by Thomas Hardy
When dusk bids her, too, seek her bed:
Nor has she watched
Amid a stormy eve’s turmoil
The pipkin slowly come to boil,
In readiness for one at toil:
Nor has she hearkened
Through the long night-time, lone and numb,
For sounds of sent-for help to come
Ere the swift-sinking life succumb:
Nor has she ever
Held the loved-lost one on her arm,
Attired with care his straightened form,
As if he were alive and warm:
Yea, never has she
Known, seen, heard, felt, such things as these,
Haps of so many in their degrees
Throughout their count of calvaries!
MIDNIGHT ON BEECHEN, 187*
On Beechen Cliff self-commune I
This night of mid-June, mute and dry;
When darkness never rises higher
Than Bath’s dim concave, towers, and spire,
Last eveglow loitering in the sky
To feel the dawn, close lurking by,
The while the lamps as glow-worms lie
In a glade, myself their lonely eyer
On Beechen Cliff:
The city sleeps below. I sigh,
For there dwells one, all testify,
To match the maddest dream’s desire:
What swain with her would not aspire
To walk the world, yea, sit but nigh
On Beechen Cliff!
THE AËROLITE
I thought a germ of Consciousness
Escaped on an aërolite
Aions ago
From some far globe, where no distress
Had means to mar supreme delight;
But only things abode that made
The power to feel a gift uncloyed
Of gladsome glow,
And life unendingly displayed
Emotions loved, desired, enjoyed.
And that this stray, exotic germ
Fell wanderingly upon our sphere,
After its wingings,
Quickened, and showed to us the worm
That gnaws vitalities native here,
And operated to unblind
Earth’s old-established ignorance
Of stains and stingings,
Which grin no griefs while not opined,
But cruelly tax intelligence.
“How shall we,” then the seers said,
“Oust this awareness, this disease
Called sense, here sown,
Though good, no doubt, where it was bred,
And wherein all things work to please?”
Others cried: “Nay, we rather would,
Since this untoward gift is sent
For ends unknown,
Limit its registerings to good,
And hide from it all anguishment.”
I left them pondering. This was how
(Or so I dreamed) was waked on earth
The mortal moan
Begot of sentience. Maybe now
Normal unwareness waits rebirth.
THE PROSPECT
The twigs of the birch imprint the December sky
Like branching veins upon a thin old hand;
I think of summer-time, yes, of last July,
When she was beneath them, greeting a gathered band
Of the urban and bland.
Iced airs wheeze through the skeletoned hedge from the north,
With steady snores, and a numbing that threatens snow,
And skaters pass; and merry boys go forth
To look for slides. But well, well do I know
Whither I would go!
December 1912.
GENITRIX LAESA
(MEASURE OF A SARUM SEQUENCE)
Nature, through these generations
You have nursed us with a patience
Cruelly crossed by malversations,
Marring mother-ministry
To your multitudes, so blended
By your processes, long-tended,
And the painstaking expended
On their chording tunefully.
But this stuff of slowest moulding,
In your fancy ever enfolding
Life that rhythmic chime is holding:
(Yes; so deem it you, Ladye —
This “concordia discors”!) — truly,
Rather, as if some imp unruly
Twitched your artist-arm when newly
Shaping forth your scenery!
Aye. Yet seem you not to know it.
Hence your world-work needs must show it
Good in dream, in deed below it:
(Lady, yes: so sight it we!)
Thus, then, go on fondly thinking:
Why should man your purblind blinking
Crave to cure, when all is sinking
To dissolubility?
THE FADING ROSE
I saw a rose, in bloom, but sad,
Shedding the petals that still it had,
And I heard it say: “O where is she
Who used to come and muse on me?
“The pruner says she comes no more
Because she loves another flower,
The weeder says she’s tired of me
Because I droop so suddenly.
“Because of a sweetheart she comes not,
Declares the man with the watering-pot;
‘She does not come,’ says he with the rake,
‘Because all women are fickle in make.’
“He with the spade and humorous leer
Says: ‘Know, I delve elsewhere than here,
Mid text-writ stones and grassy heaps,
Round which a curious silence creeps.
“‘She must get to you underground
If any way at all be found,
For, clad in her beauty, marble’s kin,
‘Tis there I have laid her and trod her in.’”
WHEN OATS WERE REAPED
That day when oats were reaped, and wheat was ripe, and barley ripening,
The road-dust hot, and the bleaching grasses dry,
I walked along and said,
While looking just ahead to where some silent people lie:
“I wounded one who’s there, and now know well I wounded her:
But, ah, she does not know that she wounded me!”
And not an air stirred,
Nor a bill of any bird; and no response accorded she.
August 1913.
LOUIE
I am forgetting Louie the buoyant;
Why not raise her phantom, too,
Here in daylight
With the elect one’s?
She will never thrust the foremost figure out of view!
Mid this heat, in gauzy muslin
See I Louie’s life-lit brow
Here in daylight
By the elect one’s. —
Long two strangers they and far apart; such neighbours now!
July 1913.
SHE OPENED THE DOOR
She opened the door of the West to me,
With its loud sea-lashings,
And cliff-side clashings
Of waters rife with revelry.
She opened the door of Romance to me,
The door from a cell
I had known too well,
Too long, till then, and was fain to flee.
She opened the door of a Love to me,
That passed the wry
World-welters by
As far as the arching blue the lea.
She opens the door of the Past to me,
Its magic lights,
Its heavenly heights,
When forward little is to see!
WHAT’S THERE TO TELL?
(SONG)
What’s th
ere to tell of the world
More than is told?
— Into its vortex hurled,
Out of it rolled,
Can
we yet more of the world
Find to be told?
Lalla-la, lu!
If some could last alive
Much might be told;
Yes, gladness might survive;
But they go cold —
Each and each late alive —
All their tale told.
Lalla-la, lu!
There’s little more of the world,
Then, to be told;
Had ever life unfurled
Joys manifold,
There had been more of the world
Left to be told.
Lalla-la, lalla-la, lalla-la, lu!
190*.
THE HARBOUR BRIDGE
From here, the quay, one looks above to mark
The bridge across the harbour, hanging dark
Against the day’s-end sky, fair-green in glow
Over and under the middle archway’s bow:
It draws its skeleton where the sun has set,
Yea, clear from cutwater to parapet;
On which mild glow, too, lines of rope and spar
Trace themselves black as char.
Down here in shade we hear the painters shift
Against the bollards with a drowsy lift,
As moved by the incoming stealthy tide.
High up across the bridge the burghers glide
As cut black-paper portraits hastening on
In conversation none knows what upon:
Their sharp-edged lips move quickly word by word
To speech that is not heard.
There trails the dreamful girl, who leans and stops,
There presses the practical woman to the shops,
There is a sailor, meeting his wife with a start,
And we, drawn nearer, judge they are keeping apart.
Both pause. She says: “I’ve looked for you. I thought
We’d make it up.” Then no words can be caught.
At last: “Won’t you come home?” She moves still nigher:
“‘Tis comfortable, with a fire.”
“No,” he says gloomily. “And, anyhow,
I can’t give up the other woman now:
You should have talked like that in former days,
When I was last home.” They go different ways.
And the west dims, and yellow lamplights shine:
And soon above, like lamps more opaline,
White stars ghost forth, that care not for men’s wives,
Or any other lives.
Weymouth.
VAGRANT’S SONG
(WITH AN OLD WESSEX REFRAIN)
I
When a dark-eyed dawn
Crawls forth, cloud-drawn,
And starlings doubt the night-time’s close;
And “three months yet,”
They seem to fret,
“Before we cease us slaves of snows,
And sun returns
To loose the burns,
And this wild woe called Winter goes!” —
O a hollow tree
Is as good for me
As a house where the back-brand glows!
Che-hane, mother; che-hane, mother,
As a house where the back-brand glows!
II
When autumn brings
A whirr of wings
Among the evergreens around,
And sundry thrills
About their quills
Awe rooks, and misgivings abound,
And the joyless pines
In leaning lines
Protect from gales the lower ground,
O a hollow tree
Is as good for me
As a house of a thousand pound!
Che-hane, mother; che-hane, mother,
As a house of a thousand pound!
“Back-brand” — the log which used to be laid at the back of a wood fire.
FARMER DUNMAN’S FUNERAL
“Bury me on a Sunday,”
He said; “so as to see
Poor folk there. ‘Tis their one day
To spare for following me.”
With forethought of that Sunday,
He wrote, while he was well,
On ten rum-bottles one day,
“Drink for my funeral.”
They buried him on a Sunday,
That folk should not be balked
His wish, as ‘twas their one day:
And forty couple walked.
They said: “To have it Sunday
Was always his concern;
His meaning being that one day
He’d do us a good turn.
“We must, had it been Monday,
Have got it over soon,
But now we gain, being Sunday,
A jolly afternoon.”
THE SEXTON AT LONGPUDDLE
He passes down the churchyard track
On his way to toll the bell;
And stops, and looks at the graves around,
And notes each finished and greening mound
Complacently,
As their shaper he,
And one who can do it well,
And, with a prosperous sense of his doing,
Thinks he’ll not lack
Plenty such work in the long ensuing
Futurity.
For people will always die,
And he will always be nigh
To shape their cell.
THE HARVEST-SUPPER
(Circa 1850)
Nell and the other maids danced their best
With the Scotch-Greys in the barn;
These had been asked to the harvest-feast;
Red shapes amid the corn.
Nell and the other maids sat in a row
Within the benched barn-nook;
Nell led the songs of long ago
She’d learnt from never a book.
She sang of the false Sir John of old,
The lover who witched to win,
And the parrot, and cage of glittering gold;
And the other maids joined in.
Then whispered to her a gallant Grey,
“Dear, sing that ballet again!
For a bonnier mouth in a bonnier way
Has sung not anywhen!”
As she loosed her lips anew there sighed
To Nell through the dark barn-door
The voice of her Love from the night outside,
Who was buried the month before:
“O Nell, can you sing ballets there,
And I out here in the clay,
Of lovers false of yore, nor care
What you vowed to me one day!
“O can you dance with soldiers bold,
Who kiss when dancing’s done,
Your little waist within their hold,
As ancient troth were none!”
She cried: “My heart is pierced with a wound!
There’s something outside the wall
That calls me forth to a greening mound:
I can sing no more at all!
“My old Love rises from the worms,
Just as he used to be,
And I must let gay gallants’ arms
No more encircle me!”
They bore her home from the merry-making;
Bad dreams disturbed her bed:
“Nevermore will I dance and sing,”
Mourned Nell; “and never wed!”
AT A PAUSE IN A COUNTRY DANCE
(MIDDLE OF LAST CENTURY)
They stood at the foot of the figure,
And panted: they’d danced it down through —
That “Dashing White Serjeant” they loved so: —
A window, uncurtained, was nigh them
That end of the room. Thence in view
Outside it a valley updrew,
Where the frozen moon lit frozen snow:
At the furthermost reach of the valley
A light from a window shone low.
“They are inside that window,” said she,
As she l
ooked. “They sit up there for me;
And baby is sleeping there, too.”
He glanced. “Yes,” he said. “Never mind,
Let’s foot our way up again; do!
And dance down the line as before.
What’s the world to us, meeting once more!”
“ — Not much, when your husband full trusts you,
And thinks the child his that I bore!”
He was silent. The fiddlers six-eighted
With even more passionate vigour.
The pair swept again up the figure,
The child’s cuckoo-father and she,
And the next couples threaded below,
And the twain wove their way to the top
Of “The Dashing White Serjeant” they loved so,
Restarting: right, left, to and fro.
— From the homestead, seen yon, the small glow
Still adventured forth over the white,
Where the child slept, unknowing who sired it,
In the cradle of wicker tucked tight,
And its grandparents, nodding, admired it
In elbow-chairs through the slow night.
ON THE PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN ABOUT TO BE HANGED
Comely and capable one of our race,
Posing there in your gown of grace,
Plain, yet becoming;
Could subtlest breast
Ever have guessed
What was behind that innocent face,
Drumming, drumming!
Would that your Causer, ere knoll your knell
For this riot of passion, might deign to tell
Why, since It made you
Sound in the germ,
It sent a worm
To madden Its handiwork, when It might well
