Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (961 page)

   And the well-meaner died
While waiting tremulously unsatisfied
That no return of the family’s foreign scion
   Would still betide.

   And many years slid by,
And active church-restorers cast their eye
Upon the ancient garth and hoary building
   The tomb stood nigh.

   And when they had scraped each wall,
Pulled out the stately pews, and smartened all,
“It will be well,” declared the spruce church-warden,
   ”To overhaul

   ”And broaden this path where shown;
Nothing prevents it but an old tombstone
Pertaining to a family forgotten,
   Of deeds unknown.

   ”Their names can scarce be read,
Depend on’t, all who care for them are dead.”
So went the tomb, whose shards were as path-paving
   Distributed.

   Over it and about
Men’s footsteps beat, and wind and water-spout,
Until the names, aforetime gnawed by weathers,
   Were quite worn out.

   So that no sage can say
In pensive progress near where they decay,
“This stone records a luminous line whose talents
   Told in their day.”

REGRET NOT ME

      Regret not me;
   Beneath the sunny tree
I lie uncaring, slumbering peacefully.

      Swift as the light
   I flew my faery flight;
Ecstatically I moved, and feared no night.

      I did not know
   That heydays fade and go,
But deemed that what was would be always so.

      I skipped at morn
   Between the yellowing corn,
Thinking it good and glorious to be born.

      I ran at eves
   Among the piled-up sheaves,
Dreaming, “I grieve not, therefore nothing grieves.”

      Now soon will come
   The apple, pear, and plum
And hinds will sing, and autumn insects hum.

      Again you will fare
   To cider-makings rare,
And junketings; but I shall not be there.

      Yet gaily sing
   Until the pewter ring
Those songs we sang when we went gipsying.

      And lightly dance
   Some triple-timed romance
In coupled figures, and forget mischance;

      And mourn not me
   Beneath the yellowing tree;
For I shall mind not, slumbering peacefully.

THE RECALCITRANTS

Let us off and search, and find a place
Where yours and mine can be natural lives,
Where no one comes who dissects and dives
And proclaims that ours is a curious case,
That its touch of romance can scarcely grace.

You would think it strange at first, but then
Everything has been strange in its time.
When some one said on a day of the prime
He would bow to no brazen god again
He doubtless dazed the mass of men.

None will recognize us as a pair whose claims
To righteous judgment we care not making;
Who have doubted if breath be worth the taking,
And have no respect for the current fames
Whence the savour has flown while abide the names.

We have found us already shunned, disdained,
And for re-acceptance have not once striven;
Whatever offence our course has given
The brunt thereof we have long sustained.
Well, let us away, scorned unexplained.

STARLINGS ON THE ROOF

“No smoke spreads out of this chimney-pot,
The people who lived here have left the spot,
And others are coming who knew them not.

If you listen anon, with an ear intent,
The voices, you’ll find, will be different
From the well-known ones of those who went.”

“Why did they go? Their tones so bland
Were quite familiar to our band;
The comers we shall not understand.”

“They look for a new life, rich and strange;
They do not know that, let them range
Wherever they may, they will get no change.

“They will drag their house-gear ever so far
In their search for a home no miseries mar;
They will find that as they were they are,

“That every hearth has a ghost, alack,
And can be but the scene of a bivouac
Till they move perforce — no time to pack!”

THE MOON LOOKS IN

I

I have risen again,
And awhile survey
By my chilly ray
Through your window-pane
Your upturned face,
As you think, “Ah-she
Now dreams of me
In her distant place!”

II

I pierce her blind
In her far-off home:
She fixes a comb,
And says in her mind,
“I start in an hour;
Whom shall I meet?
Won’t the men be sweet,
And the women sour!”

THE SWEET HUSSY

In his early days he was quite surprised
When she told him she was compromised
By meetings and lingerings at his whim,
And thinking not of herself but him;
While she lifted orbs aggrieved and round
That scandal should so soon abound,
(As she had raised them to nine or ten
Of antecedent nice young men)
And in remorse he thought with a sigh,
How good she is, and how bad am I! -
It was years before he understood
That she was the wicked one — he the good.

THE TELEGRAM

“O he’s suffering — maybe dying — and I not there to aid,
And smooth his bed and whisper to him! Can I nohow go?
Only the nurse’s brief twelve words thus hurriedly conveyed,
   As by stealth, to let me know.

“He was the best and brightest! — candour shone upon his brow,
And I shall never meet again a soldier such as he,
And I loved him ere I knew it, and perhaps he’s sinking now,
   Far, far removed from me!”

- The yachts ride mute at anchor and the fulling moon is fair,
And the giddy folk are strutting up and down the smooth parade,
And in her wild distraction she seems not to be aware
   That she lives no more a maid,

But has vowed and wived herself to one who blessed the ground she
trod
To and from his scene of ministry, and thought her history known
In its last particular to him — aye, almost as to God,
   And believed her quite his own.

So great her absentmindedness she droops as in a swoon,
And a movement of aversion mars her recent spousal grace,
And in silence we two sit here in our waning honeymoon
   At this idle watering-place . . .

What now I see before me is a long lane overhung
With lovelessness, and stretching from the present to the grave.
And I would I were away from this, with friends I knew when young,
   Ere a woman held me slave.

THE MOTH-SIGNAL

(On Egdon Heath)

“What are you still, still thinking,”
   He asked in vague surmise,
“That stare at the wick unblinking
   With those great lost luminous eyes?”

“O, I see a poor moth burning
   In the candle-flame,” said she,
Its wings and legs are turning
   To a cinder rapidly.”

“Moths fly in from the heather,”
   He said, “now the days decline.”
“I know,” said she. “The weather,
   I hope, will at last be fine.

“I think,” she added lightly,
   ”I’ll look out at the door.
The ring the moon wears nightly
   May be visible now no more.”

She rose, and, little heeding,
   Her husband then went on
With his attentive reading
   In the annals of ages gone.

Outside the house a figure
   Came from the tumulus near,
And speedily waxed bigger,
   And clasped and called her Dear.

“I saw the pale-winged token
   You sent through the crack,” sighed she.
“That moth is burnt and broken
   With which you lured out me.

“And were I as the moth is
   It might be better far
For one whose marriage troth is
   Shattered as potsherds are!”

Then grinned the Ancient Briton
   From the tumulus treed with pine:
“So, hearts are thwartly smitten
   In these days as in mine!”

SEEN BY THE WAITS

Through snowy woods and shady
   We went to play a tune
To the lonely manor-lady
   By the light of the Christmas moon.

We violed till, upward glancing
   To where a mirror leaned,
We saw her airily dancing,
   Deeming her movements screened;

Dancing alone in the room there,
   Thin-draped in her robe of night;
Her postures, glassed in the gloom there,
   Were a strange phantasmal sight.

She had learnt (we heard when homing)
   That her roving spouse was dead;
Why she had danced in the gloaming
   We thought, but never said.

THE TWO SOLDIERS

Just at the corner of the wall
   We met — yes, he and I -
Who had not faced in camp or hall
   Since we bade home good-bye,
And what once happened came back — all -
   Out of those years gone by.

And that strange woman whom we knew
   And loved — long dead and gone,
Whose poor half-perished residue,
   Tombless and trod, lay yon!
But at this moment to our view
   Rose like a phantom wan.

And in his fixed face I could see,
   Lit by a lurid shine,
The drama re-enact which she
   Had dyed incarnadine
For us, and more. And doubtless he
   Beheld it too in mine.

A start, as at one slightly known,
   And with an indifferent air
We passed, without a sign being shown
   That, as it real were,
A memory-acted scene had thrown
   Its tragic shadow there.

THE DEATH OF REGRET

I opened my shutter at sunrise,
   And looked at the hill hard by,
And I heartily grieved for the comrade
   Who wandered up there to die.

I let in the morn on the morrow,
   And failed not to think of him then,
As he trod up that rise in the twilight,
   And never came down again.

I undid the shutter a week thence,
   But not until after I’d turned
Did I call back his last departure
   By the upland there discerned.

Uncovering the casement long later,
   I bent to my toil till the gray,
When I said to myself, “Ah — what ails me,
   To forget him all the day!”

As daily I flung back the shutter
   In the same blank bald routine,
He scarcely once rose to remembrance
   Through a month of my facing the scene.

And ah, seldom now do I ponder
   At the window as heretofore
On the long valued one who died yonder,
   And wastes by the sycamore.

IN THE DAYS OF CRINOLINE

A plain tilt-bonnet on her head
She took the path across the leaze.
- Her spouse the vicar, gardening, said,
“Too dowdy that, for coquetries,
   So I can hoe at ease.

But when she had passed into the heath,
And gained the wood beyond the flat,
She raised her skirts, and from beneath
Unpinned and drew as from a sheath
   An ostrich-feathered hat.

And where the hat had hung she now
Concealed and pinned the dowdy hood,
And set the hat upon her brow,
And thus emerging from the wood
   Tripped on in jaunty mood.

The sun was low and crimson-faced
As two came that way from the town,
And plunged into the wood untraced . . .
When separately therefrom they paced
   The sun had quite gone down.

The hat and feather disappeared,
The dowdy hood again was donned,
And in the gloom the fair one neared
Her home and husband dour, who conned
   Calmly his blue-eyed blonde.

“To-day,” he said, “you have shown good sense,
A dress so modest and so meek
Should always deck your goings hence
Alone.” And as a recompense
   He kissed her on the cheek.

THE ROMAN GRAVEMOUNDS

By Rome’s dim relics there walks a man,
Eyes bent; and he carries a basket and spade;
I guess what impels him to scrape and scan;
Yea, his dreams of that Empire long decayed.

“Vast was Rome,” he must muse, “in the world’s regard,
Vast it looms there still, vast it ever will be;”
And he stoops as to dig and unmine some shard
Left by those who are held in such memory.

But no; in his basket, see, he has brought
A little white furred thing, stiff of limb,
Whose life never won from the world a thought;
It is this, and not Rome, that is moving him.

And to make it a grave he has come to the spot,
And he delves in the ancient dead’s long home;
Their fames, their achievements, the man knows not;
The furred thing is all to him — nothing Rome!

“Here say you that Caesar’s warriors lie? -
But my little white cat was my only friend!
Could she but live, might the record die
Of Caesar, his legions, his aims, his end!”

Well, Rome’s long rule here is oft and again
A theme for the sages of history,
And the small furred life was worth no one’s pen;
Yet its mourner’s mood has a charm for me.

November 1910.

THE WORKBOX

“See, here’s the workbox, little wife,
   That I made of polished oak.”
He was a joiner, of village life;
   She came of borough folk.

He holds the present up to her
As with a smile she nears
And answers to the profferer,
“‘Twill last all my sewing years!”

“I warrant it will. And longer too.
‘Tis a scantling that I got
Off poor John Wayward’s coffin, who
Died of they knew not what.

“The shingled pattern that seems to cease
Against your box’s rim
Continues right on in the piece
That’s underground with him.