Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (992 page)

THERE SEEMED A STRANGENESS

A PHANTASY

There seemed a strangeness in the air,
Vermilion light on the land’s lean face;
I heard a Voice from I knew not where: —
“The Great Adjustment is taking place!

“I set thick darkness over you,
And fogged you all your years therein;
At last I uncloud your view,
Which I am weary of holding in.

“Men have not heard, men have not seen
Since the beginning of the world
What earth and heaven mean;
But now their curtains shall be furled,

“And they shall see what is, ere long,
Not through a glass, but face to face;
And Right shall disestablish Wrong:
The Great Adjustment is taking place.”

A NIGHT OF QUESTIONINGS

On the eve of All-Souls’ Day
I heard the dead men say
Who lie by the tottering tower,
To the dark and doubling wind
At the midnight’s turning hour,
When other speech had thinned:
“What of the world now?”
The wind whiffed back: “Men still
Who are born, do good, do ill
Here, just as in your time:
Till their years the locust hath eaten,
Leaving them bare, downbeaten;
Somewhiles in springtide rime,
Somewhiles in summer glow,
Somewhiles in winter snow: —
No more I know.”

The same eve I caught cry
To the selfsame wind, those dry
As dust beneath the aisles
Of old cathedral piles,
Walled up in vaulted biers
Through many Christian years:
“What of the world now?”

Sighed back the circuiteer:
“Men since your time, shrined here
By deserved ordinance,
Their own craft, or by chance,
Which follows men from birth
Even until under earth,
But little difference show
When ranged in sculptured row,
Different as dyes although: —
No more I know.”

On the selfsame eve, too, said
Those swayed in the sunk sea-bed
To the selfsame wind as it played
With the tide in the starless shade
From Comorin to Horn,
And round by Wrath forlorn:
“What of the world now?”
And the wind for a second ceased,
Then whirred: “Men west and east,
As each sun soars and dips,
Go down to the sea in ships
As you went — hither and thither;
See the wonders of the deep,
As you did, ere they sleep;
But few at home care whither
They wander to and fro;
Themselves care little also! —
No more I know.”

Said, too, on the selfsame eve
The troubled skulls that heave
And fust in the flats of France,
To the wind wayfaring over
Listlessly as in trance
From the Ardennes to Dover,
“What of the world now?”
And the farer moaned: “As when
You mauled these fields, do men
Set them with dark-drawn breaths
To knave their neighbours’ deaths

In periodic spasms!
Yea, fooled by foul phantasms,
In a strange cyclic throe
Backward to type they go: —
No more I know.”

That night, too, men whose crimes
Had cut them off betimes,
Who lay within the pales
Of town and county jails
With the rope-groove on them yet,
Said to the same wind’s fret,
“What of the world now?”
And the blast in its brooding tone
Returned: “Men have not shown,
Since you were stretched that morning,
A white cap your adorning,
More lovely deeds or true
Through thus neck-knotting you;
Or that they purer grow,
Or ever will, I trow! —
No more I know.”

XENOPHANES, THE MONIST OF COLOPHON

Ann: aet: suae XCII. — A: C: CCCCLXXX.

“Are You groping Your way?
Do You do it unknowing? —
Or mark Your wind blowing?
Night tell You from day,
O Mover? Come, say!”
Cried Xenophanes.

“I mean, querying so,
Do You do it aware,
Or by rote, like a player,
Or in ignorance, nor care
Whether doing or no?”
Pressed Xenophanes

“Thus strive I to plumb
Your depths, O Great Dumb! —
Not a god, but the All
(As I read); yet a thrall
To a blind ritual,”
Sighed Xenophanes.

“If I only could bring
You to own it, close Thing,
I would write it again
With a still stronger pen
To my once neighbour-men!”
Said Xenophanes.

— Quoth the listening Years:
“You ask It in vain;
You waste sighs and tears
On these callings inane,
Which It grasps not nor hears,
O Xenophanes!

“When you penned what you thought
You were cast out, and sought
A retreat over sea
From aroused enmity:
So it always will be,
Yea, Xenophanes!

“In the lone of the nights
At Elea unseen,
Where the swinging wave smites
Of the restless Tyrrhene,
You may muse thus, serene,
Safe, Xenophanes.

“But write it not back
To your dear Colophon;
Brows still will be black
At your words, ‘All is One,’
From disputers thereon,
Know, Xenophanes.

“Three thousand years hence,
Men who hazard a clue
To this riddle immense,
And still treat it as new,
Will be scowled at, like you,
O Xenophanes!

“‘Some day I may tell,
When I’ve broken My spell,’
It snores in Its sleep
If you listen long, deep
At Its closely-sealed cell,
Wronged Xenophanes!

“Yea, on, near the end,
Its doings may mend;
Aye, when you’re forgotten,
And old cults are rotten,
And bulky codes shotten,
Xenophanes!”

1921.

LIFE AND DEATH AT SUNRISE

(NEAR DOGBURY GATE, 1867)

The hills uncap their tops
Of woodland, pasture, copse,
And look on the layers of mist
At their foot that still persist:
They are like awakened sleepers on one elbow lifted,
Who gaze around to learn if things during night have shifted.

A waggon creaks up from the fog
With a laboured leisurely jog;
Then a horseman from off the hill-tip
Comes clapping down into the dip;
While woodlarks, finches, sparrows, try to entune at one time,
And cocks and hens and cows and bulls take up the chime.

With a shouldered basket and flagon
A man meets the one with the waggon,

And both the men halt of long use.
“Well,” the waggoner says, “what’s the news?”
“ — ’Tis a boy this time. You’ve just met the doctor trotting back.
She’s doing very well. And we think we shall call him ‘Jack.’

“And what have you got covered there?”
He nods to the waggon and mare.
“Oh, a coffin for old John Thinn:
We are just going to put him in.”
“ — So he’s gone at last. He always had a good constitution.”
“ — He was ninety-odd. He could call up the French Revolution.”

NIGHT-TIME IN MID-FALL

It is a storm-strid night, winds footing swift
Through the blind profound;
I know the happenings from their sound;
Leaves totter down still green, and spin and drift;
The tree-trunks rock to their roots, which wrench and lift
The loam where they run onward underground.

The streams are muddy and swollen; eels migrate
To a new abode;
Even cross, ‘tis said, the turnpike-road;
(Men’s feet have felt their crawl, home-coming late):
The westward fronts of towers are saturate,
Church-timbers crack, and witches ride abroad.

A SHEEP FAIR

The day arrives of the autumn fair,
And torrents fall,
Though sheep in throngs are gathered there,
Ten thousand all,
Sodden, with hurdles round them reared:
And, lot by lot, the pens are cleared,
And the auctioneer wrings out his beard,
And wipes his book, bedrenched and smeared,
And rakes the rain from his face with the edge of his hand,
As torrents fall.

The wool of the ewes is like a sponge
With the daylong rain:
Jammed tight, to turn, or lie, or lunge,
They strive in vain.
Their horns are soft as finger-nails,
Their shepherds reek against the rails,
The tied dogs soak with tucked-in tails,
The buyers’ hat-brims fill like pails,
Which spill small cascades when they shift their stand
In the daylong rain.

POSTSCRIPT

Time has trailed lengthily since met
At Pummery Fair
Those panting thousands in their wet
And woolly wear:
And every flock long since has bled,
And all the dripping buyers have sped,
And the hoarse auctioneer is dead,
Who “Going — going!” so often said,
As he consigned to doom each meek, mewed band
At Pummery Fair.

SNOW IN THE SUBURBS

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eyes.

And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.

A LIGHT SNOW-FALL AFTER FROST

On the flat road a man at last appears:
How much his whitening hairs
Owe to the settling snow’s mute anchorage,
And how much to a life’s rough pilgrimage,
One cannot certify.

The frost is on the wane,
And cobwebs hanging close outside the pane
Pose as festoons of thick white worsted there,
Of their pale presence no eye being aware
Till the rime made them plain.

A second man comes by;
His ruddy beard brings fire to the pallid scene:
His coat is faded green;
Hence seems it that his mien
Wears something of the dye
Of the berried holm-trees that he passes nigh.

The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though
But half an hour ago
The road was brown, and now is starkly white,
A watcher would have failed defining quite
When it transformed it so.

Near Surbiton.

WINTER NIGHT IN WOODLAND

(OLD TIME)

The bark of a fox rings, sonorous and long: —
Three barks, and then silentness; “wong, wong, wong!”
In quality horn-like, yet melancholy,
As from teachings of years; for an old one is he.
The hand of all men is against him, he knows; and yet, why?
That
he knows not, — will never know, down to his death-halloo cry.

With clap-nets and lanterns off start the bird-baiters,
In trim to make raids on the roosts in the copse,
Where they beat the boughs artfully, while their awaiters
Grow heavy at home over divers warm drops.
The poachers, with swingels, and matches of brimstone, outcreep
To steal upon pheasants and drowse them a-perch and asleep.

Out there, on the verge, where a path wavers through,
Dark figures, filed singly, thrid quickly the view,
Yet heavily laden: land-carriers are they
In the hire of the smugglers from some nearest bay.
Each bears his two “tubs,” slung across, one in front, one behind,
To a further snug hiding, which none but themselves are to find.

And then, when the night has turned twelve the air brings
From dim distance, a rhythm of voices and strings:
‘Tis the quire, just afoot on their long yearly rounds,
To rouse by worn carols each house in their bounds;
Robert Penny, the Dewys, Mail, Voss, and the rest; till anon
Tired and thirsty, but cheerful, they home to their beds in the dawn.

ICE ON THE HIGHWAY

Seven buxom women abreast, and arm in arm,
Trudge down the hill, tip-toed,
And breathing warm;
They must perforce trudge thus, to keep upright
On the glassy ice-bound road,

And they must get to market whether or no,
Provisions running low
With the nearing Saturday night,
While the lumbering van wherein they mostly ride
Can nowise go:
Yet loud their laughter as they stagger and slide!

Yell’ham Hill.

MUSIC IN A SNOWY STREET

The weather is sharp,
But the girls are unmoved:
One wakes from a harp,
The next from a viol,
A strain that I loved
When life was no trial.

The tripletime beat
Bounds forth on the snow,
But the spry springing feet
Of a century ago,
And the arms that enlaced
As the couples embraced,
Are silent old bones
Under graying gravestones.

The snow-feathers sail
Across the harp-strings,
Whose throbbing threads wail
Like love-satiate things.
Each lyre’s grimy mien,
With its rout-raising tune,
Against the new white
Of the flake-laden noon,
Is incongruous to sight,
Hinting years they have seen
Of revel at night
Ere these damsels became
Possessed of their frame.

O bygone whirls, heys,
Crotchets, quavers, the same
That were danced in the days
Of grim Bonaparte’s fame,
Or even by the toes
Of the fair Antoinette, —
Yea, old notes like those
Here are living on yet! —
But of their fame and fashion
How little these know
Who strum without passion
For pence, in the snow!

THE FROZEN GREENHOUSE

(ST. JULIOT)

“There was a frost
Last night!” she said,
“And the stove was forgot
When we went to bed,
And the greenhouse plants
Are frozen dead!”

By the breakfast blaze
Blank-faced spoke she,
Her scared young look
Seeming to be
The very symbol
Of tragedy.