Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (972 page)

“By some still close-cowled mystery
We have reached feeling faster than he,
But he will overtake us anon,
   If the world goes on.”

MIDNIGHT ON THE GREAT WESTERN

In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy,
   And the roof-lamp’s oily flame
Played down on his listless form and face,
Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,
      Or whence he came.

In the band of his hat the journeying boy
   Had a ticket stuck; and a string
Around his neck bore the key of his box,
That twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams
      Like a living thing.

What past can be yours, O journeying boy
   Towards a world unknown,
Who calmly, as if incurious quite
On all at stake, can undertake
      This plunge alone?

Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy,
   Our rude realms far above,
Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete
This region of sin that you find you in,
      But are not of?

HONEYMOON TIME AT AN INN

At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn,
      The moon was at the window-square,
   Deedily brooding in deformed decay -
   The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze;
At the shiver of morning a little before the false dawn
   So the moon looked in there.

Her speechless eyeing reached across the chamber,
      Where lay two souls opprest,
   One a white lady sighing, “Why am I sad!”
   To him who sighed back, “Sad, my Love, am I!”
And speechlessly the old moon conned the chamber,
   And these two reft of rest.

While their large-pupilled vision swept the scene there,
      Nought seeming imminent,
   Something fell sheer, and crashed, and from the floor
   Lay glittering at the pair with a shattered gaze,
While their large-pupilled vision swept the scene there,
   And the many-eyed thing outleant.

With a start they saw that it was an old-time pier-glass
      Which had stood on the mantel near,
   Its silvering blemished, — yes, as if worn away
   By the eyes of the countless dead who had smirked at it
Ere these two ever knew that old-time pier-glass
   And its vague and vacant leer.

As he looked, his bride like a moth skimmed forth, and kneeling
      Quick, with quivering sighs,
   Gathered the pieces under the moon’s sly ray,
   Unwitting as an automaton what she did;
Till he entreated, hasting to where she was kneeling,
   Let it stay where it lies!”

“Long years of sorrow this means!” breathed the lady
      As they retired. “Alas!”
   And she lifted one pale hand across her eyes.
   ”Don’t trouble, Love; it’s nothing,” the bridegroom said.
“Long years of sorrow for us!” murmured the lady,
   ”Or ever this evil pass!”

And the Spirits Ironic laughed behind the wainscot,
      And the Spirits of Pity sighed.
   It’s good,” said the Spirits Ironic, “to tickle their minds
   With a portent of their wedlock’s after-grinds.”
And the Spirits of Pity sighed behind the wainscot,
   ”It’s a portent we cannot abide!

“More, what shall happen to prove the truth of the portent?”
     — ”Oh; in brief, they will fade till old,
   And their loves grow numbed ere death, by the cark of care.”
- “But nought see we that asks for portents there? -
‘Tis the lot of all.” — ”Well, no less true is a portent
   That it fits all mortal mould.”

THE ROBIN

When up aloft
I fly and fly,
I see in pools
The shining sky,
And a happy bird
Am I, am I!

When I descend
Towards their brink
I stand, and look,
And stoop, and drink,
And bathe my wings,
And chink and prink.

When winter frost
Makes earth as steel
I search and search
But find no meal,
And most unhappy
Then I feel.

But when it lasts,
And snows still fall,
I get to feel
No grief at all,
For I turn to a cold stiff
Feathery ball!

I ROSE AND WENT TO ROU’TOR TOWN

(She, alone)

I rose and went to Rou’tor Town
   With gaiety and good heart,
   And ardour for the start,
That morning ere the moon was down
That lit me off to Rou’tor Town
   With gaiety and good heart.

When sojourn soon at Rou’tor Town
   Wrote sorrows on my face,
   I strove that none should trace
The pale and gray, once pink and brown,
When sojourn soon at Rou’tor Town
   Wrote sorrows on my face.

The evil wrought at Rou’tor Town
   On him I’d loved so true
   I cannot tell anew:
But nought can quench, but nought can drown
The evil wrought at Rou’tor Town
   On him I’d loved so true!

THE NETTLES

   This, then, is the grave of my son,
   Whose heart she won! And nettles grow
Upon his mound; and she lives just below.

   How he upbraided me, and left,
   And our lives were cleft, because I said
She was hard, unfeeling, caring but to wed.

   Well, to see this sight I have fared these miles,
   And her firelight smiles from her window there,
Whom he left his mother to cherish with tender care!

   It is enough. I’ll turn and go;
   Yes, nettles grow where lone lies he,
Who spurned me for seeing what he could not see.

IN A WAITING-ROOM

On a morning sick as the day of doom
   With the drizzling gray
   Of an English May,
There were few in the railway waiting-room.
About its walls were framed and varnished
Pictures of liners, fly-blown, tarnished.
The table bore a Testament
For travellers’ reading, if suchwise bent.

      I read it on and on,
   And, thronging the Gospel of Saint John,
   Were figures — additions, multiplications -
By some one scrawled, with sundry emendations;
      Not scoffingly designed,
      But with an absent mind, -
   Plainly a bagman’s counts of cost,
   What he had profited, what lost;
And whilst I wondered if there could have been
      Any particle of a soul
      In that poor man at all,

   To cypher rates of wage
   Upon that printed page,
   There joined in the charmless scene
And stood over me and the scribbled book
   (To lend the hour’s mean hue
   A smear of tragedy too)
A soldier and wife, with haggard look
Subdued to stone by strong endeavour;
   And then I heard
   From a casual word
They were parting as they believed for ever.

   But next there came
   Like the eastern flame
Of some high altar, children — a pair -
Who laughed at the fly-blown pictures there.
“Here are the lovely ships that we,
Mother, are by and by going to see!
When we get there it’s ‘most sure to be fine,
And the band will play, and the sun will shine!”

It rained on the skylight with a din
As we waited and still no train came in;
But the words of the child in the squalid room
Had spread a glory through the gloom.

THE CLOCK-WINDER

It is dark as a cave,
Or a vault in the nave
When the iron door
Is closed, and the floor
Of the church relaid
With trowel and spade.

But the parish-clerk
Cares not for the dark
As he winds in the tower
At a regular hour
The rheumatic clock,
Whose dilatory knock
You can hear when praying
At the day’s decaying,
Or at any lone while
From a pew in the aisle.

Up, up from the ground
Around and around
In the turret stair
He clambers, to where
The wheelwork is,
With its tick, click, whizz,
Reposefully measuring
Each day to its end
That mortal men spend
In sorrowing and pleasuring
Nightly thus does he climb
To the trackway of Time.

Him I followed one night
To this place without light,
And, ere I spoke, heard
Him say, word by word,
At the end of his winding,
The darkness unminding:-

“So I wipe out one more,
My Dear, of the sore
Sad days that still be,
Like a drying Dead Sea,
Between you and me!”

Who she was no man knew:
He had long borne him blind
To all womankind;
And was ever one who
Kept his past out of view.

OLD EXCURSIONS

“What’s the good of going to Ridgeway,
   Cerne, or Sydling Mill,
   Or to Yell’ham Hill,
Blithely bearing Casterbridge-way
   As we used to do?
She will no more climb up there,
Or be visible anywhere
   In those haunts we knew.”

But to-night, while walking weary,
   Near me seemed her shade,
   Come as ‘twere to upbraid
This my mood in deeming dreary
   Scenes that used to please;
And, if she did come to me,
Still solicitous, there may be
   Good in going to these.

So, I’ll care to roam to Ridgeway,
   Cerne, or Sydling Mill,
   Or to Yell’ham Hill,
Blithely bearing Casterbridge-way
   As we used to do,
Since her phasm may flit out there,
And may greet me anywhere
   In those haunts we knew.

April 1913.

THE MASKED FACE

I found me in a great surging space,
   At either end a door,
And I said: “What is this giddying place,
   With no firm-fixed floor,
   That I knew not of before?”
   ”It is Life,” said a mask-clad face.

I asked: “But how do I come here,
   Who never wished to come;
Can the light and air be made more clear,
   The floor more quietsome,
   And the doors set wide? They numb
   Fast-locked, and fill with fear.”

The mask put on a bleak smile then,
   And said, “O vassal-wight,
There once complained a goosequill pen
   To the scribe of the Infinite
   Of the words it had to write
   Because they were past its ken.”

IN A WHISPERING GALLERY

That whisper takes the voice
Of a Spirit’s compassionings
Close, but invisible,
And throws me under a spell
At the kindling vision it brings;
And for a moment I rejoice,
And believe in transcendent things
That would mould from this muddy earth
A spot for the splendid birth
Of everlasting lives,
Whereto no night arrives;
And this gaunt gray gallery
A tabernacle of worth
On this drab-aired afternoon,
When you can barely see
Across its hazed lacune
If opposite aught there be
Of fleshed humanity
Wherewith I may commune;
Or if the voice so near
Be a soul’s voice floating here.

THE SOMETHING THAT SAVED HIM

   It was when
Whirls of thick waters laved me
   Again and again,
That something arose and saved me;
   Yea, it was then.

   In that day
Unseeing the azure went I
   On my way,
And to white winter bent I,
   Knowing no May.

   Reft of renown,
Under the night clouds beating
   Up and down,
In my needfulness greeting
   Cit and clown.

   Long there had been
Much of a murky colour
   In the scene,
Dull prospects meeting duller;
   Nought between.

   Last, there loomed
A closing-in blind alley,
   Though there boomed
A feeble summons to rally
   Where it gloomed.

   The clock rang;
The hour brought a hand to deliver;
   I upsprang,
And looked back at den, ditch and river,
   And sang.

THE ENEMY’S PORTRAIT

He saw the portrait of his enemy, offered
At auction in a street he journeyed nigh,
That enemy, now late dead, who in his life-time
Had injured deeply him the passer-by.
“To get that picture, pleased be God, I’ll try,
And utterly destroy it; and no more
Shall be inflicted on man’s mortal eye
A countenance so sinister and sore!”

And so he bought the painting. Driving homeward,
“The frame will come in useful,” he declared,
“The rest is fuel.” On his arrival, weary,
Asked what he bore with him, and how he fared,
He said he had bid for a picture, though he cared
For the frame only: on the morrow he
Would burn the canvas, which could well be spared,
Seeing that it portrayed his enemy.

Next day some other duty found him busy;
The foe was laid his face against the wall;
But on the next he set himself to loosen
The straining-strips. And then a casual call
Prevented his proceeding therewithal;
And thus the picture waited, day by day,
Its owner’s pleasure, like a wretched thrall,
Until a month and more had slipped away.

And then upon a morn he found it shifted,
Hung in a corner by a servitor.
“Why did you take on you to hang that picture?
You know it was the frame I bought it for.”
“It stood in the way of every visitor,
And I just hitched it there.” — ”Well, it must go:
I don’t commemorate men whom I abhor.
Remind me ‘tis to do. The frame I’ll stow.”

But things become forgotten. In the shadow
Of the dark corner hung it by its string,
And there it stayed — once noticed by its owner,
Who said, “Ah me — I must destroy that thing!”
But when he died, there, none remembering,
It hung, till moved to prominence, as one sees;
And comers pause and say, examining,
“I thought they were the bitterest enemies?”

IMAGININGS

   She saw herself a lady
      With fifty frocks in wear,
And rolling wheels, and rooms the best,
      And faithful maidens’ care,
   And open lawns and shady
      For weathers warm or drear.