Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated), page 787
TO A TREE IN LONDON
(CLEMENT’S INN)
Here you stay
Night and day,
Never, never going away!
Do you ache
When we take
Holiday for our health’s sake?
Wish for feet
When the heat
Scalds you in the brick-built street,
That you might
Climb the height
Where your ancestry saw light,
Find a brook
In some nook
There to purge your swarthy look?
No. You read
Trees to need
Smoke like earth whereon to feed. . . .
Have no sense
That far hence
Air is sweet in a blue immense,
Thus, black, blind,
You have opined
Nothing of your brightest kind;
Never seen
Miles of green,
Smelt the landscape’s sweet serene.
192*.
THE FELLED ELM AND SHE
When you put on that inmost ring
She, like you, was a little thing:
When your circles reached their fourth,
Scarce she knew life’s south from north:
When your year-zones counted twenty
She had fond admirers plenty:
When you’d grown your twenty-second
She and I were lovers reckoned:
When you numbered twenty-three
She went everywhere with me:
When you, at your fortieth line,
Showed decay, she seemed to pine:
When you were quite hollow within
She was felled — mere bone and skin:
You too, lacking strength to grow
Further trunk-rings, were laid low,
Matching her; both unaware
That your lives formed such a pair.
HE DID NOT KNOW ME
(WOMAN’S SORROW SONG)
He said: “I do not know you;
You are not she who came
And made my heart grow tame?”
I laughed: “The same!”
Still said he: “I don’t know you.”
“But I am your Love!” laughed I:
“Yours — faithful ever — till I die,
And pulseless lie!”
Yet he said: “I don’t know you.”
Freakful, I went away,
And met pale Time, with “Pray,
What means his Nay?”
Said Time: “He does not know you
In your mask of Comedy.”
“But,” said I, “that I have chosen to be:
Tragedy he.”
“True; hence he did not know you.”
“But him I could recognize?”
“Yea. Tragedy is true guise,
Comedy lies.”
SO VARIOUS
You may have met a man — quite young —
A brisk-eyed youth, and highly strung:
One whose desires
And inner fires
Moved him as wires.
And you may have met one stiff and old,
If not in years; of manner cold;
Who seemed as stone,
And never had known
Of mirth or moan.
And there may have crossed your path a lover,
In whose clear depths you could discover
A staunch, robust,
And tender trust,
Through storm and gust.
And you may have also known one fickle,
Whose fancies changed as the silver sickle
Of yonder moon,
Which shapes so soon
To demilune!
You entertained a person once
Whom you internally deemed a dunce: —
As he sat in view
Just facing you
You saw him through.
You came to know a learned seer
Of whom you read the surface mere:
Your soul quite sank;
Brain of such rank
Dubbed yours a blank.
Anon you quizzed a man of sadness,
Who never could have known true gladness:
Just for a whim
You pitied him
In his sore trim.
You journeyed with a man so glad
You never could conceive him sad:
He proved to be
Indubitably
Good company.
You lit on an unadventurous slow man,
Who, said you, need be feared by no man;
That his slack deeds
And sloth must needs
Produce but weeds.
A man of enterprise, shrewd and swift,
Who never suffered affairs to drift,
You eyed for a time
Just in his prime,
And judged he might climb.
You smoked beside one who forgot
All that you said, or grasped it not.
Quite a poor thing,
Not worth a sting
By satirizing!
Next year you nearly lost for ever
Goodwill from one who forgot slights never;
And, with unease,
Felt you must seize
Occasion to please . . .
Now. . . . All these specimens of man,
So various in their pith and plan,
Curious to say
Were one man. Yea,
I was all they.
A SELF-GLAMOURER
My little happiness,
How much I have made of it! —
As if I had been not less
Than a queen, to be straight obeyed of it.
“Life, be fairer far,”
I said, “Than you are.”
So I counted my springtime-day’s
Dream of futurity
Enringed with golden rays
To be quite a summer surety;
And my trustful daring undoubt
Brought it about!
Events all human-wrought
Had look of divinity,
And what I foreframed in thought
Grew substanced, by force of affinity:
Visions to verities came,
Seen as the same.
My years in trusting spent
Make to shape towardly,
And fate and accident
Behave not perversely or frowardly.
Shall, then, Life’s winter snow
To me be so?
THE DEAD BASTARD
Many and many a time I thought,
“Would my child were in its grave!”
Such the trouble and shame it brought.
Now ‘tis there. And now I’d brave
Opinion’s worst, in word or act,
To have that child alive; yes, slave
To dress and flaunt it to attract;
Show it the gossips brazenly,
And let as nothing be the fact
That never its father married me.
THE CLASPED SKELETONS
SURMISED DATE 1800 B.C.
(In an Ancient British barrow near the writer’s house)
O why did we uncover to view
So closely clasped a pair?
Your chalky bedclothes over you,
This long time here!
Ere Paris lay with Helena —
The poets’ dearest dear —
Ere David bedded Bathsheba
You two were bedded here.
Aye, even before the beauteous Jael
Bade Sisera doff his gear
And lie in her tent; then drove the nail,
You two lay here.
Wicked Aholah, in her youth,
Colled loves from far and near
Until they slew her without ruth;
But you had long colled here.
Aspasia lay with Pericles,
And Philip’s son found cheer
At eves in lying on Thais’ knees
While you lay here.
Cleopatra with Antony,
Resigned to dalliance sheer,
Lay, fatuous he, insatiate she,
Long after you’d lain here.
Pilate by Procula his wife
Lay tossing at her tear
Of pleading for an innocent life;
You tossed not here.
Ages before Monk Abélard
Gained tender Héloïse’ ear,
And loved and lay with her till scarred,
Had you lain loving here.
So long, beyond chronology,
Lovers in death as ‘twere,
So long in placid dignity
Have you lain here!
Yet what is length of time? But dream!
Once breathed this atmosphere
Those fossils near you, met the gleam
Of day as you did here;
But so far earlier theirs beside
Your life-span and career,
That they might style of yestertide
Your coming here!
IN THE MARQUEE
It was near last century’s ending,
And, though not much to rate
In a world of getting and spending,
To her it was great.
The scene was a London suburb
On a night of summer weather,
And the villas had back gardens
Running together.
Her neighbours behind were dancing
Under a marquee;
Two violoncellos played there,
And violins three.
She had not been invited,
Although her lover was;
She lay beside her husband,
Perplexed at the cause.
Sweet after sweet quadrille rang:
Absence made her weep;
The tears dried on her eyelids
As she fell asleep.
She dreamt she was whirling with him
In this dance upon the green
To which she was not invited
Though her lover had been.
All night she danced as he clasped her —
That is, in the happy dream
The music kept her dreaming
Till the first daybeam.
“O damn those noisy fiddles!”
Her husband said as he turned:
“Close to a neighbour’s bedroom:
I’d like them burned!”
At intervals thus all night-long
Her husband swore. But she
Slept on, and danced in the loved arms,
Under the marquee.
Next day she found that her lover,
Though asked, had gone elsewhere,
And that she had possessed him in absence
More than if there.
AFTER THE BURIAL
The family had buried him,
Their bread-bringer, their best:
They had returned to the house, whose hush a dim
Vague vacancy expressed.
There sat his sons, mute, rigid-faced,
His daughters, strained, red-eyed,
His wife, whose wan, worn features, vigil-traced,
Bent over him when he died.
At once a peal bursts from the bells
Of a large tall tower hard by:
Along the street the jocund clangour swells,
And upward to the sky.
Probably it was a wedding-peal,
Or possibly for a birth,
Or townsman knighted for political zeal,
This resonant mark of mirth.
The mourners, heavy-browed, sat on
Motionless. Well they heard,
They could not help it; nevertheless thereon
Spoke not a single word,
Nor window did they close, to numb
The bells’ insistent calls
Of joy; but suffered the harassing din to come
And penetrate their souls.
THE MONGREL
In Havenpool Harbour the ebb was strong,
And a man with a dog drew near and hung,
And taxpaying day was coming along,
So the mongrel had to be drowned.
The man threw a stick from the paved wharf-side
Into the midst of the ebbing tide,
And the dog jumped after with ardent pride
To bring the stick aground.
But no: the steady suck of the flood
To seaward needed, to be withstood,
More than the strength of mongrelhood
To fight its treacherous trend.
So, swimming for life with desperate will,
The struggler with all his natant skill
Kept buoyant in front of his master still
There standing to wait the end.
The loving eyes of the dog inclined
To the man he held as a god enshrined,
With no suspicion in his mind
That this had all been meant.
Till the effort not to drift from shore
Of his little legs grew slower and slower,
And, the tide still outing with brookless power,
Outward the dog, too, went.
Just ere his sinking what does one see
Break on the face of that devotee?
A wakening to the treachery
He had loved with love so blind?
The faith that had shone in that mongrel’s eye
That his owner would save him by and by
Turned to much like a curse as he sank to die,
And a loathing of mankind.
CONCERNING AGNES
I am stopped from hoping what I have hoped before —
Yes, many a time! —
To dance with that fair woman yet once more
As in the prime
Of August, when the wide-faced moon looked through
The boughs at the faery lamps of the Larmer Avenue.
I could not, though I should wish, have over again
That old romance,
And sit apart in the shade as we sat then
After the dance
The while I held her hand, and, to the booms
Of contrabassos, feet still pulsed from the distant rooms.
I could not. And you do not ask me why.
Hence you infer
That what may chance to the fairest under the sky
Has chanced to her.
Yes. She lies white, straight, features marble-keen,
Unapproachable, mute, in a nook I have never seen.
There she may rest like some vague goddess, shaped
As out of snow;
Say Aphrodite sleeping; or bedraped
Like Kalupso;
Or Amphitrite stretched on the Mid-sea swell,
Or one of the Nine grown stiff from thought. I cannot tell!
HENLEY REGATTA
She looks from the window: still it pours down direly,
And the avenue drips. She cannot go, she fears;
And the Regatta will be spoilt entirely;
And she sheds half-crazed tears.
Regatta Day and rain come on together
Again, years after. Gutters trickle loud;
But Nancy cares not. She knows nought of weather,
Or of the Henley crowd:
She’s a Regatta quite her own. Inanely
She laughs in the asylum as she floats
Within a water-tub, which she calls “Henley,”
Her little paper boats.
AN EVENING IN GALILEE
She looks far west towards Carmel, shading her eyes with her hand,
And she then looks east to the Jordan, and the smooth Tiberias’ strand.
“Is my son mad?” she asks; and never an answer has she,
Save from herself, aghast at the possibility.
“He professes as his firm faiths things far too grotesque to be true,
And his vesture is odd — too careless for one of his fair young hue! . . .
“He lays down doctrines as if he were old — aye, fifty at least:
In the Temple he terrified me, opposing the very High-Priest!
Why did he say to me, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’
O it cuts to the heart that a child of mine thus spoke to me!
And he said, too, ‘Who is my mother?’ — when he knows so very well.
He might have said, ‘Who is my father?’ — and I’d found it hard to tell!
That no one knows but Joseph and — one other, nor ever will;
One who’ll not see me again. . . . How it chanced! — I dreaming no ill! . . .
“Would he’d not mix with the lowest folk — like those fishermen —
The while so capable, culling new knowledge, beyond our ken! . . .
That woman of no good character, ever following him,
Adores him if I mistake not: his wish of her is but a whim
Of his madness, it may be, outmarking his lack of coherency;
After his ‘Keep the Commandments!’ to smile upon such as she!
It is just what all those do who are wandering in their wit.
I don’t know — dare not say — what harm may grow from it.
O a mad son is a terrible thing; it even may lead
To arrest, and death! . . . And how he can preach, expound, and read!
“Here comes my husband. Shall I unveil him this tragedy-brink?
No. He has nightmares enough. I’ll pray, and think, and think.” . . .
She remembers she’s never put on any pot for his evening meal,
And pondering a plea looks vaguely to south of her — towards Jezreel.
THE BROTHER
O know you what I have done
To avenge our sister? She,
