Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (978 page)

I chance now on the last of hers,
   By the moon’s cold shine;
It is the one remaining page
Out of the many shallow and sage
   Whereto she set her sign.
Who could foresee there were to be
   Such letters of pain and pine
Ere I should read this last of hers
   By the moon’s cold shine!

AT A HOUSE IN HAMPSTEAD

SOMETIME THE DWELLING OF JOHN KEATS

O poet, come you haunting here
Where streets have stolen up all around,
And never a nightingale pours one
   Full-throated sound?

Drawn from your drowse by the Seven famed Hills,
Thought you to find all just the same
Here shining, as in hours of old,
   If you but came?

What will you do in your surprise
At seeing that changes wrought in Rome
Are wrought yet more on the misty slope
   One time your home?

Will you wake wind-wafts on these stairs?
Swing the doors open noisily?
Show as an umbraged ghost beside
   Your ancient tree?

Or will you, softening, the while
You further and yet further look,
Learn that a laggard few would fain
   Preserve your nook? . . .

 - Where the Piazza steps incline,
And catch late light at eventide,
I once stood, in that Rome, and thought,
   ”‘Twas here he died.”

I drew to a violet-sprinkled spot,
Where day and night a pyramid keeps
Uplifted its white hand, and said,
   ”‘Tis there he sleeps.”

Pleasanter now it is to hold
That here, where sang he, more of him
Remains than where he, tuneless, cold,
   Passed to the dim.

July
1920.

A WOMAN’S FANCY

“Ah Madam; you’ve indeed come back here?
   ’Twas sad - your husband’s so swift death,
And you away!  You shouldn’t have left him:
      It hastened his last breath.”

“Dame, I am not the lady you think me;
   I know not her, nor know her name;
I’ve come to lodge here - a friendless woman;
      My health my only aim.”

She came; she lodged.  Wherever she rambled
   They held her as no other than
The lady named; and told how her husband
      Had died a forsaken man.

So often did they call her thuswise
   Mistakenly, by that man’s name,
So much did they declare about him,
      That his past form and fame

Grew on her, till she pitied his sorrow
   As if she truly had been the cause -
Yea, his deserter; and came to wonder
      What mould of man he was.

“Tell me my history!” would exclaim she;
   ”
Our
history,” she said mournfully.
“But
you
know, surely, Ma’am?” they would answer,
      Much in perplexity.

Curious, she crept to his grave one evening,
   And a second time in the dusk of the morrow;
Then a third time, with crescent emotion
      Like a bereaved wife’s sorrow.

No gravestone rose by the rounded hillock;
   - “I marvel why this is?” she said.
- “He had no kindred, Ma’am, but you near.”
      - She set a stone at his head.

She learnt to dream of him, and told them:
   ”In slumber often uprises he,
And says: ‘I am joyed that, after all, Dear,
      You’ve not deserted me!”

At length died too this kinless woman,
   As he had died she had grown to crave;
And at her dying she besought them
      To bury her in his grave.

Such said, she had paused; until she added:
   ”Call me by his name on the stone,
As I were, first to last, his dearest,
      Not she who left him lone!”

And this they did.  And so it became there
   That, by the strength of a tender whim,
The stranger was she who bore his name there,
      Not she who wedded him.

HER SONG

I sang that song on Sunday,
   To witch an idle while,
I sang that song on Monday,
   As fittest to beguile;
I sang it as the year outwore,
      And the new slid in;
I thought not what might shape before
   Another would begin.

I sang that song in summer,
   All unforeknowingly,
To him as a new-comer
   From regions strange to me:
I sang it when in afteryears
      The shades stretched out,
And paths were faint; and flocking fears
   Brought cup-eyed care and doubt.

Sings he that song on Sundays
   In some dim land afar,
On Saturdays, or Mondays,
   As when the evening star
Glimpsed in upon his bending face
      And my hanging hair,
And time untouched me with a trace
   Of soul-smart or despair?

A WET AUGUST

Nine drops of water bead the jessamine,
And nine-and-ninety smear the stones and tiles:
- ‘Twas not so in that August - full-rayed, fine -
When we lived out-of-doors, sang songs, strode miles.

Or was there then no noted radiancy
Of summer?  Were dun clouds, a dribbling bough,
Gilt over by the light I bore in me,
And was the waste world just the same as now?

It can have been so: yea, that threatenings
Of coming down-drip on the sunless gray,
By the then possibilities in things
Were wrought more bright than brightest skies to-day.

1920.

THE DISSEMBLERS

“It was not you I came to please,
   Only myself,” flipped she;
“I like this spot of phantasies,
   And thought you far from me.”
But O, he was the secret spell
   That led her to the lea!

“It was not she who shaped my ways,
   Or works, or thoughts,” he said.
“I scarcely marked her living days,
   Or missed her much when dead.”
But O, his joyance knew its knell
   When daisies hid her head!

TO A LADY PLAYING AND SINGING IN THE MORNING

   Joyful lady, sing! 
And I will lurk here listening,
Though nought be done, and nought begun,
And work-hours swift are scurrying.

   Sing, O lady, still! 
Aye, I will wait each note you trill,
Though duties due that press to do
This whole day long I unfulfil.

   ” - It is an evening tune;
One not designed to waste the noon,”
You say.  I know: time bids me go -
For daytide passes too, too soon!

   But let indulgence be,
This once, to my rash ecstasy:
When sounds nowhere that carolled air
My idled morn may comfort me!

A MAN WAS DRAWING NEAR TO ME

On that gray night of mournful drone,
A part from aught to hear, to see,
I dreamt not that from shires unknown
   In gloom, alone,
   By Halworthy,
A man was drawing near to me.

I’d no concern at anything,
No sense of coming pull-heart play;
Yet, under the silent outspreading
   Of even’s wing
   Where Otterham lay,
A man was riding up my way.

I thought of nobody - not of one,
But only of trifles - legends, ghosts -
Though, on the moorland dim and dun
   That travellers shun
   About these coasts,
The man had passed Tresparret Posts.

There was no light at all inland,
Only the seaward pharos-fire,
Nothing to let me understand
   That hard at hand
   By Hennett Byre
The man was getting nigh and nigher.

There was a rumble at the door,
A draught disturbed the drapery,
And but a minute passed before,
   With gaze that bore
   My destiny,
The man revealed himself to me
.

THE STRANGE HOUSE

(MAX GATE, A.D. 2000)

“I hear the piano playing -
   Just as a ghost might play.”
“ - O, but what are you saying?
   There’s no piano to-day;
Their old one was sold and broken;
   Years past it went amiss.”
“ - I heard it, or shouldn’t have spoken:
      A strange house, this!

“I catch some undertone here,
   From some one out of sight.”
“ - Impossible; we are alone here,
   And shall be through the night.”
“ - The parlour-door - what stirred it?”
   ” - No one: no soul’s in range.”
“ - But, anyhow, I heard it,
      And it seems strange!

“Seek my own room I cannot -
   A figure is on the stair!”
“ - What figure?  Nay, I scan not
   Any one lingering there.
A bough outside is waving,
   And that’s its shade by the moon.”
“ - Well, all is strange!  I am craving
      Strength to leave soon.”

“ - Ah, maybe you’ve some vision
   Of showings beyond our sphere;
Some sight, sense, intuition
   Of what once happened here?
The house is old; they’ve hinted
   It once held two love-thralls,
And they may have imprinted
      Their dreams on its walls?

“They were - I think ‘twas told me -
   Queer in their works and ways;
The teller would often hold me
   With weird tales of those days.
Some folk can not abide here,
   But we - we do not care
Who loved, laughed, wept, or died here,
      Knew joy, or despair.”

AS ‘TWERE TO-NIGHT

(SONG)

As ‘twere to-night, in the brief space
   Of a far eventime,
   My spirit rang achime
At vision of a girl of grace;
As ‘twere to-night, in the brief space
   Of a far eventime.

As ‘twere at noontide of to-morrow
   I airily walked and talked,
   And wondered as I walked
What it could mean, this soar from sorrow;
As ‘twere at noontide of to-morrow
   I airily walked and talked.

As ‘twere at waning of this week
   Broke a new life on me;
   Trancings of bliss to be
In some dim dear land soon to seek;
As ‘twere at waning of this week
   Broke a new life on me!

THE CONTRETEMPS

   A forward rush by the lamp in the gloom,
      And we clasped, and almost kissed;
   But she was not the woman whom
   I had promised to meet in the thawing brume
On that harbour-bridge; nor was I he of her tryst.

   So loosening from me swift she said:
      ”O why, why feign to be
   The one I had meant! - to whom I have sped
   To fly with, being so sorrily wed!”
- ‘Twas thus and thus that she upbraided me.

   My assignation had struck upon
      Some others’ like it, I found.
   And her lover rose on the night anon;
   And then her husband entered on
The lamplit, snowflaked, sloppiness around.

   ”Take her and welcome, man!” he cried:
      ”I wash my hands of her.
   I’ll find me twice as good a bride!”
   - All this to me, whom he had eyed,
Plainly, as his wife’s planned deliverer.

   And next the lover: “Little I knew,
      Madam, you had a third!
   Kissing here in my very view!”
   - Husband and lover then withdrew.
I let them; and I told them not they erred.

   Why not?  Well, there faced she and I -
      Two strangers who’d kissed, or near,
   Chancewise.  To see stand weeping by
   A woman once embraced, will try
The tension of a man the most austere.

   So it began; and I was young,
      She pretty, by the lamp,
   As flakes came waltzing down among
   The waves of her clinging hair, that hung
Heavily on her temples, dark and damp.

   And there alone still stood we two;
      She one cast off for me,
   Or so it seemed: while night ondrew,
   Forcing a parley what should do
We twain hearts caught in one catastrophe.

   In stranded souls a common strait
      Wakes latencies unknown,
   Whose impulse may precipitate
   A life-long leap.  The hour was late,
And there was the Jersey boat with its funnel agroan.

   ”Is wary walking worth much pother?”
      It grunted, as still it stayed.
   ”One pairing is as good as another
   Where all is venture!  Take each other,
And scrap the oaths that you have aforetime made.” . . .

   - Of the four involved there walks but one
      On earth at this late day.
   And what of the chapter so begun?
   In that odd complex what was done?
   Well; happiness comes in full to none:
Let peace lie on lulled lips: I will not say.

WEYMOUTH.

A GENTLEMAN’S EPITAPH ON HIMSELF AND A LADY, WHO WERE BURIED TOGETHER

I dwelt in the shade of a city,
   She far by the sea,
With folk perhaps good, gracious, witty;
   But never with me.

Her form on the ballroom’s smooth flooring
   I never once met,
To guide her with accents adoring
   Through Weippert’s “First Set.”

I spent my life’s seasons with pale ones
   In Vanity Fair,
And she enjoyed hers among hale ones
   In salt-smelling air.

Maybe she had eyes of deep colour,
   Maybe they were blue,
Maybe as she aged they got duller;
   That never I knew.

She may have had lips like the coral,
   But I never kissed them,
Saw pouting, nor curling in quarrel,
   Nor sought for, nor missed them.

Not a word passed of love all our lifetime,
   Between us, nor thrill;
We’d never a husband-and-wife time,
   For good or for ill.

Yet as one dust, through bleak days and vernal,
   Lie I and lies she,
This never-known lady, eternal
   Companion to me!

THE OLD GOWN

(SONG)

I have seen her in gowns the brightest,
   Of azure, green, and red,
And in the simplest, whitest,
   Muslined from heel to head;
I have watched her walking, riding,
   Shade-flecked by a leafy tree,
Or in fixed thought abiding
   By the foam-fingered sea.