Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (995 page)

“And there we rode as man and wife
In the broad blaze of the sun,”
Would you aver; yea, you with her
You had left for another one.

“The morning,” you said, my friend long dead,
“Was ordinary and fine;
And yet there gleamed, it somehow seemed,
At moments, a strange shine.”

You hailed a boy from your garden-plot,
And sent him along the way
To the parish church; whence word was brought
No marriage had been that day.

You mused, you said; till you heard anon
That at that hour she died
Whom once, instead of your living wife,
You had meant to make your bride. . . .

You, dead man, dwelt in your new-built house
With no great spirit or will,
And after your soon decease your spouse
Re-mated: she lives there still.

Which should be blamed, if either can,
The teller does not know
For your mismatch, O weird-wed man,
Or what you thought was so.

From an old draft.

THE MOCK WIFE

It’s a dark drama, this; and yet I know the house, and date;
That is to say, the where and when John Channing met his fate.
The house was one in High Street, seen of burghers still alive,
The year was some two centuries bygone; seventeen-hundred and five

And dying was Channing the grocer. All the clocks had struck eleven,
And the watchers saw that ere the dawn his soul would be in Heaven;
When he said on a sudden: “I should
like
to kiss her before I go, —
For one last time!” They looked at each other and murmured, “Even so.”

She’d just been haled to prison, his wife; yea, charged with shaping his death:
By poison, ‘twas told; and now he was nearing the moment of his last breath:
He, witless that his young housemate was suspect of such a crime,
Lay thinking that his pangs were but a malady of the time.

Outside the room they pondered gloomily, wondering what to do,
As still he craved her kiss — the dying man who nothing knew:
“Guilty she may not be,” they said; “so why should we torture him
In these his last few minutes of life? Yet how indulge his whim?”

And as he begged there piteously for what could not be done,
And the murder-charge had flown about the town to every one,
The friends around him in their trouble thought of a hasty plan,
And straightway set about it. Let denounce them all who can.

“O will you do a kindly deed — it may be a soul to save;
At least, great misery to a man with one foot in the grave?”
Thus they to the buxom woman not unlike his prisoned wife;
“The difference he’s past seeing; it will soothe his sinking life.”

Well, the friendly neighbour did it; and he kissed her; held her fast;
Kissed her again and yet again. “I — knew she’d — come at last! —
Where have you been? — Ah, kept away! — I’m sorry — overtried —
God bless you!” And he loosed her, fell back tiredly, and died.

His wife stood six months after on the scaffold before the crowd,
Ten thousand of them gathered there; fixed, silent, and hard-browed.
To see her strangled and burnt to dust, as was the verdict then
On women truly judged, or false, of doing to death their men.

Some of them said as they watched her burn: “I am glad he never knew,
Since a few hold her as innocent — think such she could not do!
Glad, too, that (as they tell) he thought she kissed him ere he died.”
And they seemed to make no question that the cheat was justified.

THE FIGHT ON DURNOVER MOOR

(183*)

We’d loved, we two, some while,
And that had come which comes when men too much beguile;
And without more ado
My lady said: “O shame! Get home, and hide!” But he was true.

Yes: he was true to me,
And helped me some miles homealong; and vowing to come
Before the weeks were three,
And do in church a deed should strike all scandal dumb.

And when we had traipsed to Grey’s great Bridge, and pitched my box
On its cope, to breathe us there,
He cried: “What wrangle’s that in yonder moor? Those knocks,
Gad, seem not to be fair!

“And a woman on her knees! . . . I’ll go. . . . There’s surely something wrong!”
I said: “You are tired and spent
With carrying my heavy things so far and long!”
But he would go, and went.

And there I stood, steadying my box, and screened from none,
Upon the crown of the bridge,
Ashamed o’ my shape, as lower and lower slipped the sun
Down behind Pummery Ridge. . . .

“O you may long wait so!
Your young man’s done — aye, dead!” they by and by ran and cried.
“You shouldn’t have let him go
And join that whorage, but have kept him at your side!

“It was another wench,
Biggening as you, that he championed: yes, he came on straight
With a warmth no words could quench
For her helpless face, as soon as ever he eyed her state,

“And fought her fancy-lad, who had used her far from well,
So soon to make her moan,
Aye, closed with him in fight, till at a blow yours fell,
His skull against a stone.

“She’d followed him there, this man who’d won her, and overwon,
So, when he set to twit her
Yours couldn’t abide him — him all other fighters shun,
For he’s a practised hitter.

“Your man moved not, and the constables came for the other; so he,
He’ll never make her his wife
Any more than yours will you; for they say that at least ‘twill be
Across the water for life.”

“O what has she brought about!”
I groaned; “this woman met here in my selfsame plight;
She’s put another yielding heart’s poor candle out
By dogging her man to-night!

“He might never have done her his due
Of amends! But mine had bidden the banns for marrying me!
Why did we rest on this bridge; why rush to a quarrel did he
With which he had nothing to do!”

But vain were bursts of blame:
We twain stood like and like, though strangers till that hour,
Foredoomed to tread our paths beneath like gaze and glower,
Bear a like blushful name.

Almost the selfsame day
It fell that her time and mine came on, — a lad and a lass:
The father o’ mine was where the worms waggle under the grass,
Of hers, at Botany Bay.

LAST LOOK ROUND ST. MARTIN’S FAIR

The sun is like an open furnace door,
Whose round revealed retort confines the roar
Of fires beyond terrene;
The moon presents the lustre-lacking face
Of a brass dial gone green,
Whose hours no eye can trace.
The unsold heathcroppers are driven home
To the shades of the Great Forest whence they come
By men with long cord-waistcoats in brown monochrome.
The stars break out, and flicker in the breeze,
It seems, that twitches the trees. —
From its hot idol soon
The fickle unresting earth has turned to a fresh patroon —
The cold, now brighter, moon.
The woman in red, at the nut-stall with the gun,
Lights up, and still goes on:
She’s redder in the flare-lamp than the sun
Showed it ere it was gone.
Her hands are black with loading all the day,
And yet she treats her labour as ‘twere play,
Tosses her ear-rings, and talks ribaldry
To the young men around as natural gaiety,
And not a weary work she’d readily stay,
And never again nut-shooting see,
Though crying, “Fire away!”

THE CARICATURE

Of the Lady Lu there were stories told,
For she was a woman of comely mould,
In heart-experience old.

Too many a man for her whimful sake
Had borne with patience chill and ache,
And nightly lain awake!

This epicure in pangs, in her tooth
For more of the sweet, with a calm unruth
Cast eyes on a painter-youth.

Her junior he; and the bait of bliss
Which she knew to throw — not he to miss —
She threw, till he dreamed her his.

To her arts not blind, he yet sued long,
As a songster jailed by a deed of wrong
Will shower the doer with song;

Till tried by tones now smart, now suave,
He would flee in ire, to return a slave
Who willingly forgave.

When no! One day he left her door,
“I’ll ease mine agony!” he swore,
“And bear this thing no more!

“I’ll practise a plan!” Thereon he took
Her portrait from his sketching-book,
And, though his pencil shook,

He moulded on the real its mock;
Of beauteous brow, lip, eye, and lock
Composed a laughingstock.

Amazed at this satire of his long lure,
Whenever he scanned it he’d scarce endure
His laughter. ‘Twas his cure.

And, even when he woke in the night,
And chanced to think of the comic sight,
He laughed till exhausted quite.

“Why do you laugh?” she said one day
As he gazed at her in a curious way.
“Oh — for nothing,” said he. “Mere play.”

— A gulf of years then severed the twain;
Till he heard — a painter of high attain —
She was dying on her domain.

“And,” dryly added the friend who told,
“You may know or not that, in semblance cold,
She loved once, loved whole-souled;

“And that you were the man? Did you break your vow?
Well, well; she is good as gone by now . . .
But you hit her, all allow!”

Ah, the blow past bearing that he received!
In his bachelor quiet he grieved and grieved;
How cruel; how self-deceived!

Did she ever know? . . . Men pitied his state
As the curse of his own contrivance ate
Like canker into his fate.

For ever that thing of his evil craft
Uprose on his grief — his mocking draught —
Till, racked, he insanely laughed.

Thence onward folk would muse in doubt
What gloomed him so as he walked about,
But few, or none, found out.

A LEADER OF FASHION

Never has she known
The way a robin will skip and come,
With an eye half bold, half timorsome,
To the table’s edge for a breakfast crumb:

Nor has she seen
A streak of roseate gently drawn
Across the east, that means the dawn,
When, up and out, she foots it on:

Nor has she heard
The rustle of the sparrow’s tread
To roost in roof-holes near her head
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.