Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (935 page)

(The neighbourhood of Leghorn: March, 1887)

Somewhere afield here something lies
In Earth’s oblivious eyeless trust
That moved a poet to prophecies -
A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust

The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,
And made immortal through times to be; -
Though it only lived like another bird,
And knew not its immortality.

Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell -
A little ball of feather and bone;
And how it perished, when piped farewell,
And where it wastes, are alike unknown.

Maybe it rests in the loam I view,
Maybe it throbs in a myrtle’s green,
Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue
Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.

Go find it, faeries, go and find
That tiny pinch of priceless dust,
And bring a casket silver-lined,
And framed of gold that gems encrust;

And we will lay it safe therein,
And consecrate it to endless time;
For it inspired a bard to win
Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.

IN THE OLD THEATRE, FIESOLE

(April, 1887)

I traced the Circus whose gray stones incline
Where Rome and dim Etruria interjoin,
Till came a child who showed an ancient coin
That bore the image of a Constantine.

She lightly passed; nor did she once opine
How, better than all books, she had raised for me
In swift perspective Europe’s history
Through the vast years of Caesar’s sceptred line.

For in my distant plot of English loam
‘Twas but to delve, and straightway there to find
Coins of like impress. As with one half blind
Whom common simples cure, her act flashed home
In that mute moment to my opened mind
The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome.

ROME: ON THE PALATINE

(April, 1887)

We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile,
And passed to Livia’s rich red mural show,
Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico,
We gained Caligula’s dissolving pile.

And each ranked ruin tended to beguile
The outer sense, and shape itself as though
It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow
Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle.

When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh over-head,
Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss:
It stirred me as I stood, in Caesar’s house,
Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led,

And blended pulsing life with lives long done,
Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one.

ROME: BUILDING A NEW STREET IN THE ANCIENT QUARTER

(April, 1887)

These numbered cliffs and gnarls of masonry
Outskeleton Time’s central city, Rome;
Whereof each arch, entablature, and dome
Lies bare in all its gaunt anatomy.

And cracking frieze and rotten metope
Express, as though they were an open tome
Top-lined with caustic monitory gnome;
“Dunces, Learn here to spell Humanity!”

And yet within these ruins’ very shade
The singing workmen shape and set and join
Their frail new mansion’s stuccoed cove and quoin
With no apparent sense that years abrade,
Though each rent wall their feeble works invade
Once shamed all such in power of pier and groin.

ROME THE VATICAN — SALA DELLE MUSE (1887)

I sat in the Muses’ Hall at the mid of the day,
And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away,
And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun,
Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.

She was nor this nor that of those beings divine,
But each and the whole — an essence of all the Nine;
With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place,
A pensive smile on her sweet, small, marvellous face.

“Regarded so long, we render thee sad?” said she.
“Not you,” sighed I, “but my own inconstancy!
I worship each and each; in the morning one,
And then, alas! another at sink of sun.

“To-day my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth
Of yesternight with Tune: can one cleave to both?”
- “Be not perturbed,” said she. “Though apart in fame,
As I and my sisters are one, those, too, are the same.

- “But my loves go further — to Story, and Dance, and Hymn,
The lover of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim -
Is swayed like a river-weed as the ripples run!”
- “Nay, wight, thou sway’st not. These are but phases of one;

“And that one is I; and I am projected from thee,
One that out of thy brain and heart thou causest to be -
Extern to thee nothing. Grieve not, nor thyself becall,
Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love at all!

ROME AT THE PYRAMID OF CESTIUS

NEAR THE GRAVES OF SHELLEY AND KEATS
(1887)

      Who, then, was Cestius,
      And what is he to me? -
Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous
      One thought alone brings he.

      I can recall no word
      Of anything he did;
For me he is a man who died and was interred
      To leave a pyramid

      Whose purpose was exprest
      Not with its first design,
Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest
      Two countrymen of mine.

      Cestius in life, maybe,
      Slew, breathed out threatening;
I know not. This I know: in death all silently
      He does a kindlier thing,

      In beckoning pilgrim feet
      With marble finger high
To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street,
      Those matchless singers lie . . .

     — Say, then, he lived and died
      That stones which bear his name
Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide;
      It is an ample fame.

LAUSANNE

IN GIBBON’S OLD GARDEN: 11-12 P.M.
June 27, 1897
(The 110th anniversary of the completion of the “Decline and Fall” at
the same hour and place)

      A spirit seems to pass,
   Formal in pose, but grave and grand withal:
   He contemplates a volume stout and tall,
And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.

      Anon the book is closed,
   With “It is finished!” And at the alley’s end
   He turns, and soon on me his glances bend;
And, as from earth, comes speech — small, muted, yet composed.

      ”How fares the Truth now? — Ill?
  — Do pens but slily further her advance?
   May one not speed her but in phrase askance?
Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?

      ”Still rule those minds on earth
   At whom sage Milton’s wormwood words were hurled:
   ’Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?”

ZERMATT

TO THE MATTERHORN
(June-July, 1897)

Thirty-two years since, up against the sun,
Seven shapes, thin atomies to lower sight,
Labouringly leapt and gained thy gabled height,
And four lives paid for what the seven had won.

They were the first by whom the deed was done,
And when I look at thee, my mind takes flight
To that day’s tragic feat of manly might,
As though, till then, of history thou hadst none.

Yet ages ere men topped thee, late and soon
Thou watch’dst each night the planets lift and lower;
Thou gleam’dst to Joshua’s pausing sun and moon,
And brav’dst the tokening sky when Caesar’s power
Approached its bloody end: yea, saw’st that Noon
When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour.

THE BRIDGE OF LODI

(Spring, 1887)

I

When of tender mind and body
   I was moved by minstrelsy,
And that strain “The Bridge of Lodi”
   Brought a strange delight to me.

II

In the battle-breathing jingle
   Of its forward-footing tune
I could see the armies mingle,
   And the columns cleft and hewn

III

On that far-famed spot by Lodi
   Where Napoleon clove his way
To his fame, when like a god he
   Bent the nations to his sway.

IV

Hence the tune came capering to me
   While I traced the Rhone and Po;
Nor could Milan’s Marvel woo me
   From the spot englamoured so.

V

And to-day, sunlit and smiling,
   Here I stand upon the scene,
With its saffron walls, dun tiling,
   And its meads of maiden green,

VI

Even as when the trackway thundered
   With the charge of grenadiers,
And the blood of forty hundred
   Splashed its parapets and piers . . .

VII

Any ancient crone I’d toady
   Like a lass in young-eyed prime,
Could she tell some tale of Lodi
   At that moving mighty time.

VIII

So, I ask the wives of Lodi
   For traditions of that day;
But alas! not anybody
   Seems to know of such a fray.

IX

And they heed but transitory
   Marketings in cheese and meat,
Till I judge that Lodi’s story
   Is extinct in Lodi’s street.

X

Yet while here and there they thrid them
   In their zest to sell and buy,
Let me sit me down amid them
   And behold those thousands die . . .

XI

- Not a creature cares in Lodi
   How Napoleon swept each arch,
Or where up and downward trod he,
   Or for his memorial March!

XII

So that wherefore should I be here,
   Watching Adda lip the lea,
When the whole romance to see here
   Is the dream I bring with me?

XIII

And why sing “The Bridge of Lodi”
   As I sit thereon and swing,
When none shows by smile or nod he
   Guesses why or what I sing? . . .

XIV

Since all Lodi, low and head ones,
   Seem to pass that story by,
It may be the Lodi-bred ones
   Rate it truly, and not I.

XV

Once engrossing Bridge of Lodi,
   Is thy claim to glory gone?
Must I pipe a palinody,
   Or be silent thereupon?

XVI

And if here, from strand to steeple,
   Be no stone to fame the fight,
Must I say the Lodi people
   Are but viewing crime aright?

XVII

Nay; I’ll sing “The Bridge of Lodi” -
   That long-loved, romantic thing,
Though none show by smile or nod he
   Guesses why and what I sing!

ON AN INVITATION TO THE UNITED STATES

I

My ardours for emprize nigh lost
Since Life has bared its bones to me,
I shrink to seek a modern coast
Whose riper times have yet to be;
Where the new regions claim them free
From that long drip of human tears
Which peoples old in tragedy
Have left upon the centuried years.

II

For, wonning in these ancient lands,
Enchased and lettered as a tomb,
And scored with prints of perished hands,
And chronicled with dates of doom,
Though my own Being bear no bloom
I trace the lives such scenes enshrine,
Give past exemplars present room,
And their experience count as mine.

THE MOTHER MOURNS

When mid-autumn’s moan shook the night-time,
   And sedges were horny,
And summer’s green wonderwork faltered
   On leaze and in lane,

I fared Yell’ham-Firs way, where dimly
   Came wheeling around me
Those phantoms obscure and insistent
   That shadows unchain.

Till airs from the needle-thicks brought me
   A low lamentation,
As ‘twere of a tree-god disheartened,
   Perplexed, or in pain.

And, heeding, it awed me to gather
   That Nature herself there
Was breathing in aerie accents,
   With dirgeful refrain,

Weary plaint that Mankind, in these late days,
   Had grieved her by holding
Her ancient high fame of perfection
   In doubt and disdain . . .

- “I had not proposed me a Creature
   (She soughed) so excelling
All else of my kingdom in compass
   And brightness of brain

“As to read my defects with a god-glance,
   Uncover each vestige
Of old inadvertence, annunciate
   Each flaw and each stain!

“My purpose went not to develop
   Such insight in Earthland;
Such potent appraisements affront me,
   And sadden my reign!

“Why loosened I olden control here
   To mechanize skywards,
Undeeming great scope could outshape in
   A globe of such grain?

“Man’s mountings of mind-sight I checked not,
   Till range of his vision
Has topped my intent, and found blemish
   Throughout my domain.

“He holds as inept his own soul-shell -
   My deftest achievement -
Contemns me for fitful inventions
   Ill-timed and inane:

“No more sees my sun as a Sanct-shape,
   My moon as the Night-queen,
My stars as august and sublime ones
   That influences rain:

“Reckons gross and ignoble my teaching,
   Immoral my story,
My love-lights a lure, that my species
   May gather and gain.

“‘Give me,’ he has said, ‘but the matter
   And means the gods lot her,
My brain could evolve a creation
   More seemly, more sane.’