Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (952 page)
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Authors: Thomas Hardy
A yellowing marble, placed there
Tablet-wise,
And two joined hearts enchased there
Meet the eyes;
And reading their twin names we moralise:
Did she, we wonder, follow
Jealously?
And were those protests hollow? -
Or saw he
Some semblant dame? Or can wraiths really be?
Were it she went, her honour,
All may hold,
Pressed truth at last upon her
Till she told -
(Him only — others as these lines unfold.)
Riddle death-sealed for ever,
Let it rest! . . .
One’s heart could blame her never
If one guessed
That go she did. She knew her actor best.
UNREALIZED
Down comes the winter rain -
Spoils my hat and bow -
Runs into the poll of me;
But mother won’t know.
We’ve been out and caught a cold,
Knee-deep in snow;
Such a lucky thing it is
That mother won’t know!
Rosy lost herself last night -
Couldn’t tell where to go.
Yes — it rather frightened her,
But mother didn’t know.
Somebody made Willy drunk
At the Christmas show:
O ‘twas fun! It’s well for him
That mother won’t know!
Howsoever wild we are,
Late at school or slow,
Mother won’t be cross with us,
Mother won’t know.
How we cried the day she died!
Neighbours whispering low . . .
But we now do what we will -
Mother won’t know.
WAGTAIL AND BABY
A baby watched a ford, whereto
A wagtail came for drinking;
A blaring bull went wading through,
The wagtail showed no shrinking.
A stallion splashed his way across,
The birdie nearly sinking;
He gave his plumes a twitch and toss,
And held his own unblinking.
Next saw the baby round the spot
A mongrel slowly slinking;
The wagtail gazed, but faltered not
In dip and sip and prinking.
A perfect gentleman then neared;
The wagtail, in a winking,
With terror rose and disappeared;
The baby fell a-thinking.
ABERDEEN
(April: 1905)
“And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times.” — Isaiah xxxiii. 6.
I looked and thought, “All is too gray and cold
To wake my place-enthusiasms of old!”
Till a voice passed: “Behind that granite mien
Lurks the imposing beauty of a Queen.”
I looked anew; and saw the radiant form
Of Her who soothes in stress, who steers in storm,
On the grave influence of whose eyes sublime
Men count for the stability of the time.
GEORGE MEREDITH 1828-1909
Forty years back, when much had place
That since has perished out of mind,
I heard that voice and saw that face.
He spoke as one afoot will wind
A morning horn ere men awake;
His note was trenchant, turning kind.
He was of those whose wit can shake
And riddle to the very core
The counterfeits that Time will break . . .
Of late, when we two met once more,
The luminous countenance and rare
Shone just as forty years before.
So that, when now all tongues declare
His shape unseen by his green hill,
I scarce believe he sits not there.
No matter. Further and further still
Through the world’s vaporous vitiate air
His words wing on — as live words will.
May 1909.
YELL’HAM-WOOD’S STORY
Coomb-Firtrees say that Life is a moan,
And Clyffe-hill Clump says “Yea!”
But Yell’ham says a thing of its own:
It’s not “Gray, gray
Is Life alway!”
That Yell’ham says,
Nor that Life is for ends unknown.
It says that Life would signify
A thwarted purposing:
That we come to live, and are called to die,
Yes, that’s the thing
In fall, in spring,
That Yell’ham says:-
”Life offers — to deny!”
1902.
A YOUNG MAN’S EPIGRAM ON EXISTENCE
A senseless school, where we must give
Our lives that we may learn to live!
A dolt is he who memorizes
Lessons that leave no time for prizes.
1
6 W. P. V., 1866.
SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE
This collection of poems was published in 1914 and includes the 18 poem sequence ‘Poems of 1912-13’.
Satires and Circumstances
is widely regarded to be the greatest achievement of Hardy’s poetic career. With many poems being inspired by the tragic loss of his wife Emma, the collection includes some of the most powerful poems ever to portray the theme of bereavement.
The first edition
CONTENTS
MY SPIRIT WILL NOT HAUNT THE MOUND
AH, ARE YOU DIGGING ON MY GRAVE?
SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCES IN FIFTEEN GLIMPSES
A KING’S SOLILOQUY ON THE NIGHT OF HIS FUNERAL
POSTSCRIPT “MEN WHO MARCH AWAY” (SONG OF THE SOLDIERS)
IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE
Plunging and labouring on in a tide of visions,
Dolorous and dear,
Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters
Stretching around,
Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape
Yonder and near,
Blotted to feeble mist. And the coomb and the upland
Foliage-crowned,
Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flat
Stroked by the light,
Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial
Meadow or mound.
What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost
Under my sight,
Hindering me to discern my paced advancement
Lengthening to miles;
What were the re-creations killing the daytime
As by the night?
O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,
Some as with smiles,
Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled
Over the wrecked
Cheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish,
Harrowed by wiles.
Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them -
Halo-bedecked -
And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,
Rigid in hate,
Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,
Dreaded, suspect.
Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons
Further in date;
Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion
Vibrant, beside
Lamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth’s crust
Now corporate.
Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect
Gnawed by the tide,
Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there
Guilelessly glad -
Wherefore they knew not — touched by the fringe of an ecstasy
Scantly descried.
Later images too did the day unfurl me,
Shadowed and sad,
Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,
Laid now at ease,
Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow
Sepulture-clad.
So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,
Over the leaze,
Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;
— Yea, as the rhyme
Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness
Captured me these.
For, their lost revisiting manifestations
In their own time
Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,
Seeing behind
Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling
Sweet, sad, sublime.
Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser
Stare of the mind
As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast
Body-borne eyes,
Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them
As living kind.
Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying
In their surmise,
“Ah — whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought
Round him that looms
Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,
Save a few tombs?”
CHANNEL FIRING
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day
And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,
The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:
“All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christes sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.