Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1004 page)

I bought the gift she had held so light,
And
buried it
— as ‘twere he. —
Well, well! Such things are trifling, quite,
But when one’s lonely
How cruel they can be!

LYING AWAKE

You, Morningtide Star, now are steady-eyed, over the east,
I know it as if I saw you;
You, Beeches, engrave on the sky your thin twigs, even the least;
Had I paper and pencil I’d draw you.

You, Meadow, are white with your counterpane cover of dew,
I see it as if I were there;
You, Churchyard, are lightening faint from the shade of the yew,
The names creeping out everywhere.

THE LADY IN THE FURS

“I’m a lofty lovely woman,”
Says the lady in the furs,
In the glance she throws around her
On the poorer dames and sirs:
“This robe, that cost three figures,
Yes, is mine,” her nod avers.

“True, my money did not buy it,
But my husband’s, from the trade;
And they, they only got it
From things feeble and afraid
By murdering them in ambush
With a cunning engine’s aid.

“True, my hands, too, did not shape it
To the pretty cut you see,
But the hands of midnight workers
Who are strangers quite to me:
It was fitted, too, by dressers
Ranged around me toilsomely.

“But I am a lovely lady,
Though sneerers say I shine
By robbing Nature’s children
Of apparel not mine,
And that I am but a broom-stick,
Like a scarecrow’s wooden spine.”

CHILDHOOD AMONG THE FERNS

I sat one sprinkling day upon the lea,
Where tall-stemmed ferns spread out luxuriantly,
And nothing but those tall ferns sheltered me.

The rain gained strength, and damped each lopping frond,
Ran down their stalks beside me and beyond,
And shaped slow-creeping rivulets as I conned,

With pride, my spray-roofed house. And though anon
Some drops pierced its green rafters, I sat on,
Making pretence I was not rained upon.

The sun then burst, and brought forth a sweet breath
From the limp ferns as they dried underneath:
I said: “I could live on here thus till death”;

And queried in the green rays as I sate:
“Why should I have to grow to man’s estate,
And this afar-noised World perambulate?”

A COUNTENANCE

Her laugh was not in the middle of her face quite,
As a gay laugh springs,
It was plain she was anxious about some things
I could not trace quite.
Her curls were like fir-cones — piled up, brown —
Or rather like tight-tied sheaves:
It seemed they could never be taken down. . . .

And her lips were too full, some might say:
I did not think so. Anyway,
The shadow her lower one would cast
Was green in hue whenever she passed
Bright sun on midsummer leaves.
Alas, I knew not much of her,
And lost all sight and touch of her!

If otherwise, should I have minded
The shy laugh not in the middle of her mouth quite,
And would my kisses have died of drouth quite
As love became unblinded?

1884.

A POET’S THOUGHT

It sprang up out of him in the dark,
And took on the lightness of a lark:
It went from his chamber along the city strand,
Lingered awhile, then leapt all over the land.

It came back maimed and mangled. And the poet
When he beheld his offspring did not know it:
Yea, verily, since its birth Time’s tongue had tossed to him
Such travesties that his old thought was lost to him.

SILENCES

There is the silence of a copse or croft
When the wind sinks dumb,
And of a belfry-loft
When the tenor after tolling stops its hum.

And there’s the silence of a lonely pond
Where a man was drowned,
Nor nigh nor yond
A newt, frog, toad, to make the merest sound.

But the rapt silence of an empty house
Where oneself was born,
Dwelt, held carouse
With friends, is of all silences most forlorn!

Past are remembered songs and music-strains
Once audible there:
Roof, rafters, panes
Look absent-thoughted, tranced, or locked in prayer.

It seems no power on earth can waken it
Or rouse its rooms,
Or its past permit
The present to stir a torpor like a tomb’s.

I WATCHED A BLACKBIRD

I watched a blackbird on a budding sycamore
One Easter Day, when sap was stirring twigs to the core;
I saw his tongue, and crocus-coloured bill
Parting and closing as he turned his trill;
Then he flew down, seized on a stem of hay,
And upped to where his building scheme was under way,
As if so sure a nest were never shaped on spray.

A NIGHTMARE, AND THE NEXT THING

On this decline of Christmas Day
The empty street is fogged and blurred:
The house-fronts all seem backwise turned
As if the outer world were spurned:
Voices and songs within are heard,
Whence red rays gleam when fires are stirred,
Upon this nightmare Christmas Day.

The lamps, just lit, begin to outloom
Like dandelion-globes in the gloom;
The stonework, shop-signs, doors, look bald;
Curious crude details seem installed,
And show themselves in their degrees
As they were personalities
Never discerned when the street was bustling
With vehicles, and farmers hustling.
Three clammy casuals wend their way
To the Union House. I hear one say:
“Jimmy, this is a treat! Hay-hay!”

Six laughing mouths, six rows of teeth,
Six radiant pairs of eyes, beneath

Six yellow hats, looking out at the back
Of a waggonette on its slowed-down track
Up the steep street to some gay dance,
Suddenly interrupt my glance.

They do not see a gray nightmare
Astride the day, or anywhere.

TO A TREE IN LONDON

(CLEMENT’S INN)

Here you stay
Night and day,
Never, never going away!

Do you ache
When we take
Holiday for our health’s sake?

Wish for feet
When the heat
Scalds you in the brick-built street,

That you might
Climb the height
Where your ancestry saw light,

Find a brook
In some nook
There to purge your swarthy look?

No. You read
Trees to need
Smoke like earth whereon to feed. . . .

Have no sense
That far hence
Air is sweet in a blue immense,

Thus, black, blind,
You have opined
Nothing of your brightest kind;

Never seen
Miles of green,
Smelt the landscape’s sweet serene.

192*.

THE FELLED ELM AND SHE

When you put on that inmost ring
She, like you, was a little thing:
When your circles reached their fourth,
Scarce she knew life’s south from north:
When your year-zones counted twenty
She had fond admirers plenty:
When you’d grown your twenty-second
She and I were lovers reckoned:
When you numbered twenty-three
She went everywhere with me:
When you, at your fortieth line,
Showed decay, she seemed to pine:
When you were quite hollow within
She was felled — mere bone and skin:
You too, lacking strength to grow
Further trunk-rings, were laid low,
Matching her; both unaware
That your lives formed such a pair.

HE DID NOT KNOW ME

(WOMAN’S SORROW SONG)

He said: “I do not know you;
You are not she who came
And made my heart grow tame?”
I laughed: “The same!”

Still said he: “I don’t know you.”
“But I am your Love!” laughed I:
“Yours — faithful ever — till I die,
And pulseless lie!”

Yet he said: “I don’t know you.”
Freakful, I went away,
And met pale Time, with “Pray,
What means his Nay?”

Said Time: “He does not know you
In your mask of Comedy.”
“But,” said I, “that I have chosen to be:
Tragedy he.”

“True; hence he did not know you.”
“But him I could recognize?”
“Yea. Tragedy is true guise,
Comedy lies.”

SO VARIOUS

You may have met a man — quite young —
A brisk-eyed youth, and highly strung:
One whose desires
And inner fires
Moved him as wires.

And you may have met one stiff and old,
If not in years; of manner cold;
Who seemed as stone,
And never had known
Of mirth or moan.

And there may have crossed your path a lover,
In whose clear depths you could discover
A staunch, robust,
And tender trust,
Through storm and gust.

And you may have also known one fickle,
Whose fancies changed as the silver sickle
Of yonder moon,
Which shapes so soon
To demilune!

You entertained a person once
Whom you internally deemed a dunce: —
As he sat in view
Just facing you
You saw him through.

You came to know a learned seer
Of whom you read the surface mere:
Your soul quite sank;
Brain of such rank
Dubbed yours a blank.

Anon you quizzed a man of sadness,
Who never could have known true gladness:
Just for a whim
You pitied him
In his sore trim.

You journeyed with a man so glad
You never could conceive him sad:
He proved to be
Indubitably
Good company.

You lit on an unadventurous slow man,
Who, said you, need be feared by no man;
That his slack deeds
And sloth must needs
Produce but weeds.

A man of enterprise, shrewd and swift,
Who never suffered affairs to drift,
You eyed for a time
Just in his prime,
And judged he might climb.

You smoked beside one who forgot
All that you said, or grasped it not.
Quite a poor thing,
Not worth a sting
By satirizing!

Next year you nearly lost for ever
Goodwill from one who forgot slights never;
And, with unease,
Felt you must seize
Occasion to please . . .

Now. . . . All these specimens of man,
So various in their pith and plan,
Curious to say
Were
one
man. Yea,
I was all they.

A SELF-GLAMOURER

My little happiness,
How much I have made of it! —
As if I had been not less
Than a queen, to be straight obeyed of it.
“Life, be fairer far,”
I said, “Than you are.”

So I counted my springtime-day’s
Dream of futurity
Enringed with golden rays
To be quite a summer surety;
And my trustful daring undoubt
Brought it about!

Events all human-wrought
Had look of divinity,
And what I foreframed in thought
Grew substanced, by force of affinity:
Visions to verities came,
Seen as the same.

My years in trusting spent
Make to shape towardly,
And fate and accident
Behave not perversely or frowardly.
Shall, then, Life’s winter snow
To me be so?

THE DEAD BASTARD

Many and many a time I thought,
“Would my child were in its grave!”
Such the trouble and shame it brought.

Now ‘tis there. And now I’d brave
Opinion’s worst, in word or act,
To have that child alive; yes, slave

To dress and flaunt it to attract;
Show it the gossips brazenly,
And let as nothing be the fact
That never its father married me.

THE CLASPED SKELETONS

SURMISED DATE 1800 B.C.

(In an Ancient British barrow near the writer’s house)

O why did we uncover to view
So closely clasped a pair?
Your chalky bedclothes over you,
This long time here!

Ere Paris lay with Helena —
The poets’ dearest dear —
Ere David bedded Bathsheba
You two were bedded here.

Aye, even before the beauteous Jael
Bade Sisera doff his gear
And lie in her tent; then drove the nail,
You two lay here.

Wicked Aholah, in her youth,
Colled loves from far and near
Until they slew her without ruth;
But you had long colled here.

Aspasia lay with Pericles,
And Philip’s son found cheer
At eves in lying on Thais’ knees
While you lay here.

Cleopatra with Antony,
Resigned to dalliance sheer,
Lay, fatuous he, insatiate she,
Long after you’d lain here.

Pilate by Procula his wife
Lay tossing at her tear
Of pleading for an innocent life;
You tossed not here.

Ages before Monk Abélard
Gained tender Héloïse’ ear,
And loved and lay with her till scarred,
Had you lain loving here.

So long, beyond chronology,
Lovers in death as ‘twere,
So long in placid dignity
Have you lain here!

Yet what is length of time? But dream!
Once breathed this atmosphere
Those fossils near you, met the gleam
Of day as you did here;

But so far earlier theirs beside
Your life-span and career,
That they might style of yestertide
Your coming here!

IN THE MARQUEE

It was near last century’s ending,
And, though not much to rate
In a world of getting and spending,
To her it was great.

The scene was a London suburb
On a night of summer weather,
And the villas had back gardens
Running together.