Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces

Thomas Hardy

Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces

LYRICS AND REVERIES

IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE

Plunging and labouring on in a tide of visions,

   Dolorous and dear,

Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters

   Stretching around,

Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape

   Yonder and near,

Blotted to feeble mist.  And the coomb and the upland

   Foliage-crowned,

Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flat

   Stroked by the light,

Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial

   Meadow or mound.

What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost

   Under my sight,

Hindering me to discern my paced advancement

   Lengthening to miles;

What were the re-creations killing the daytime

   As by the night?

O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,

   Some as with smiles,

Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled

   Over the wrecked

Cheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish,

   Harrowed by wiles.

Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them —

   Halo-bedecked —

And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,

   Rigid in hate,

Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,

   Dreaded, suspect.

Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons

   Further in date;

Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion

   Vibrant, beside

Lamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth’s crust

   Now corporate.

Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect

   Gnawed by the tide,

Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there

   Guilelessly glad —

Wherefore they knew not – touched by the fringe of an ecstasy

   Scantly descried.

Later images too did the day unfurl me,

   Shadowed and sad,

Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,

   Laid now at ease,

Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow

   Sepulture-clad.

So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,

   Over the leaze,

Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;

   – Yea, as the rhyme

Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness

   Captured me these.

For, their lost revisiting manifestations

   In their own time

Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,

   Seeing behind

Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling

   Sweet, sad, sublime.

Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser

   Stare of the mind

As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast

   Body-borne eyes,

Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them

   As living kind.

Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying

   In their surmise,

“Ah – whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought

   Round him that looms

Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,

   Save a few tombs?”

CHANNEL FIRING

That night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright.  While drearisome

Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled.  Till God called, “No;

It’s gunnery practice out at sea

Just as before you went below;

The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make

Red war yet redder.  Mad as hatters

They do no more for Christés sake

Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgment-hour

For some of them’s a blessed thing,

For if it were they’d have to scour

Hell’s floor for so much threatening.

“Ha, ha.  It will be warmer when

I blow the trumpet (if indeed

I ever do; for you are men,

And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again.  “I wonder,

Will the world ever saner be,”

Said one, “than when He sent us under

In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook his head.

“Instead of preaching forty year,”

My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Again the guns disturbed the hour,

Roaring their readiness to avenge,

As far inland as Stourton Tower,

And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

April

 1914.

THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

(Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)

I

   In a solitude of the sea

   Deep from human vanity,

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

   Steel chambers, late the pyres

   Of her salamandrine fires,

Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

   Over the mirrors meant

   To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

   Jewels in joy designed

   To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

   Dim moon-eyed fishes near

   Gaze at the gilded gear

And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”.

VI

   Well: while was fashioning

   This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

   Prepared a sinister mate

   For her – so gaily great —

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII

   And as the smart ship grew

   In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

   Alien they seemed to be:

   No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

X

   Or sign that they were bent

   By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI

   Till the Spinner of the Years

   Said “Now!”  And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

THE GHOST OF THE PAST

We two kept house, the Past and I,

   The Past and I;

I tended while it hovered nigh,

   Leaving me never alone.

It was a spectral housekeeping

   Where fell no jarring tone,

As strange, as still a housekeeping

   As ever has been known.

As daily I went up the stair

   And down the stair,

I did not mind the Bygone there —

   The Present once to me;

Its moving meek companionship

   I wished might ever be,

There was in that companionship

   Something of ecstasy.

It dwelt with me just as it was,

   Just as it was

When first its prospects gave me pause

   In wayward wanderings,

Before the years had torn old troths

   As they tear all sweet things,

Before gaunt griefs had torn old troths

   And dulled old rapturings.

And then its form began to fade,

   Began to fade,

Its gentle echoes faintlier played

   At eves upon my ear

Than when the autumn’s look embrowned

   The lonely chambers here,

The autumn’s settling shades embrowned

   Nooks that it haunted near.

And so with time my vision less,

   Yea, less and less

Makes of that Past my housemistress,

   It dwindles in my eye;

It looms a far-off skeleton

   And not a comrade nigh,

A fitful far-off skeleton

   Dimming as days draw by.

AFTER THE VISIT

(

To F. E. D.

)

   Come again to the place

Where your presence was as a leaf that skims

Down a drouthy way whose ascent bedims

   The bloom on the farer’s face.

   Come again, with the feet

That were light on the green as a thistledown ball,

And those mute ministrations to one and to all

   Beyond a man’s saying sweet.

   Until then the faint scent

Of the bordering flowers swam unheeded away,

And I marked not the charm in the changes of day

   As the cloud-colours came and went.

   Through the dark corridors

Your walk was so soundless I did not know

Your form from a phantom’s of long ago

   Said to pass on the ancient floors,

   Till you drew from the shade,

And I saw the large luminous living eyes

Regard me in fixed inquiring-wise

   As those of a soul that weighed,

   Scarce consciously,

The eternal question of what Life was,

And why we were there, and by whose strange laws

   That which mattered most could not be.

TO MEET, OR OTHERWISE

Whether to sally and see thee, girl of my dreams,

   Or whether to stay

And see thee not!  How vast the difference seems

   Of Yea from Nay

Just now.  Yet this same sun will slant its beams

   At no far day

On our two mounds, and then what will the difference weigh!

Yet I will see thee, maiden dear, and make

   The most I can

Of what remains to us amid this brake Cimmerian

Through which we grope, and from whose thorns we ache,

   While still we scan

Round our frail faltering progress for some path or plan.

By briefest meeting something sure is won;

   It will have been:

Nor God nor Daemon can undo the done,

   Unsight the seen,

Make muted music be as unbegun,

   Though things terrene

Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.

So, to the one long-sweeping symphony

   From times remote

Till now, of human tenderness, shall we

   Supply one note,

Small and untraced, yet that will ever be

   Somewhere afloat

Amid the spheres, as part of sick Life’s antidote.

THE DIFFERENCE

I

Sinking down by the gate I discern the thin moon,

And a blackbird tries over old airs in the pine,

But the moon is a sorry one, sad the bird’s tune,

For this spot is unknown to that Heartmate of mine.

II

Did my Heartmate but haunt here at times such as now,

The song would be joyous and cheerful the moon;

But she will see never this gate, path, or bough,

Nor I find a joy in the scene or the tune.

THE SUN ON THE BOOKCASE

(

Student’s Love-song

)

Once more the cauldron of the sun

Smears the bookcase with winy red,

And here my page is, and there my bed,

And the apple-tree shadows travel along.

Soon their intangible track will be run,

   And dusk grow strong

   And they be fled.

Yes: now the boiling ball is gone,

And I have wasted another day.

But wasted —

wasted

, do I say?

Is it a waste to have imaged one

Beyond the hills there, who, anon,

   My great deeds done

   Will be mine alway?

“WHEN I SET OUT FOR LYONNESSE”

When I set out for Lyonnesse,

   A hundred miles away,

   The rime was on the spray,

And starlight lit my lonesomeness

When I set out for Lyonnesse

   A hundred miles away.

What would bechance at Lyonnesse

   While I should sojourn there

   No prophet durst declare,

Nor did the wisest wizard guess

What would bechance at Lyonnesse

   While I should sojourn there.

When I came back from Lyonnesse

   With magic in my eyes,

   None managed to surmise

What meant my godlike gloriousness,

When I came back from Lyonnesse

   With magic in my eyes.

A THUNDERSTORM IN TOWN

(

A Reminiscence

)

She wore a new “terra-cotta” dress,

And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,

Within the hansom’s dry recess,

Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless

   We sat on, snug and warm.

Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,

And the glass that had screened our forms before

Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:

I should have kissed her if the rain

   Had lasted a minute more.

THE TORN LETTER

I

I tore your letter into strips

   No bigger than the airy feathers

   That ducks preen out in changing weathers

Upon the shifting ripple-tips.

II

In darkness on my bed alone

   I seemed to see you in a vision,

   And hear you say: “Why this derision

Of one drawn to you, though unknown?”

III

Yes, eve’s quick mood had run its course,

   The night had cooled my hasty madness;

   I suffered a regretful sadness

Which deepened into real remorse.

IV

I thought what pensive patient days

   A soul must know of grain so tender,

   How much of good must grace the sender

Of such sweet words in such bright phrase.

V

Uprising then, as things unpriced

   I sought each fragment, patched and mended;

   The midnight whitened ere I had ended

And gathered words I had sacrificed.

VI

But some, alas, of those I threw

   Were past my search, destroyed for ever:

   They were your name and place; and never

Did I regain those clues to you.

VII

I learnt I had missed, by rash unheed,

   My track; that, so the Will decided,

   In life, death, we should be divided,

And at the sense I ached indeed.

VIII

That ache for you, born long ago,

   Throbs on; I never could outgrow it.

   What a revenge, did you but know it!

But that, thank God, you do not know.

BEYOND THE LAST LAMP

(Near Tooting Common)

I

While rain, with eve in partnership,

Descended darkly, drip, drip, drip,

Beyond the last lone lamp I passed

   Walking slowly, whispering sadly,

   Two linked loiterers, wan, downcast:

Some heavy thought constrained each face,

And blinded them to time and place.

II

The pair seemed lovers, yet absorbed

In mental scenes no longer orbed

By love’s young rays.  Each countenance

   As it slowly, as it sadly

   Caught the lamplight’s yellow glance

Held in suspense a misery

At things which had been or might be.

III

When I retrod that watery way

Some hours beyond the droop of day,

Still I found pacing there the twain

   Just as slowly, just as sadly,

   Heedless of the night and rain.

One could but wonder who they were

And what wild woe detained them there.

IV

Though thirty years of blur and blot

Have slid since I beheld that spot,

And saw in curious converse there

   Moving slowly, moving sadly

   That mysterious tragic pair,

Its olden look may linger on —

All but the couple; they have gone.

V

Whither?  Who knows, indeed.. And yet

To me, when nights are weird and wet,

Without those comrades there at tryst

   Creeping slowly, creeping sadly,

   That lone lane does not exist.

There they seem brooding on their pain,

And will, while such a lane remain.

THE FACE AT THE CASEMENT

   If ever joy leave

An abiding sting of sorrow,

So befell it on the morrow

   Of that May eve.

   The travelled sun dropped

To the north-west, low and lower,

The pony’s trot grew slower,

   And then we stopped.

   “This cosy house just by

I must call at for a minute,

A sick man lies within it

   Who soon will die.

   “He wished to marry me,

So I am bound, when I drive near him,

To inquire, if but to cheer him,

   How he may be.”

   A message was sent in,

And wordlessly we waited,

Till some one came and stated

   The bulletin.

   And that the sufferer said,

For her call no words could thank her;

As his angel he must rank her

   Till life’s spark fled.

   Slowly we drove away,

When I turned my head, although not

Called; why so I turned I know not

   Even to this day.

   And lo, there in my view

Pressed against an upper lattice

Was a white face, gazing at us

   As we withdrew.

   And well did I divine

It to be the man’s there dying,

Who but lately had been sighing

   For her pledged mine.

   Then I deigned a deed of hell;

It was done before I knew it;

What devil made me do it

   I cannot tell!

   Yes, while he gazed above,

I put my arm about her

That he might see, nor doubt her

   My plighted Love.

   The pale face vanished quick,

As if blasted, from the casement,

And my shame and self-abasement

   Began their prick.

   And they prick on, ceaselessly,

For that stab in Love’s fierce fashion

Which, unfired by lover’s passion,

   Was foreign to me.

   She smiled at my caress,

But why came the soft embowment

Of her shoulder at that moment

   She did not guess.

   Long long years has he lain

In thy garth, O sad Saint Cleather:

What tears there, bared to weather,

   Will cleanse that stain!

   Love is long-suffering, brave,

Sweet, prompt, precious as a jewel;

But O, too, Love is cruel,

   Cruel as the grave.

LOST LOVE

I play my sweet old airs —

   The airs he knew

   When our love was true —

   But he does not balk

   His determined walk,

And passes up the stairs.

I sing my songs once more,

   And presently hear

   His footstep near

   As if it would stay;

   But he goes his way,

And shuts a distant door.

So I wait for another morn

   And another night

   In this soul-sick blight;

   And I wonder much

   As I sit, why such

A woman as I was born!

“MY SPIRIT WILL NOT HAUNT THE MOUND”

My spirit will not haunt the mound

   Above my breast,

But travel, memory-possessed,

To where my tremulous being found

   Life largest, best.

My phantom-footed shape will go

   When nightfall grays

Hither and thither along the ways

I and another used to know

   In backward days.

And there you’ll find me, if a jot

   You still should care

For me, and for my curious air;

If otherwise, then I shall not,

   For you, be there.

WESSEX HEIGHTS (1896)

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand

For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,

Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,

I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man’s friend —

Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:

Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,

But mind-chains do not clank where one’s next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways —

Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:

They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things —

Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,

And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause

Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,

Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there’s a figure against the moon,

Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;

I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed

For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

Ther