Let it be
As just a dream — the merest —
Haunting me,
That a frank full-souled sweetness
Warmed your smile
And voice, to indiscreetness
Once, awhile!
And I will fondly ponder
Till I lie
Earthed up with others yonder
Past a sigh,
That you may name at stray times
With regret
One whom through green and gray times
You forget!
AT A FASHIONABLE DINNER
We sat with the banqueting-party
By the table-end —
Unmarked, — no diners out
Were we: scarce a friend
Of our own mind’s trend
Was there, though the welcome was hearty.
Then we noticed a shade extend
By a distant screen,
And I said: “What to you does it seem to mean,
Lavine?”
“ — It is like my own body lying
Beyond the door
Where the servants glide in and about
The carpeted floor;
And it means my death hour! — ”
“ — What a fancy! Who feels like dying
While these smart sallies pour,
With laughter between!
To me it is more like satin sheen,
Lavine.”
“ — That means your new bride, when you win her:
Yes, so it must be!
It’s her satin dress, no doubt —
That shine you see —
My own corpse to me!”
And a gloom came over the dinner,
Where almost strangers were we,
As the spirit of the scene
Forsook her — the fairest of the whole thirteen —
Lavine!
GREEN SLATES
(PENPETHY
)
It happened once, before the duller
Loomings of life defined them,
I searched for slates of greenish colour
A quarry where men mined them;
And saw, the while I peered around there,
In the quarry standing
A form against the slate background there,
Of fairness eye-commanding.
And now, though fifty years have flown me,
With all their dreams and duties,
And strange-pipped dice my hand has thrown me,
And dust are all her beauties,
Green slates — seen high on roofs, or lower
In waggon, truck, or lorry —
Cry out: “Our home was where you saw her
Standing in the quarry!”
AN EAST-END CURATE
A small blind street off East Commercial Road;
Window, door; window, door;
Every house like the one before,
Is where the curate, Mr. Dowle, has found a pinched abode.
Spectacled, pale, moustache straw-coloured, and with a long thin face,
Day or dark his lodgings’ narrow doorstep does he pace.
A bleached pianoforte, with its drawn silk plaitings faded,
Stands in his room, its keys much yellowed, cyphering, and abraded,
“Novello’s Anthems” lie at hand, and also a few glees,
And “Laws of Heaven for Earth” in a frame upon the wall one sees.
He goes through his neighbours’ houses as his own, and none regards,
And opens their back-doors off-hand, to look for them in their yards:
A man is threatening his wife on the other side of the wall,
But the curate lets it pass as knowing the history of it all.
Freely within his hearing the children skip and laugh and say:
“There’s Mister Dow-well! There’s Mister Dow-well!” in their play;
And the long, pallid, devoted face notes not,
But stoops along abstractedly, for good, or in vain, God wot!
AT RUSHY-POND
On the frigid face of the heath-hemmed pond
There shaped the half-grown moon:
Winged whiffs from the north with a husky croon
Blew over and beyond.
And the wind flapped the moon in its float on the pool,
And stretched it to oval form;
Then corkscrewed it like a wriggling worm;
Then wanned it weariful.
And I cared not for conning the sky above
Where hung the substant thing,
For my thought was earthward sojourning
On the scene I had vision of.
Since there it was once, in a secret year,
I had called a woman to me
From across this water, ardently —
And practised to keep her near;
Till the last weak love-words had been said,
And ended was her time,
And blurred the bloomage of her prime,
And white the earlier red.
And the troubled orb in the pond’s sad shine
When she withdrew thence, mirrored, and
Her days dropped out of mine.
FOUR IN THE MORNING
At four this day of June I rise:
The dawn-light strengthens steadily;
Earth is a cerule mystery,
As if not far from Paradise
At four o’clock,
Or else near the Great Nebula,
Or where the Pleiads blink and smile:
(For though we see with eyes of guile
The grisly grin of things by day,
At four o’clock
They show their best.) . . . In this vale’s space
I am up the first, I think. Yet, no,
A whistling? and the to-and-fro
Wheezed whettings of a scythe apace
At four o’clock? . . .
— Though pleasure spurred, I rose with irk:
Here is one at compulsion’s whip
Taking his life’s stern stewardship
With blithe uncare, and hard at work
At four o’clock!
Bockhampton.
ON THE ESPLANADE
MIDSUMMER: 10 P.M.
The broad bald moon edged up where the sea was wide,
Mild, mellow-faced;
Beneath, a tumbling twinkle of shines, like dyed,
A trackway traced
To the shore, as of petals fallen from a rose to waste,
In its overblow,
And fluttering afloat on inward heaves of the tide: —
All this, so plain; yet the rest I did not know.
The horizon gets lost in a mist new-wrought by the night:
The lamps of the Bay
That reach from behind me round to the left and right
On the sea-wall way
For a constant mile of curve, make a long display
As a pearl-strung row,
Under which in the waves they bore their gimlets of light: —
All this was plain; but there was a thing not so.
Inside a window, open, with undrawn blind,
There plays and sings
A lady unseen a melody undefined:
And where the moon flings
Its shimmer a vessel crosses, whereon to the strings
Plucked sweetly and low
Of a harp, they dance. Yea, such did I mark. That, behind,
My Fate’s masked face crept near me I did not know!
IN ST. PAUL’S A WHILE AGO
Summer and winter close commune
On this July afternoon
As I enter chilly Paul’s,
With its chasmal classic walls.
— Drifts of gray illumination
From the lofty fenestration
Slant them down in bristling spines that spread
Fan-like upon the vast dust-moted shade.
Moveless here, no whit allied
To the daemonian din outside,
Statues stand, cadaverous, wan,
Round the loiterers looking on
Under the yawning dome and nave,
Pondering whatnot, giddy or grave.
Here a verger moves a chair,
Or a red rope fixes there: —
A brimming Hebe, rapt in her adorning,
Brushes an Artemisia craped in mourning;
Beatrice Benedick piques, coquetting;
All unknowing or forgetting
That strange Jew, Damascus-bound,
Whose name, thereafter travelling round
To this precinct of the world,
Spread here like a flag unfurled:
Anon inspiring architectural sages
To frame this pile, writ his throughout the ages:
Whence also the encircling mart
Assumed his name, of him no part,
And to his vision-seeing mind
Charmless, blank in every kind;
And whose displays, even had they called his eye,
No gold or silver had been his to buy;
Whose haunters, had they seen him stand
On his own steps here, lift his hand
In stress of eager, stammering speech,
And his meaning chanced to reach,
Would have proclaimed him as they passed
An epilept enthusiast.
COMING UP OXFORD STREET: EVENING
The sun from the west glares back,
And the sun from the watered track,
And the sun from the sheets of glass,
And the sun from each window-brass;
Sun-mirrorings, too, brighten
From show-cases beneath
The laughing eyes and teeth
Of ladies who rouge and whiten.
And the same warm god explores
Panels and chinks of doors;
Problems with chymists’ bottles
Profound as Aristotle’s
He solves, and with good cause,
Having been ere man was.
Also he dazzles the pupils of one who walks west,
A city-clerk, with eyesight not of the best,
Who sees no escape to the very verge of his days
From the rut of Oxford Street into open ways;
And he goes along with head and eyes flagging forlorn,
Empty of interest in things, and wondering why he was born,
As seen July 4, 1872.
A LAST JOURNEY
“Father, you seem to have been sleeping fair?”
The child uncovered the dimity-curtained window-square
And looked out at the dawn,
And back at the dying man nigh gone,
And propped up in his chair,
Whose breathing a robin’s “chink” took up in antiphon.
The open fireplace spread
Like a vast weary yawn above his head,
Its thin blue blower waved against his whitening crown,
For he could not lie down:
He raised him on his arms so emaciated: —
“Yes; I’ve slept long, my child. But as for rest,
Well, that I cannot say.
The whole night have I footed field and turnpike way —
A regular pilgrimage — as at my best
And very briskest day!
“‘Twas first to Weatherb’ry, to see them there,
And thence to King’s-Stag, where
I joined in a jolly trip to Weydon-Priors Fair:
I shot for nuts, bought gingerbreads, cream-cheese;
And, not content with these,
I went to London: heard the watchmen cry the hours.
“I soon was off again, and found me in the bowers
Of father’s apple-trees,
And he shook the apples down: they fell in showers,
Whereon he turned, smiled strange at me, as ill at ease;
And then you pulled the curtain; and, ah me,
I found me back where I wished not to be!”
‘Twas told the child next day: “Your father’s dead.”
And, struck, she questioned, “O,
That journey, then, did father really go? —
Buy nuts, and cakes, and travel at night till dawn was red,
And tire himself with journeying, as he said,
To see those old friends that he cared for so?”
SINGING LOVERS
I rowed: the dimpled tide was at the turn,
And mirth and moonlight spread upon the bay:
There were two singing lovers in the stern;
But mine had gone away, —
Whither, I shunned to say!
The houses stood confronting us afar,
A livid line against the evening glare;
The small lamps livened; then out-stole a star;
But my Love was not there, —
Vanished. I sorrowed where!
His arm was round her, both full facing me
With no reserve. Theirs was not love to hide;
He held one tille
r-rope, the other she;
I pulled — the merest glide, —
Looked on at them, and sighed.
The moon’s glassed glory heaved as we lay swinging
Upon the undulations. Shoreward, slow,
The plash of pebbles joined the lovers’ singing,
But she of a bygone vow
Joined in the song not now!
Weymouth.
THE MONTH’S CALENDAR
Tear off the calendar
Of this month past,
And all its weeks, that are
Flown, to be cast
To oblivion fast!
Darken that day
On which we met,
With its words of gay
Half-felt regret
That you’ll forget!
The second day, too;
The noon I nursed
Well — thoughts; yes, through
To the thirty-first;
That was the worst.
For then it was
You let me see
There was good cause
Why you could not be
Aught ever to me!
A SPELLBOUND PALACE
(HAMPTON COURT)
On this kindly yellow day of mild low-travelling winter sun
The stirless depths of the yews
Are vague with misty blues:
Across the spacious pathways stretching spires of shadow run,
And the wind-gnawed walls of ancient brick are fired vermilion
Two or three early sanguine finches tune
Some tentative strains, to be enlarged by May or June:
From a thrush or blackbird
Comes now and then a word,
While an enfeebled fountain somewhere within is heard.
Our footsteps wait awhile,
Then draw beneath the pile,
When an inner court outspreads
As ‘twere History’s own asile,
