Thomas Hardy: Selected Poetry and Non-Fictional Prose 9781350362765, 9780333665343

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for Jane again (who still manages to like Hardy's poems, too).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Of the many debts of obligation incurred in producing this volume, the following are most pressing: John Drakakis for his encouragement, patience and then his generosity; my colleagues at Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education - and especially Philip Martin - for enabling me to spend most of my first 18 months there finishing it; Helen Gough, in the library, for readily producing the books I needed; Beryl Steel first, and then Ros Boase, for the unenviable task of typing my manuscript; Jane and Tom for living with it. My thanks to all.

NOTE ON THE TEXT AND REFERENCES Hardy was an inveterate reviser of everything he wrote, and the poetry was no exception. His revisions were made in a variety of different places, and were never collated by him in his lifetime. Once his Collected Poems appeared in 1919, however, many of the revisions were incorporated in later editions of it (1923; 1928- includes Human Shows, Far Phantasies; 1930includes Winter Words). It is this last edition which is the basis for the present selection. However, since then, there have been two modern scholarly editions: i) James Gibson's The Complete Poems (1976), based on the Collected Poems of 1928 and 1930, which 'includes all the previously uncollected poems' plus six extracts from The Dynasts, which Hardy had printed as freestanding lyrics in Selected Poems (1916), and incorporates other revisions Hardy made after poems had appeared in earlier editions of Collected Poems; this text forms the basis of Gibson's Variorium edition of 1979, which lists all variants, etc.; ii) Samuel Hynes's The Complete Poetical Works I, II, III (1982-5) which also shows all variants and further 'corrections' Hardy made in his own copies of various editions of his poetry. Both works, and especially the latter, have been invaluable to the present editor, and the 1930 Collected Poems copy-text has been adapted, for this selection, to incorporate many of the suggestions made in them. In most cases, the prose writings included here are based on the text of their original publication, although the prefaces to the volumes of poetry derive from the revised versions of the 'Wessex Edition'. However, a debt must be acknowledged to Harold Orel's pioneering editorial work, Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings (1966), in establishing the text of the present selection. Throughout the references and editorial commentary, abbreviations are used which are listed at the start of this volume. A selection of other works cited can be found in the Reading List at the end. Page references for poems and prose extracts relate to the present volume; if the piece is not included here, the abbreviation 'n.i.h.' is used.

ABBREVIATIONS [The abbreviations listed here are used throughout the book; further abbreviations, specific to the Notes, appear as part of the headnote there.] PROCEDURAL

c. cf. ch., chs. cp. Crit. Comm. ed edtn 'FH' H/TH hn., hns. lntro. 'LFH' 1., ll. ms. n. n.i.h. passim p., pp. 'Sei.Prose' st., sts. v.

WWI II

circa: about (of dates, numbers, etc.) confer (standard form for cross-referencing) chapter, chapters compare the Critical Commentary section of this book editor, edited by edition the 'Familiar Hardy' section of this book Hardy/Thomas Hardy headnote, headnotes to a volume, poem or essay the Introduction to this book the 'Less Familiar Hardy' section here line, lines manuscript note or notes to a line/lines in a poem or essay not included here (of a poem, etc.) dispersed throughout page, pages the 'Selected Non-Fictional Prose' section of this book stanza, stanzas vide: see (as in 'v. below, p. -') World War One (1914-18)

HARDY'S WORKS

Barnes, Pref 'CEF' Col/. P (1919) Col/. P (1923) CP Ds Ds, Pref 'DL'

the 'Preface' to Select Poems of William Barnes (ed TH) 'Candour in English Fiction' (1890, essay) The Collected Poems of TH (Macmillan, 1919) The Collected Poems of TH (Macmillan, 1923) Chosen Poems of TH (1929) The Dynasts (1902-7) the 'Preface' to Ds, Part I 'The Dorsetshire Labourer' (1883, essay)

ABBREVIATIONS

DR FMC GND 'GP' HE HS jude Laod. LLE LLE, Apol LLI MC 'MR' MV PBE ppp

PPP, Pref 'PRF' RN

sc

'SF' SP Tess TL

TL, Pref T-M TT UGT 'UP'

Ws W-B 'Wess. edtn' WP WP, Pref

WTs

ww

WW, Intro

XVll

Desperate Remedies (1871) Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) A Group of Noble Dames (1891) the 'General Preface to the Novels and Poems', for the 'Wessex Edition' of TH's works (1912) The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925) jude the Obscure (1895) A Laodicean (1881) Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses (1922) the 'Apology' to LLE Life's Little Ironies ( 1894) The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) 'Maumbury Ring' (1908, essay) Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses ( 1917) A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872) Poems of the Past and the Present (190 1) the 'Preface' to PPP 'The Profitable Reading of Fiction' (1888, essay) The Return of the Native (1878) Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries with Miscellaneous Pieces (1914) 'The Science of Fiction' (1891, essay) Selected Poems of TH (1916) Tess of the D 'Urbervilles (1891) Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909) the 'Preface' to TL The Trumpet-Major (1880) Two on a Tower (1882) Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) 'Uncollected Poems' (separately sectionalised in 'Complete' edtns. of TH's poetry, these were ones never published in any of his own volumes) The Woodlanders (1887) The Well-Beloved (1892/97) the 'Wessex Edition' (Macmillan) of all TH's works (24 vols, 1912-31) Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898) the 'Preface' to WP Wessex Tales (1888) Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928) the 'Introductory Note' to WW

References to TH's novels are, by chapter and page, to the 'New Wessex' edtn.

xviii III

ABBREVIATIONS

EDITIONS, BIOGRAPHIES AND REFERENCE BOOKS (REFERRED TO EXTENSIVELY THROUGHOUT THE PRESENT VOLUME)

Armstrong Bailey Creighton Gibson Gittings, I, II Hynes I, II, III Hynes (1984) Hynes (1994) Kay-R Life

Millgate Motion Ore! Pinion I Pinion II Pinion III SR Thomas Wain I, II

Wright

Tim Armstrong, ed, TH: Selected Poems, Longman, 1993 J.O. Bailey, The Poems of TH: A Handbook and Commentary, University of North Carolina Press, 1970 T.R.M. Creighton, ed, Poems of TH: A New Selection, Macmillan, 1974 James Gibson, ed, TH: The Complete Poems, 'New Wessex' edtn, Macmillan (1976), 1978 Robert Gittings, I: Young TH (1975), Penguin, 1978 Robert Gittings, II: The Older Hardy, Heinemann, 1978 Samuel Hynes, ed, The Complete Poetical Works of TH, OUP, vols. I (1982), II (1984), III (1985) Samuel Hynes, ed, TH: A Critical Selection of His Finest Poetry, 'The Oxford Authors', OUP, 1984 Samuel Hynes, ed, TH: A Selection of His Finest Poems, 'Oxford Poetry Library', OUP, 1994 Denys Kay-Robinson, Hardy's Wessex Re-appraised, David and Charles, 1972 Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of TH, 1840-1928, Macmillan (I 962), 1975 (one-volume edtn of The Early Life of TH, 1840-1891, 1928, and The Later Years of TH, 1892-1928, 1930) Michael Millgate, TH: A Biography, OUP, 1982 Andrew Motion, ed, TH: Selected Poems, 'Everyman', ].M. Dent, 1994 Harold Ore!, ed, TH's Personal Writings, Macmillan (1966), 1990 F.B. Pinion, A Commentary on the Poems ofTH, Macmillan, 1976 F.B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion, Macmillan (1968), 1978 F.B. Pinion, A TH Dictionary, Macmillan (1989), 1992 Emma Hardy, Some Recollections (ed Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings), OUP (1961), 1979 Harry Thomas, ed, TH: Selected Poems, 'Penguin Classics', 1993 John Wain, I, ed, Selected Shorter Poems ofTH, Macmillan, (1966), 1975 John and Eirian Wain, II, eds, The New Wessex Selection of TH's Poetry, Macmillan, 1978 David Wright, ed, TH: Selected Poems, 'The Penguin Poetry Library' (1978), 1986

-

' ""

.,J

Hardy's own illustration for 'In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury' from Wesux Poems, Macmillan, 1898

'•a

:!!:4.. ..Q..· -· ··- -· ·- - ..._. ..:JIIIIM1NI_~~~ - H·rt::;i~1f's ')t

~~~~~~-- · _ - ---

,.,.,_

INTRODUCTION THOMAS HARDY: A PARTIAL PORTRAIT It is a commonplace of literary criticism that 'major author X' was a 'transitional' writer who lived and worked in a 'transitional' period. This does not get us very far, however, since all periods are, in the nature of historical process, transitional; and all major writers, by dint of their perceived majority, will also be transitional in that they modify by innovation the literary culture of which they are a part. As Thomas Hardy has so often been awarded the 'transitional' accolade, we may ask: is it any more illuminating in relation to him than to anyone else? Born a stonemason's son in a small Dorset village on 2 June 1840, Hardy died 88 years later on 11 January 1928, an internationally eminent novelist and poet. It is difficult to imagine how a period so long and eventful beginning some 14 years before the Charge of the Light Brigade, when Tennyson and Dickens were in their prime, and ending ten years after WWI, when Hardy's literary contemporaries included Eliot, Joyce and Woolf- could be anything but 'transitional'. 1 Nor is it conceivable that Hardy's own work in two genres would not have been inscribed by the macro and micro social and cultural processes shaping that long life; nor again, that his oeuvre did not help to shape and inscribe the cultural theme-park in which he still remains so large an attraction. What this Introduction aims to do, therefore, is block in those aspects of Hardy's life and work which, it will propose, are most germane in establishing that to call Hardy a transitional writer is indeed to mean something. Oddly enough, his long life was, compared with many writers, markedly uneventful. Furthermore, there are readily available several major biographies of him, 2 as well as Florence Emily Hardy's The Life of Thomas Hardy, 18401928 (albeit dictated in the third person to his second wife during the 1920s with the clear intention that it should be passed off as a 'definitive' biography by her - and hence, in some senses, his last fiction 3). It is not this Introduction's business, then, to chart in miniature the slow diurnal unravelling of Hardy's life. Rather, it takes three themes in his biographical narrative and uses each to construct a 'partial portrait', to set in place something of an 1

2 3

Tim Armstrong makes a similar point in the introduction to Armstrong (see Abbreviations), p. 42. V. Gittings I and II; Millgate; also Martin Seymour-Smith, Hardy, Bloomsbury, 1994. I develop this point at greater length in Hardy in History: a Study in Literary Sociology, 1989, p. 139; the whole of ch. 4, there, comprises a detailed analysis of Lift.

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historical context for it, and to bring into bold relief public and private issues which help to gloss Hardy's poetry in particular. The three themes are: war, class and sex - the second and third of which closely interrelate. Consideration will next be given to the fact that Hardy actually had two literary 'lives' in his lifetime - that of novelist, 'followed' (he claimed he was always really this) by that of poet. Finally, because the present volume is itself so overtly and strategically 'partial' in its presentation of Hardy's work, the Introduction takes a self-reflexive look at the premises underpinning a selection which is divided into two parts: the first presents a selection of poems in two sections- 'The Familiar Hardy' and 'The Less Familiar Hardy'; the second contains a selection of Hardy's non-fictional prose.

*

*

*

*

*

*

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The choice of war as a motif in Hardy's life is, of course, in part a way of plotting its long chronology, and of indicating the huge transition between the social ancl cultural world he was born into and the one he died in. But war also fascinated and repelled Hardy, and was the subject of a sizeable proportion of his poetry (Hardy as 'war poet' is itself, perhaps, a 'less familiar' designation). In addition, it helps to account - especially in relation to WWI - for the bleakness of his vision (in common with so many of his Modernist contemporaries) in what he saw as the 'new Dark Age' 4 of the post-war period. When Hardy was born in 1840, the battle of Waterloo (1815) was only 25 years in the past; and the revolutionary wars with France, the spectre of Napoleon stalking Europe, and threat-of-invasion scares on the south coast of England were still fresh in older people's memories (v. 'One We Knew', TL, p. 32 ). Hardy, of course, was to use that recent past as the context for The Trumpet-Major and as the subject of his huge 'epic-drama' The Dynasts (1902-7). The Crimean War (in which the clash of traditional and modern modes of warfare became shockingly apparent) had begun when Hardy was 13; and the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870) coincided with his courtship of his first wife, Emma: Lift 5 records that they were reading Tennyson in the garden at St Juliot, Cornwall (v. below, pp. xxix-xxx) 'on the day the bloody battle of Gravelotte was fought', and that Hardy, reminded of this occasion 'by a still bloodier war' in 1915, composed 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations'" (MV, p. 73). The Boer War of 1899-1902 in South Mrica which coincided with the turn of the 19th century and signals British imperialism entering 20th-century crisis - involved Hardy more directly: his friend (v. below, pp. xxviii, xxix), Florence Henniker's husband, fought there, as 4

5

Cf. LLE, Apol, p. 226, 1.166; also here, p. xxiii. Lifo, p. 78. All further references to this work appear as bracketed numbers in the text.

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INTRODUCTION

did Hardy's nephew, and he produced a sequence of war poems prompted by it (in PPP). His response was characteristically ambiguous: although he and Emma were, like many English 'liberals', 'pro-Boer', 6 and despite a lifelong loathing of war as realpolitik, he was, nevertheless and self-confessedly, stirred and fascinated by matters military. He wrote to Mrs Henniker: 'It seems a justification of the extremist pessimism that at the end of the 19th Centy [sic] we settle an argument by the Sword, just as they wd have done in the 19th Centy B.C'; and later: 'I constantly deplore the fact that "civilized" nations have not learnt some more excellent ... way of settling disputes than the old & barbarous one, after all these centuries; but when I feel that it must be, few persons are more martial than I, or like better to write of war in prose or rhyme'. 7 In fact, however, none of Hardy's war poems, then or later, could be classed, in his own phrase, as 'Jingo or Imperial'. 8 It is sometimes held that the 'real' end of the 19th century was in August 1914, with the outbreak of the so-called 'Great War'- a watershed between the 'old' world and the 20th century heralded by an event which, in scale and nature, seemed to be symptomatic of what the 'new' world held in store. Certainly for Hardy, now 74, it was a profoundly shattering occurrence; and, despite publishing the patriotic (if subdued) 'Men Who March Away' in The Times on 9 September 1914 and contributing to the war effort in small ways, 9 it is to his credit that he abhorred the war from the start, when much of the nation was seized by wild patriotic fervour and other poets were producing works of 'heroic' banality. Life (364-5) records his shock (he had not anticipated this 'convulsion of nations' so soon), and his fear that, rather than being 'over by Christmas ... it might be a matter of years and untold disaster'. The following extract from Life encapsulates both Hardy's horror at the war, and his cast of mind after it: A long study of the European wars of a century earlier had made it appear to him that common sense had taken the place of bluster in men's minds; and he felt this so strongly that ... as long before as 1901 he composed a poem called 'The Sick Battle-God', which assumed that zest for slaughter was dying out. It was seldom he had felt so heavy at heart as in seeing his old view of the gradual bettering of human nature . . . completely shattered by the events of 1914 and onwards. War, he had supposed, had grown too coldly scientific to kindle again for long all the ardent romance which had characterized it down to Napoleonic times, when the most intense 6 7 8

9

Cf. Gittings II, p. 100. 17 Sept. and 11 Oct. 1899. Quoted in Millgate, p. 401. Letter to Mrs Henniker, 24 Dec. 1900. Quoted in Millgate, p. 403. 'Men Who March Away' (MV, n.i.h.). This poem, together with 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"' (MV, p. 73) and 'A Call to National Service' (MV, n.i.h.), was published with a note indicating that it was not in copyright in order to increase its circulation and contribute to the war effort (cf. Hynes II, p. 503).

INTRODUCTION

xxiii

battles were over in a day, and the most exciting tactics and strategy led to the death of comparatively few combatants. Hence nobody was more amazed than he at the German incursion into Belgium, and the contemplation of it led him to despair of the world's history thenceforward. He had not reckoned on the power still retained there by the governing castes whose interests were not the people's. (365-6) A letter of 28 August 1914 to a friend also confirms what the likely effect on his poetry was to be: 'the recognition that we are living in a more brutal age than that, say, of Elizabeth ... does not inspire one to write hopeful poetry ... , but simply to sit still in apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards, with a mild wonder if, when it gets back to the Dark Ages, and the sack of Rome, it will ever move forward again to a new Renascence, and a new literature'. 10 And a note to the poet Henry N ewbolt, shortly after the war ended in 1918, sums up Hardy's feelings by then: 'I confess that I take a smaller interest in the human race since this outburst than I did before' _ll Hardy was to live for another ten years; and the notion of a return to the 'Dark Ages' is repeated and developed in the long prefatory 'Apology' to LLE in 1922 (v. here, p. 226), with late poems also conveying this state of mind, especially in the posthumously published WW. By this time, as noted earlier, he was now the contemporary of the Modernist writers (LLE was published in the same year as The Waste Land). The poet who was born two years after an upbeat Victorian Tennyson, in 'Locksley Hall', wrote: Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. Thro' the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay could now ponder, if he chose, T.S. Eliot's cultural despair: 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins'. Ezra Pound sent a presentation copy of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and famously recognised Hardy as a fellow modern poet; 12 the contemporary of George Eliot (reviewers thought FMC was by her 13) was now the contemporary of Virginia Woolf (who wrote perceptively that Hardy always seems to hover on 'the margin of the unexpressed' 14); 10 ll 12

13 14

To Sydney Cockerell. Quoted in Hynes II, p. 506. Quoted in Hynes II, p. 504. H read, made notes on, and copied extracts from The Waste Land into his commonplace book (cf. Trevor Johnson, A Critical Introduction to the Poems of TH, 1991, p. 7). For Hand Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, cf. Millgate, p. 534. Pound recognized his debt to, and admiration for, H on a number of occasions. Cf. Life, p. 98. In her essay, 'The Novels of TH', in The Common Reader, Second Series (1932), 1959, p. 248.

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INTRODUCTION

the novelist who was recommending Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) as 'one of [his] best' to his sister in 1863 15 could now have recommended Ulysses (also 1922), had he been so minded and she not long-dead; the D.H. Lawrence who had written so acutely on Thomas Hardy's fiction in his Study . .. of 1914 16 had already published The Rainbow and Women in Love years before and, by 1928, had completed (and had banned) Lady Chatterley's Lover. The writer whose family, in his youth, had played the violins in the gallery 'quire' of Stinsford parish church now listened to Big Ben ring in the New Year (1924/5) on the 'wireless'; 17 he who was born only six years after the Tolpuddle Marryrs (six Dorset farm-workers) were sentenced to transportation for forming a trade union branch now lived through the General Strike of 1926; he who had grown up in the world of Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Garibaldi and Bismarck now grew old in that of Ramsay MacDonald, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. How far, and in what ways, Hardy's poetry may in itself register any of this is an open question, but that it is a poetry 'of transition' cannot be doubted. And it is apposite here again to recall that a central aspect of Hardy as 'transitional' writer is that in 1896, after the publication of jude, he effectively ceased writing prose fiction, thereafter devoting himself exclusively to poetry for the next 30 years. In other words, while Hardy may be seen chronologically as a 19th-century novelist, or at least as a transitional novelist poised on the brink of Modernism who never quite took the plunge (v. below, p. xxxiii), as a poet he belongs almost entirely to the 20th century although whether his poetry is better seen as 'Victorian' rather than 'Modern' is a problem most secondary and tertiary education syllabuses invariably wrestle with, as they also do, in fact, with regard to his fiction: the ultimate index, perhaps, of 'transitional' status.

* * * * * * * Hardy was born into what Raymond and Merryn Williams have called the 'intermediate class' 18 within 19th-century rural society. Neither labourers nor landowners, its members were usually copyholders or lifeholders (about whom Hardy wrote sympathetically and bitterly in Tess and, included here, in 'DL' (v. p. 281 and Notes)) who supplied most of the skills which the rural community then needed. For Hardy, it was this, his own class which was most comprehensively dispossessed and deracinated by developments in the rural economy in the second half of the 19th century, 'migration' to the large 15

16 17 18

Cf. Life, p. 40 Study ofTH, in Edward D. McDonald, ed, Phoenix, Heinemann (1936), 1970, pp. 398-516. Cf. Life, p. 430. 'Hardy and Social Class', 1980, p. 32.

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towns being only the most common and visible symptom of this. However, another characteristic of this group - less crudely economically determined was the tendency of its members to be meritocratically upwardly mobile and, by way of education in particular, to 'migrate' to other physical and other class locations. This is clearly true for Hardy himself (but also, in an equally significant way, for his cousin Tryphena Sparks, who attended a teachertraining college in London and then became an elementary school headteacher until she married). Hardy acquired a considerable basic education (he left school at 16 - late, for one of his social group) and then became an architect's 'pupil'. He went to London in the same business in the 1860s, where he read voraciously, visited theatres, art galleries and museums, and became a (self-)educated young man - up to a point. However, he did not receive the advanced formal (classical) education he was acutely conscious some of his acquaintances had (such as his friend and mentor Horace Moule and his brothers - sons of the vicar of Fordington in Dorchester and Cambridge graduates - together with other young men he met in the architects' offices in Dorchester and London); there was never any real chance of his going up to Cambridge (despite Life's implication that there was 19) and, in the event, the 'native' returned from London to Dorset in 1867 with his career still to make. That career, of course, was soon to be one of tyro-novelist, struggling to get his work placed in the literary market-place of publishers and periodicals - an experience, for the sharply class-sensitive Hardy, compounded by the fact that his earliest attempts at fiction were subjected (with luck, as it turned out) to the critical scrutiny of publishers and their readers from the Victorian haut-bourgeois intelligentsia Oohn Mordy, Leslie Stephens, George Meredith). In the event, his rapid success as a novelist is a classic instance of a meritocratic 19th-century rise to fame and fortune by way of the metropolitan market-place of letters. But it should not be disregarded that, when successful, he nevertheless built a house, Max Gate, on the outskirts of Dorchester - and therefore lived most of his eminent professional life away from London (while visiting it extensively as a literary and social celebrity). For Hardy's 'true' class position, 20 and one aspect, then, of his 'transitional' character, is at once that of deracine countryman and metropolitan man-ofletters who elects to live in Dorset - belonging neither to his class of origin, nor yet to the urban intelligentsia amongst whom his professional success positions him. The result was that Hardy was obsessed by class and classrelations, and preternaturally attuned to their minutiae (as in this symptomatic casual observation: 'The defects of a class are more perceptible to the class immediately below it than to itself' 21 ). It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, 19 2

Cf. Lifo pp. 33-4, 208. Widdowson, Hardy in History, 1989, ch. 4 (especially p. 132), where I have argued this at greater length. Lifo, P· 55.

° Cf.

21

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that his first ('lost') novel was entitled The Poor Man and the Lady (v. the poem here of similar title, 'LFH' vi.d, p. 180), 'a sweeping dramatic satire' on, amongst other things, 'the squirearchy and nobility, London society, the vulgarity of the middle class ... the tendency of the writing being socialistic, not to say revolutionary' (Life, 61). Neither is it without significance that, in old age, while composing Life, Hardy should devote several sympathetic pages to this earliest and unpublished work, describing it as 'too soon for [its] date' (18), and explaining- pointedly in the present context- that it was suppressed because 'in genteel mid-Victorian 1869 it would no doubt have incurred . . . severe strictures which might have handicapped a young writer for a long time' (62). Class, compromise and chagrin indeed marked Hardy's career as a novelist throughout. All his novels - but most overtly and significantly, perhaps, the strategically anti-realist HE (in some ways a more revealing 'Life' than the Life) and (the part-autobiographical) jude - show the marks of this obsession. Life itself, however, written when he had become the Grand Old Man of English Letters, constantly betrays the inverted snobbery of the insecure parvenu in its passing comments on Hardy's 'lack of social ambition' (15), his shrinking from 'the business of social advancement' (53), his dislike of 'the fashionable throng' (266) - all juxtaposed (despite the disclaimer that 'Hardy does not comment much on these society-gatherings, his thoughts running upon other subjects' (201)) with an exhaustive, tedious and unilluminating catalogue of his hob-nobbings, from the 1890s onwards, with the great and the good of English society. But despite 'the popularity of Hardy as an author now making him welcome anywhere' (253), the class insecurity is still clearly heard in this note of 1887: 'I spoke to a good many; was apparently unknown to a good many more I knew' (199). It is not without point either, as we shall see below, that Hardy continually claims 'an indifference to a popular novelist's fame' (57) and gives up writing fiction - having 'made it' in that (second-class) genre - for what he calls 'poetry and other forms of pure literature' (63; my emphasis). Furthermore, Life is at pains to convey his studiedly 'balanced' and impartial political stance (v. also 'DL', pp. 277, 282 and Notes, especially hn.) - he is 'quite outside politics' (169), 'not a bit of a politician' (268) - which is also likely to result from his anomalous class position. A revealing memorandum of 1880 suggests that the contradictions inherent in this produce a passive alternativism (typical of a 'superior', apolitical liberalhumanism) which may account for the deterministic philosophy and ironic quietism so often remarked in his poetry: I find that my politics really are neither Tory nor Radical. ... I am against privilege derived from accident of any kind, and am therefore equally opposed to aristocratic privilege and democratic privilege. (By the latter I mean the arrogant assumption that the only labour is hand-labour - a

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worse arrogance than that of the aristocrat, - the taxing of the worthy to help those masses of the population who will not help themselves when they might, etc.) Opportunity should be equal for all, but those who will not avail themselves of it should be cared for merely - not be a burden to, nor the rulers over, those who do avail themselves thereof. (204) The confusion in the articulation of this passage is symptomatic of the confusion in Hardy's class allegiance, although it is interesting to perceive here that 'meritocracy' is his real theme. His rejection of politics would seem to result in his conception of a neutral and unconscious power (the 'Immanent Will') governing the universe - a metaphysical displacement of his lack of a secure social and political philosophy. Irresolutely placed between belief in religion (a God-controlled universe) and materialism (a man-controlled history), the contradictions and ambiguities in Hardy's intellectual and class positions rendered him unable, on the one hand, to follow a 'socialistic' logic because of his newly-acquired social status, nor, on the other, to accept the conventional political, social and religious orthodoxies of the ruling class. Hardy, then, is left occupying an apolitical space as 'writer', bolstered by an eclectic and factitious deterministic myth of 'History'. Much of Hardy's poetry- and certainly, as we shall see in the Critical Commentary, the critical 'shaping' of it within the cultural arena of 20th-century Modernism - may well result from the consciousness of displacement, insecurity and disaffection in one who does not 'belong' to any of the constituent locales in which he is nevertheless situated. And his consanguinity with the cultural pessimism of Anglo-American Modernism is, indeed, clearly traced in the following note of 1891: 'Democratic government may be justice to man, but it will probably merge in proletarian, and when these people ['crowds parading and traipsing round' the British Museum] are our masters it will lead to more of this contempt [for rare antiquities], and possibly be the utter ruin of art and literature'. 22

* * * * * * One inescapable manifestation of Hardy's insecurity - closely interrelated with his class-consciousness - is his preoccupation with women, sex and sexuality. It is notable that one of the earliest reminiscences in Life (18-20) is of the very young Hardy's relationship with 'the lady of the manor' in Stinsford, who 'had grown passionately fond of Tommy almost from his infancy ... whom she had been accustomed to take into her lap and kiss until he was quite a big child. He quite reciprocated her fondness'. Life's language hereat once precociously sexual and sharply conscious of the woman's rank - is striking: ' ... the landowner's wife to whom he had grown more attached 22

Lifo, p. 236; cf. also, LLE, Apol, pp. 225-6, 11.155-68.

XXVUl

INTRODUCTION

than he cared to own. In fact, though he was only nine or ten and she must have been nearly forry, his feeling for her was almost that of a lover; 'in spite of his lover-like promise of fideliry to her ladyship . . .' (my emphases). From there on, the often dry and defensive pages of Life nevertheless mention the many women Hardy observes or has some, more or less eroticized, passing contact with. A small sample would include: 'the bride, all in white, [who] kissed him in her intense pleasure at the dance', when the 12-year-old Thomas was playing the fiddle at her wedding (23); the 'pink and plump' dairymaid, four years older, who was the 15-year-old's Sunday school companion 'though she was by no means a model of virtue in her love-affairs' (25); 'that girl in the omnibus [with] one of those faces of marvellous beaury which are seen casually in the streets but never among one's friends .... Where do such women come from? Who marries them? Who knows them?' (220); a 'Cleopatra in the railway carriage ... a good-natured amative creature by her voice, and her heavy moist-lips' (229); the girl of 'the streets' who thanks him for sharing his umbrella 'by holding on tight to my arm and bestowing on me many kisses' (265); and, perhaps most revealingly, the 'handsome girl: cruel small mouth: she's of the class of interesting women one would be afraid to marry' (212). The phrase 'eroticized, passing contact' was used above for two reasons. First, as Hardy's biographers make clear, apart from his two marriages (v. below, pp. xxix-xxx), he had a number of more or less unsatisfactory 'love-affairs' in the course of his life - from the 'pretry girl' the 14-year-old 'fell madly in love with', who was 'a total stranger' and soon 'disappeared for ever' (25), to the (non-) affairs with the younger and beautiful upper-class married women, Mrs Florence Henniker and Lady Agnes Grove, in the 1890s when his first marriage was in serious trouble and he appears to have been undergoing a mid-life crisis. There has also been much (unverified) speculation about a 'mystery girl' in London in the 1860s, from whose 'free' intellectual and sexual thinking and behaviour Hardy retreated back to Dorset in 1867/3 and about the possible affair with/engagement to his cousin Tryphena Sparks (v. 'Thoughts of Phena', WP, p. 6 and hn.) in the late 1860s - the result of which, it has been unreliably suggested, was an illegitimate son. 24 But, in addition, there are the many- literally- passing 'relationships' when Hardy simply sees a woman and reflects on her appearance, or fantasizes some kind of more intimate involvement with her (v. 'Faintheart in a Railway Train', 'LFH' vi.a, p. 137). This leads on to the second reason for my phrase above: Hardy very dearly eroticizes - i.e. invests with a gratuitous sexual charge women and events otherwise innocent of erotic significance (note above, for example, 'the intense pleasure' that the bride, 'all in white', finds in the dance). 23 24

Cf. Gittings I, ch. 9. For a discussion - and rebuttal - of this story, cf. Gittings I, 'Appendix: Hardy and Tryphena Sparks', pp. 313-23.

INTRODUCTION

XXIX

This is the ongm of the notion of the 'male gaze', which has featured so prominently and properly in recent feminist, and otherwise gendered, criticism. It is everywhere apparent in Hardy's fiction (especially Tess), but it also informs, as the present selection helps to establish, a significant proportion of his poetry. At times, the longing 'gaze' is prurient; at others, pathetic. But scopophilia is a fundamental drive and discourse in his work, and cannot be ignored. Two further points may be connected to this element in Hardy's writing. First, apropos his class-consciousness, 'the-poor-man-and-the-lady' theme is very clearly a part of it. Life, while parading his familiarity with society beauties and aristocratic ladies (a mark of his having 'arrived'), again iteratively indulges in a kind of inverted snobbery, presenting Hardy as disdaining such women (superficial, spoilt, 'beneath him' in all but rank), while often making pejorative comparisons with women of his own, or a lower, class. Mter a visit to a woman's teacher-training college (both Tryphena Sparks and his sister Mary had attended one), he comments: 'how far nobler in its aspirations is the life here than the life of those I met at the crush [society event] two nights back' (235); and of 'Mrs T. and her great eyes' at such a 'crush': 'the most beautiful woman present .... But these women! If put into rough wrappers in a turnip-field, where would their beauty be?' (224). In the failure of his (wishful-thinking) alfairs with Mrs Henniker and Lady Grove, Hardy's nose-against-the-window fascination with (elusive) sex is aggravated by the class exclusion/alienation he feels with regard to the 'Ladies' he desires but cannot have. The second point is that the majority of Hardy's 'love-alfairs' were stillborn or came to nothing (as many of the poems 'about' them attest) - often, it would seem, because of his own diffidence, shyness, scopophilic preference, or lack of sexual drive. The women, then, become 'lost prizes' (the phrase is from 'Thoughts of Phena'), and the poems ones of regret, frustration, self-disdain. Fused with his class insecurity, this sense of sexual failure must surely be one of the matrices in which Hardy's poetry is formed, and may explain at once his celebration of women's robust sexuality and his prurient, vicarious fascination with their sexual misfortunes (v. especially 'LFH' vi.b and c). Hardy was married rwice: first to Emma Gilford, who died in 1912, and then to Florence Emily Dugdale, whom he had known since 1905 when he was 72 and she 35. Little needs to be said here about the second marriage Hardy wrote only a very few poems about Florence Emily (much to her chagrin) - but the first needs some comment. As an architect's draughtsman in 1870, Hardy was sent to St Juliot, near Boscastle in Cornwall, to make drawings for the local church's restoration. Emma was the daughter of the rector there; both she and Hardy were clearly ready to find a partner and both represent25 their meeting and courtship as intensely romantic - snatched, 25

In Life, pp. 67-73, H reproduces several pages of Emma's account of this in SR (pp. 16, 28-37) as representing his own view of it, too.

XXX

INTRODUCTION

during Hardy's visits, in the wildly beautiful countryside of the north Cornish coast (around Tintagel). For extra measure, Emma's father did not think Hardy good enough for his daughter, so the class/sex nexus was also in play. Nevertheless, they were married, and the relationship initially appears to have been happy (although they were never to have children). As Hardy worked at becoming a novelist, they lived for a while in London, then Weymouth, then back near Hardy's birthplace, finally settling at Max Gate on the edge of Dorchester. Relations deteriorated as Hardy became successful, and by the 1890s, with the publication of Tess and then jude, the already troubled marriage soured badly - Emma loathing Hardy's 'atheism' and jealous of his relationships with younger women, and Hardy embarrassed by her behaviour and resentful of her antipathy. They struggled on, however, even when his volumes of poetry began to appear and clearly contained 'love' poems to other women. Emma's sudden - and to Hardy, apparently, unexpected death in 1912 put an end, so it seemed, to a relationship which had begun as an intense (perhaps overcharged) love affair and ended in bitterly alienated cohabitation. What happened, of course, is one of the central Hardy myths: overcome with remorse and guilt, and leaving his new second wife at home, he revisited the scenes of his and Emma's courtship, wrote, in a burst of creative energy, his famous 'Poems of 1912-13' in which he 'rememoried' (to use Toni Morrison's word 26) their love affair in 1870, and created a sequence of love poems which revivifies the past, thus exorcizing and erasing the stricken years in between. The point here, in the context of Hardy's sexual mindset, is that these poems are, in a very clear sense, the quintessence of the 'lost prize' syndrome noted earlier - the sense of failure and loss paradoxically charged now with the eroticism which had drained from the relationship itself. Here, Hardy can, as it were, realise the promise of that intense sexual bonding which he and Emma at once experienced and failed to fulfil by reanimating it in the 'present' of his poetry. Florence Emily, with a perceptiveness perhaps honed by vexation, is reported as saying: 'all the poems about [Emma] are a fiction but fiction in which their author has now come to believe'. 27 Thus the 'Poems of 1912-13' are not so much of regret and nostalgia, but of the transposed reliving of a missed opportunity. Again, we may recognize in this a 'transitional' Modernist perception of 'reality' for the artist if for no one else - where it lies, not so much in the material experience itself, but in the consciousness that registers it. 'The poetry of a scene', Hardy once reflected, 'varies with the minds of the perceivers. Indeed, it does not lie in the scene at all'. 28

* * * * * * 26 27 28

E.g., in Beloved (1987), Plume Books, 1988, pp. 36, 99, 191. Quoted in Creighton, p. 335. Life, p. 50.

INTRODUCTION

XXXI

To say that Hardy had 'two careers' - first novelist, then poet - is to misrepresent him, at least in his own estimation, since he presents himself as always primarily a poet. I noted earlier his disdain for novel-writing and his snobbish hankering to enter the realms of 'pure literature', but this is, in fact, a structuring theme of Lifo, and is inflected there in a number of ways. Early on, when Hardy was first in London, and immediately prior to his starting The Poor Man and the Lady, it notes that he 'had begun to write verses, and by 1866 to send his productions to magazines' (47); that although unsuccessful, he did not 'by any means abandon verse which he wrote constantly, but kept private'; and that he read only poetry at this point (1866-7) since he believed that 'in verse was concentrated the essence of all imaginative and emotional literature' (48). Later, the primacy of his preference for poetry is kept regularly in our view: 'the poetic tendency had been his from the earliest' (384); '"I wanted to write poetry in the beginning. Now I can"' (401). This strategic self-presentation is reinforced by one, surely disingenuous, aspect of the (auto)biography: the disrespect with which it treats his novelwriting career, despite the fact that for 30 years Hardy had laboured, with dedicated care for his craft, to produce serious fiction. Purely material factors are adduced as the impetus to start ('he was committed by circumstances to novel-writing as a regular trade' (104)), and the notion of Hardy as no more than a paid professional hack is reiterated throughout, despite some revealing slippages which suggest what a grotesque misrepresentation this is. In an early 'quoted' letter to Leslie Stephens, he expresses his willingness to court a popular readership at the expense of artistic integrity, and rejects, 'for the present circumstances', any 'higher aims' in favour of getting 'to be considered a good hand at a serial' (100). While commenting on the 'damage' Hardy had done to MC 'as an artistic whole' (my emphasis) in the interests of newspaper serialization, Lifo adds, nevertheless, that 'as he called his novel-writing "mere journeywork" he cared little about it as art' (179). After Ws, which, it is reported, 'he often said ... in some respects ... was his best novel' (185), and as Hardy was commencing the immense creative labour of writing Tess and jude, we are told: 'He now went about the business mechanically' (182-3). Finally, after the publication of jude and W-B (1896-7), Lifo neatly sums up its theme: 'and so ended his prose contributions to literature ... which had ever been secondary to his interest in verse' (286), adding, in a shameless perjury, that 'if he wished to retain any shadow of self-respect' he must abandon fiction and 'resume openly that form of [literary art] which had always been instinctive with him ... the change, after all, [being] not so great as it seemed. It was not as if he had been a writer of novels proper ... ' (291). If we relate this extraordinary depreciation of his own fiction to Hardy's over-wrought class-consciousness, then the sub-text of the narrative of his

XX:Xll

INTRODUCTION

'two careers' becomes apparent. For the 'character' of Hardy that Life wishes to depict is that of eminent man-of-letters; familiar of the noble and famous; above the pettiness of ambition, social climbing, 'popularity' and the literary market-place; always the 'true' poet ('his bias towards poetry ... instinctive and disinterested' (305)); and not, by nature, the novelist toiling away in the sweat-shops of the publishing trade (what George Gissing in 1891 had pilloried as 'New Grub Street' 29 ). When Hardy could afford to stop novelwriting, he did so - tainted as it was by representing his escape-route from his class-origins. What Life proffers, in other words, is a piece of petit-bourgeois wish-fulfilment (a publisher's reader for The Poor Man and the Lady had described the novel, back in 1868, as 'some clever lad's dream', 59): an image of the 'pure' literary man Hardy desired to be. 30 However, the explanation of why Hardy gave up fiction is rather more complex than the simple economic reason given above (although that must remain a credible factor). A further clue may lie in his comment, after the furore over jude, that 'his experiences of the few preceding years [had] killed all his interest in this form of imaginative work' (286). Always preternaturally sensitive to criticism (as he was later over his volumes of poetry), he had been badly affected by the scandalized response to Tess and jude from the late-Victorian Grundyite lobby: in no way could Tess be 'a Pure Woman' (as Hardy's provocative sub-tide claimed), nor should the kinds of experience she undergoes be the stuff of fiction (v. 'CEF', pp. 257-60); and the 'immorality', 'atheism' and 'gloom' of jude were the last straw. 31 Again, there is every reason to believe that he was indeed fed up with it all and, financial circumstances now allowing (in part, ironically, because of the very success of Tess), he took the opportuniry to stop and do something more congenial. But there is a further, more tangled and contentious, dimension to Hardy's decision. His fiction had, from the start, been subject to criticism of its 'improbabiliry' (especially of plot) and of its 'awkward', 'mannered' style. Certainly, those novels, like HE and Laod., which manifestly deviated from the 'Wessex' canon of 'Novels of Character and Environment' (v. 'GP', p. 232) were execrated on both counts. With Tess, and more overtly still with jude and W-B, these tendencies were foregrounded. Hardy, in other words, was flouting - by ineptitude or design - the laws of a dominant realist orthodoxy which demanded a kind of transparent window onto 'real life'. Much in the various prefaces to the novels, in Life, and in the three essays on fiction of 1888-91 included here suggests that it was, in fact, by design that 29

30 31

Gissing' s bitter novel of that title is set in the early 1880s. Paul Zeitlow, in Moments of Vision, 1974, calls it 'a myth of retrospective selfjustification', p. 42. Armstrong (p. 1) cites a further view (Michael Mason, 'The Burning of Jude the Obscure', Notes and Queries, 1988, 233: 332-4) that H may have found public acclaim for the 'radical' late novels as upsetting as the opprobrium, because he did not wish to be regarded as a 'free-thinker' (cp. my comments on H's rejection of 'politics', above, pp. xxvi-xxvii).

INTRODUCTION

XXXlll

Hardy's novels disrupted realist expectations. 'CEF' and 'SF' in particular (v. their headnotes and notes passim for detail) also indicate that, in his own way, Hardy was involved in the late-19th-century literary debate on 'Naturalism' and 'Realism'. AI; with Maupassant in France (v. 'PRF', p. 247, 11.2246n.), he opposed an 'inventory'-like transcription of facts 'from nature'; rejected a 'photographic' recording of detail; and wished to represent 'abstract imaginings' 32 by way of a 'disproportioning' (i.e. defamiliarizing) fictional writing, which would reveal the 'vraie verite' ('SF', p. 262, 1.76) rather than the superficies of life. Hence, he decided, '"realism" is not Art'. 33 The point here, surely, is - and it places Hardy squarely in the 'transitional' category - that he was pushing up against, indeed subverting, the limits of realism as a fictional mode, and finding it was no longer, if ever, adequate to his purposes. But rather than pursuing that logic in fiction, he gives it up and returns to poetry, in which his 'moments of vision' may now find a more appropriately non-realist form. That Hardy's own word 'disproportioning', above, translates so readily into Modernist critical terminology points clearly to his later fiction, at least, as having close affinities with the work of a younger generation of novelists who were to follow the logic of anti-realist discourses in making Modernist fiction: D.H. Lawrence, for example, who found so much to admire (and, in part, emulate) in jude. 34 It is not insignificant, either, that the large single work Hardy undertook shortly after ceasing to write novels was his non-realist 'epic-drama', The Dynasts (v. the 'Preface', pp. 229ff.). Planned over a long period (Life characteristically implies, throughout his years as a novelist, that it would be Hardy's truly major achievement), this enormous poetic drama involves many modes, some of which, in their affinity with cinematic techniques, again appear protoModernist in tendency. The first significant mention of the envisaged 'epic' in Life (May 1875; 106) coincides with Hardy's writing of his uncompromisingly anti-realist novel, HE; and in March 1886, a memorandum reflecting on the future of prose fiction proposes that novel-writing cannot go backward. Having reached the analytic stage it must transcend it by going still further in the same direction. Why not by rendering as visible essences, spectres, etc? ... Abstract realisms .... The Realities to be the true realities of life, hitherto called abstractions. The old material realities to be placed behind the former as shadowy accessories. Hardy's own response to these proposals is: 'this notion was approximately carried out, not in a novel, but through the much more appropriate medium 32 33 34

The phrase is from a memo about the painter, J.M.W. Turner, in 1887 (cf. Life, · · • an d ,rea ,.1sm IS · not Art • are b oth p h rases f rom an Important ·185 ). P.0· 1sproportwnmg · memo of 1890 (Life, pp. 228-9; cf. also 'PRF', p. 247, ll.205-6n.). Cf. his Study of TH (n.16, above}.

INTRODUCTION

XXXlV

of poetry, in the supernatural framework of The Dynasts as also in smaller poems' (Life, 177). Hardy's return to 'smaller poems', however, started before novel-writing had ceased. He woke before dawn on Christmas Day 1890, 'thinking of resuming "the viewless wings of poesy"' (230), and several new poems were written in the earlier 1890s. But by 1897-8, Life tells us, 'he had already for some time been getting together the poems [for W'P]. In date they ranged from 1865 intermittently onwards, the middle period of his novel-writing producing very few or none, but of late years they had been added to with great rapidity .. .' (291-2). This first volume, then, appeared in 1898, with Hardy, rypically, commenting sardonically on its reception 'by some critics [as] not without umbrage at [his] having taken the liberty to adopt another vehicle of expression than prose fiction without consulting them' (299). In addition to the monumental Ds, a further seven substantial volumes were to follow - some 950-plus poems in all. It is little wonder that Hardy, with some justification, aligned himself with other 'ancients' (Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) who produced major work late in life (384; v. also, 'An Ancient to Ancients', LLE, p. 77, sts. 8-9), and it seems fitting to conclude here with his own epigraph in 1918 for this second career: 'A sense of the truth of poetry, of its supreme place in literature, had awakened itself in me. At the risk of ruining all my wordly prospects I dabbled in it ... was forced out of it .... It came back upon me ... ' (385; Hardy's ellipses).

*

* * * * * *

'To cull from a dead writer's whole achievement in verse portions that shall exhibit him is a task of no small difficulry and of some temerity': thus writes Hardy in the preface to his selection of William Barnes's poetry (v. here, p. 237). With a poet whose output is on the scale of Hardy's own, however, the 'difficulty' and 'temerity' are felt even more keenly. Furthermore, there are many other selections of Hardy's poems already published. How, then, is one to produce a selection which at once does justice to his large poetic oeuvre (minus Ds) and brings into view a fuller, differently inflected 'Hardy' from the one other volumes sustain? The answer will, in effect, deal with both aspects of the question simultaneously- but first a word on the nature of 'Selections'. While they may look 'natural', almost self-selecting, objective, scholarly, neutral, disinterested, etc., in the nature of things they are nothing of the kind. Selections involve, as Hardy knew (cf. his 'Preface', pp. 237-8), personal choice, contemporary taste and more or less (usually less) random sampling of a writer's work. Indeed, compiling one is a fundamentally judgemental critical (not to say, ideological) activity, profoundly 'partial' (in both senses of the word) - hence the warning title of the present Introduction. And this is not to mention the

INTRODUCTION

XXXV

writing of introductions, biographical sketches, notes (themselves, as here, a deeply interpretative 'scholarly apparatus'), nor the compiling of 'selected further reading' (who's 'in', who's 'out'?), all of which frame the ostensibly unmediated 'text in itself'. Selections, in other words, effectively construct a writer rather more substantively - but also, because of their usually unspoken informing assumptions, more subliminally - than most other critical attention does. 35 What we take to be the 'primary text' has, in fact, already been heavily shaped and processed by the editors' and publishers' cultural predilections and market intentions (it matters, for example, if a volume is primarily intended for a sixth-form and first-year undergraduate readership, or is in a classic 'Poetry Library' series). With all this in mind, it is intended that the present volume should, wherever possible, be a kind of self-deconstructing selection which wears its editorial mechanisms on its sleeve: i.e. recognizing and drawing attention to its partiality and to the fact that it is itself a 'critical' work, an 'interpretation' based on certain theoretical premises about literature and the study of it. Since there has latterly been a striking conformity (v. Crit. Comm., pp. 190-9) in the identification of which poems comprise Hardy's 'best', 'most characteristic', 'finest', etc., the solution to the problem of selecting just under 200 of his 'smaller poems' was to devote one section to the most 'familiar' poems - those every Hardy fan would expect to find in a selection and be mortified if they were not - and one section to those many poems which, for reasons usually unexamined, appear never or very seldom to be selected or anthologized - the 'Less Familiar Hardy'. The methodology used to ensure that, as far as possible, poems of both categories properly belong in them is explained in Crit. Comm. But one illustrative example may be apposite here: Samuel Hynes (editor of the invaluable Oxford Universiry Press edition of The Complete Poetical Works of TH) has also edited (the Monopolies Commission take note) two paperback selections of Hardy's poems, also for Oxford: TH: A Critical Selection of His Finest Poetry (1984) in the Oxford Authors series, and TH: A Selection of His Finest Poems (1994) in the Oxford Poetry Library series. (Both books are in print, both covers reproduce a version of the same portrait of Hardy and, along with a new copyright date, the 1994 volume reproduces verbatim the 1984 introduction.) The larger Finest Poetry contains well over half of Hardy's poems, and many of my 'less familiar' ones are, of course, included there; the smaller Finest Poems is roughly half the size, and it scarcely needs to be added that the poems which have been left out, time after time, are those 'less familiar' ones. Perhaps the 1994 volume should have been called The Finest of Hardy's Finest Poems! In the present volume, the two sections are intended to sit in juxtaposition, thus raising the questions: why are these here and those there? how did 35

For a fuller discussion of what I there call a writer's 'critiography', v. Hardy in History, 1989, especially 'Introduction' and ch. I.

XXXVI

INTRODUCTION

they get to be there? on what principles, and why? what does it mean, in the culture of the 1990s and beyond, that these are here and those there? There is no a priori suggestion that the 'Familiar Hardy' should not be so, nor that the 'Less Familiar Hardy' is somehow 'better' or 'more representative' and should thus displace the other as the object of attention. However, the latter may possibly bring into view different emphases and inflections (as well as some comprehensively disregarded poems), whilst denaturalizing the 'Familiar Hardy' may illuminate his underlying constituent features and release some of those poems, too, from the thrall of literary-critical and cultural orthodoxies. Perhaps most pointed will be the question - and the answers to it - posed by the presence of two comparable poems in different sections: what is it that has made this one of 'the finest' and the other not? Finally, a couple of practical matters need to be noted. The 'FH' section is organized in the chronological sequence of Hardy's original published volumes, and the poems themselves are in the order in which they appeared (although obviously separated there by others not included here); those in the 'LFH' section are in contrived groupings across volumes, intended to bring out resemblances between disparate poems, and are often in minisequences to the same end. All Hardy's volumes are fairly evenly represented although, significantly (v. Crit. Comm., pp. 202-3, for analysis of this), rather more of the 'FH' section is drawn from the earlier ones, and vice versa for the 'LFH' section. The greater proportion of his poems are undated as to their time of composition 36 and, given that some poems (often revised versions37) from earlier periods appear in later volumes, there is a problem in attempting to identifY when poems were actually written. Any dates in the text, therefore, are Hardy's own. As a supplement to the 'Less Familiar Hardy', the third section of the present selection is from his (not extensive) non-fictional prose writings, which have remained seldom reprinted - barring the volume prefaces - except in occasional and disparate locations or in Harold Orel's (reissued but unrevised) pioneering collection, Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings of 1966. Furthermore, these have never been as comprehensively annotated as they are here and it is to be hoped, as with the 'Less Familiar' poems (and their extensive notes), that they will help to bring into view a Thomas Hardy who is rather more various and complex a figure than his conventional construction as 'the poet of Wessex' allows him to be.

36 Cf. Hynes III, Appendix E, pp. 354-64 , for a 'Chronological List of Dated Poems'. 37 Cf. e.g., Lifo, pp. 47, 54.

THE HISTORY OF AN HOUR VAIN is the wish to try rhyming it, writing it!

Pen cannot weld into words what it was; Time will be squandered in toil at inditing it; Clear is the cause! Yea, 'rwas too satiate with soul, too ethereal; June-morning scents of a rose-bush in flower Catch in a clap-net of hempen material; So catch that hour!

Human Shows, Far Phantasies (1925)

5

THE FAMILIAR HARDY

From: Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898) NEUTRAL TONES WE stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod; - They had fallen from an ash, and were gray. Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove Over tedious riddles of years ago; And some words played between us to and fro On which lost the more by our love.

5

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing Alive enough to have strength to die; And a grin of bitterness swept thereby Like an ominous bird a-wing ....

10

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

15

1867

SHE AT HIS FUNERAL THEY bear him to his resting-place In slow procession sweeping by; I follow at a stranger's space; His kindred they, his sweetheart I.

4

POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

Unchanged my gown of garish dye, Though sable-sad is their attire; But they stand round with griefless eye, Whilst my regret consumes like fire!

5

187-

FRIENDS BEYOND WILLIAM DEWY, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough, Robert's kin, and John's and Ned's, And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now! 'Gone,' I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads; Yet at mothy curfew-tide, And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads,

5

They've a way of whispering to me - fellow-wight who yet abide In the muted, measured note Of a ripple under archways, or a love cave's stillicide: 'We have triumphed: this achievement turns the bane to antidote, Unsuccesses to success, Many thought-worn eves and morrows to a morrow free of thought.

10

'No more need we corn and clothing, feel of old terrestrial stress; Chill detraction stirs no sigh, Fear of death has even bygone us: death gave all that we possess.' 15

WESSEX POEMS

5

WD. - 'Ye mid burn the old bass-viol that I set such value by.' Squire. - 'You may hold the manse in fee, You may wed my spouse, may let my children's memory of me die.' Lady S. - 'You may have my rich brocades, my laces; take each household key; 20 Ransack coffer, desk, bureau; Quiz the few poor treasures hid there, con the letters kept by me.' Far. - 'Ye mid zell my favourite heifer, ye mid let the charlock grow, Foul the grinterns, give up thrift.' Far. Wife. - 'If ye break my best blue china, children, I shan't care or ho.'

All. - 'We've no wish

hear the tidings, how the people's 25 fortunes shift; What your daily doings are; Who are wedded, born, divided; if your lives beat slow or swift. to

'Curious not the least are we if our intents you make or mar, If you quire to our old tune, If the City stage still passes, if the weirs still roar afar.'

30

- Thus, with very gods' composure, freed those crosses late and soon Which, in life, the Trine allow (Why, none witteth), and ignoring all that haps beneath the moon, William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough, Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's, And the Squire, and Lady Susan, murmur mildly to me now.

35

6

POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

THOUGHTS OF PHENA AT NEWS OF HER DEATH

NOT a line of her writing have I, Not a thread of her hair, No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby I may picture her there; And in vain do I urge my unsight 5 To conceive my lost prize At her close, whom I knew when her dreams were upbrimming with light, And with laughter her eyes. What scenes spread around her last days, Sad, shining, or dim? 10 Did her gifts and compassions enray and enarch her sweet ways With an aureate nimb? Or did life-light decline from her years, And mischances control Her full day-star; unease, or regret, or forebodings, or fears 15 Disennoble her soul? Thus I do but the phantom retain Of the maiden of yore As my relic; yet haply the best of her - fined in my brain It may be the more That no line of her writing have I, Nor a thread of her hair, No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby I may picture her there.

20

March 1890

WESSEX POEMS

7

NATURE'S QUESTIONING WHEN I look forth at dawning, pool, Field, flock, and lonely tree, All seem to gaze at me Like chastened children sitting silent in a school; Their faces dulled, constrained, and worn, As though the master's ways Through the long teaching days Had cowed them till their early zest was overborne. Upon them stirs in lippings mere (As if once clear in call, But now scarce breathed at all) 'We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here! 'Has some Vast Imbecility, Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardty? 'Or come we of an Automaton Unconscious of our pains? Or are we live remains Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone?

5

10

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'Or is it that some high Plan betides, As yet not understood, Of Evil stormed by Good, We the Forlorn Hope over which Achievement strides?' Thus things around. No answerer I. . . . Meanwhile the winds, and rains, And Earth's old glooms and pains Are still the same, and Life and Death are neighbours nigh.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY THE IMPERCIPIENT (AT A CATHEDRAL SERVICE)

THAT with this bright believing band I have no claim to be, That faiths by which my comrades stand Seem fantasies to me, And mirage-mists their Shining Land, Is a strange destiny. Why thus my soul should be consigned To infelicity, Why always I must feel as blind To sights my brethren see, Why joys they've found I cannot find, Abides a mystery. Since heart of mine knows not that ease Which they know; since it be That He who breathes All's Well to these Breathes no All' s-Well to me, My lack might move their sympathies And Christian charity! I am like a gazer who should mark An inland company Standing upfingered, with, 'Hark! hark! The glorious -distant sea!' And feel, 'Alas, 'tis but yon dark And wind-swept pine to me!'

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WESSEX POEMS

Yet I would bear my shortcomings With meet tranquillity, But for the charge that blessed things I'd Iiefer not have be. 0, doth a bird deprived of wings Go earth-bound wilfully!

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30

Enough. As yet disquiet clings About us. Rest shall we.

'I LOOK INTO MY GLASS' I LOOK into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, 'Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!' For then, I, undistrest By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity. But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide.

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10

From: Poems of the Past and the Present

(1902)

DRUMMER HODGE

THEY throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest Uncoffined - just as found: His landmark is a kopje-crest That breaks the veldt around; And foreign constellations west Each night above his mound.

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II

Young Hodge the Drummer never knewFresh from his Wessex home The meaning of the broad Karoo, The Bush, the dusty loam, And why uprose to nightly view Strange stars amid the gloam.

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III

Yet portion of that unknown plain Will Hodge for ever be; His homely Northern breast and brain Grow to some Southern tree, And strange-eyed constellations reign His stars eternally.

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POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

11

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 finer 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.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

A COMMONPLACE DAY THE day is turning ghost, And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively, To join the anonymous host Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe, To one of like degree.

5

I part the fire-gnawed logs, Rake forth the embers, spoil the busy flames, and lay the ends Upon the shining dogs; Further and further from the nooks the twilight's stride extends, And beamless black impends. 10 Nothing of tiniest worth Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or praise, Since the pale corpse-like birth Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays Dullest of dull-hued Days!

15

Wanly upon the panes The rain slides, as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet Here, while Day's presence wanes, And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set, He wakens my regret.

20

Regret - though nothing dear That I wot of, was toward in the wide world at his prime, Or bloomed elsewhere than here, To die with his decease, and leave a memory sweet, sublime, Or mark him out in Time . . . .

25

- Yet, maybe, in some soul, In some spot undiscerned on sea or land, some impulse rose, Or some intent upstole Of that enkindling ardency from whose maturer glows The world's amendment flows;

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POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

13

But which, benumbed at birth By momentary chance or wile, has missed its hope to be Embodied on the earth; And undervoicings of this loss to man's futurity May wake regret in me.

35

AT A LUNAR ECLIPSE THY shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea, Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine In even monochrome and curving line Of imperturbable serenity. How With That With

shall I link such sun-cast symmetry the torn troubled form I know as thine, profile, placid as a brow divine, continents of moil and misery?

And can immense Mortality but throw So small a shade, and Heaven's high human scheme Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?

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10

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show, Nation at war with nation, brains that teem, Heroes, and women fairer than the skies? TO AN UNBORN PAUPER CHILD

BREATHE not, hid Heart: cease silently, And though thy birth-hour beckons thee, Sleep the long sleep: The Doomsters heap Travails and teens around us here, And Time-wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY II

Hark, how the peoples surge and sigh, And laughters fail, and greetings die: Hopes dwindle; yea, Faiths waste away, Affections and enthusiasms numb; Thou canst not mend these things if thou dost come.

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III

Had I the ear of wombed souls Ere their terrestrial chart unrolls, And thou wert free To cease, or be, Then would I tell thee all I know, And put it to thee: Wilt thou take Life so?

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IV

Vain vow! No hint of mine may hence To theeward fly: to thy locked sense Explain none can Life's pending plan: Thou wilt thy ignorant entry make Though skies spout fire and blood and nations quake.

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v

Fain would I, dear, find some shut plot Of earth's wide wold for thee, where not One tear, one qualm, Should break the calm. But I am weak as thou and bare; No man can change the common lot to rare.

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VI

Must come and bide. And such are weUnreasoning, sanguine, visionaryThat I can hope Health, love, friends, scope In full for thee; can dream thou'lt find Joys seldom yet attained by humankind!

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POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

15

TO LIZBIE BROWNE

DEAR Lizbie Browne, Where are you now? In sun, in rain? Or is your brow Past joy, past pain, Dear Lizbie Browne?

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II

Sweet Lizbie Browne, How you could smile, How you could sing! How archly wile In glance-giving, Sweet Lizbie Browne!

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III

And, Lizbie Browne, Who else had hair Bay-red as yours, Or flesh so fair Bred out of doors, Sweet Lizbie Browne?

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IV

When, Lizbie Browne, You had just begun To be endeared By stealth to one, You disappeared My Lizbie Browne!

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

v

Ay, Lizbie Browne, So swift your life, And mine so slow, You were a wife Ere I could show Love, Lizbie Browne.

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VI

Still, Lizbie Browne, You won, they said, The best of men When you were wed .... Where went you then, 0 Lizbie Browne?

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VII

Dear Lizbie Browne, I should have thought, 'Girls ripen fast,' And coaxed and caught You ere you passed, Dear Lizbie Browne!

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VIII

But, Lizbie Browne, I let you slip; Shaped not a sign; Touched never your lip With lip of mine, Lost Lizbie Browne!

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IX

So, Lizbie Browne, When on a day Men speak of me As not, you'll say, 'And who was he?' Yes, Lizbie Browne!

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POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

17

A BROKEN APPOINTMENT You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum, You did not come. You love not me, And love alone can lend you loyalty; - I know and knew it. But, unto the store Of human deeds divine in all but name, Was it not worth a little hour or more To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be You love not me?

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AN AUGUST MIDNIGHT

A SHADED lamp and a waving blind, And the beat of a clock from a distant floor: On this scene enter - winged, horned, and spined A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore; While 'mid my page there idly stands A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands ....

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II

Thus meet we five, in this still place, At this point of time, at this point in space. - My guests besmear my new-penned line, Or bang at the lamp and fall supine. 'God's humblest, they!' I muse. Yet why? They know Earth-secrets that know not I. Max Gate, 1899

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

THE DARKLING THRUSH upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. I

LEANT

The land's sharp features seemed to be The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-berufHed plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. 31 December 1900

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POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

19

THE RUINED MAID '0 'MELIA, my dear, this does everything crown! Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town? And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?' '0 didn't you know I'd been ruined?' said she. - 'You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks, Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks; And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!' 'Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined,' said she. - 'At home in the barton you said "thee" and "thou", And "thik oon", and "theas oon", and "t'other"; but now Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!' 'Some polish is gained with one's ruin,' said she.

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- 'Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek, And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!' 15 'We never do work when we're ruined,' said she. - 'You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream, And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; bur at present you seem To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!' 'True. One's pretty lively when ruined,' said she. - 'I wish I had feathers, a fine And a delicate face, and could 'My dear - a raw country girl, Cannot quite expect that. You

sweeping gown, strut about Town!' such as you be, ain't ruined,' said she. Westbourne Park Villas, 1866

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY THE SELF-UNSEEING HERE is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet walked in. She sat here in her chair, Smiling into the fire; He who played stood there, Bowing it higher and higher. Childlike, I danced in a dream; Blessings emblazoned that day; Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away!

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IN TENEBRIS I 'Percussus sum sicut frenum, et aruit cor meum. • - Ps. CI

WINTERTIME nighs; But my bereavement-pain It cannot bring again: Twice no one dies. Flower-petals flee; But, since it once hath been, No more that severing scene Can harrow me. Birds faint in dread: I shall not lose old strength In the lone frost's black length: Strength long since fled! Leaves freeze to dun; But friends can not turn cold This season as of old For him with none.

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POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

Tempests may scath; But love can not make smart Again this year his heart Who no heart hath. Black is night's cope; But death will not appal One who, past doubtings all, Waits in unhope.

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20

From: Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909) A TRAMPWOMAN'S TRAGEDY (182-)

FROM Wynyard's Gap the livelong day, The livelong day, We beat afoot the northward way We had travelled times before. The sun-blaze burning on our backs, Our shoulders sticking to our packs, By fosseway, fields, and turnpike tracks We skirted sad Sedge-Moor.

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II

Full twenty miles we jaunted on, We jaunted on, My fancy-man, and jeering John, And Mother Lee, and I. And, as the sun drew down to west, We climbed the toilsome Poldon crest, And saw, of landskip sights the best, The inn that beamed thereby.

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III

For months we had padded side by side, Ay, side by side Through the Great Forest, Blackmoor wide, And where the Parret ran. We'd faced the gusts on Mendip ridge, Had crossed the Yeo unhelped by bridge, Been stung by every Marshwood midge, I and my fancy-man.

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TIME'S LAUGHINGSTOCKS

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IV

Lone inns we loved, my man and I, My man and I; 'King's Stag', 'Windwhist!e' high and dry, 'The Horse' on Hintock Green, The cosy house at Wynyard's Gap, 'The Hut' renowned on Bredy Knap, And many another wayside tap Where folk might sit unseen.

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v

Now as we trudged- 0 deadly day, 0 deadly day! I teased my fancy-man in play And wanton idleness. I walked alongside jeering John, I laid his hand my waist upon; I would not bend my glances on My lover's dark distress.

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VI

Thus Poldon top at last we won, At last we won, And gained the inn at sink of sun Far-famed as 'Marshal's Elm'. Beneath us figured tor and lea, From Mendip to the western sea I doubt if finer sight there be Within this royal realm.

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VII

Inside the settle all a-row All four a-row We sat, I next to John, to show That he had wooed and won. And then he took me on his knee, And swore it was his turn to be My favoured mate, and Mother Lee Passed to my former one.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY VIII

Then in a voice I had never heard, I had never heard, My only Love to me: 'One word, My lady, if you please! Whose is the child you are like to bear? His? After all my months o' care?' God knows 'twas not! But, 0 despair! I nodded - still to tease.

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IX

Then up he sprung, and with his knife And with his knife He let out jeering Johnny's life, Yes; there, at set of sun. The slant ray through the window nigh Gilded John's blood and glazing eye, Ere scarcely Mother Lee and I Knew that the deed was done.

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X

The taverns tell the gloomy tale, The gloomy tale, How that at !vel-chester jail My Love, my sweetheart swung; Though stained till now by no misdeed Save one horse ta'en in time o' need; (Blue Jimmy stole right many a steed Ere his last fling he flung.)

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XI

Thereaft I walked the world alone, Alone, alone! On his death-day I gave my groan And dropt his dead-born child. 'Twas nigh the jail, beneath a tree, None tending me; for Mother Lee Had died at Glaston, leaving me Unfriended on the wild.

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TIME'S LAUGHINGSTOCKS

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XII

And in the night as I lay weak, As I lay weak, The leaves a-falling on my cheek, The red moon low declined The ghost of him I'd die to kiss Rose up and said: 'Ah, tell me this! Was the child mine, or was it his? Speak, that I rest may find!'

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XIII

0 doubt not but I told him then, I told him then, That I had kept me from all men Since we joined lips and swore. Whereat he smiled, and thinned away As the wind stirred to call up day 'Tis past! And here alone I stray Haunting the Western Moor.

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NoTES: 'Windwhistle' (Stanza IV). The highness and dryness of Windwhistle Inn was impressed upon the writer two or three years ago, when, after climbing on a hot afternoon to the beautiful spot near which it stands and entering the inn for tea, he was informed by the landlady that none could be had, unless he would fetch water from a valley half a mile off, the house containing not a drop, owing to its situation. However, a tantalizing row of full barrels behind her back testified to a wetness of a certain sort, which was not at that time desired. 'Marshal's Elm' (Stanza VI), so picturesquely situated, is no longer an inn, though the house, or part of it, still remains. It used to exhibit a fine old swinging sign. 'Blue Jimmy' (Stanza X) was a notorious horse-stealer of Wessex in those days, who appropriated more than a hundred horses before he was caught, among others one belonging to a neighbour of the writer's grandfather. He was hanged at the now demolished lvel-chester or Ilchester jail above mentioned - that building formerly of so many sinister associations in the minds of the local peasantry, and the continual haunt of fever, which at last led to its condemnation. Its site is now an innocent-looking green meadow.

Apri/1902

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY THE HOUSE OF HOSPITALITIES HERE we broached the Christmas barrel, Pushed up the charred log-ends; Here we sang the Christmas carol, And called in friends. Time has tired me since we met here When the folk now dead were young, Since the viands were outset here And quaint songs sung. And the worm has bored the viol That used to lead the tune, Rust eaten out the dial That struck night's noon. Now no Christmas brings in neighbours, And the New Year comes unlit; Where we sang the mole now labours, And spiders knit. Yet at midnight if here walking, When the moon sheets wall and tree, I see forms of old time talking, Who smile on me.

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SHE HEARS THE STORM THERE was a time in former years While my roof-tree was his When I should have been distressed by fears At such a night as this! I should have murmured anxiously, 'The pricking rain strikes cold; His road is bare of hedge or tree, And he is getting old.'

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TIME'S LAUGHINGSTOCKS But now the fitful chimney-roar, The drone of Thorncombe trees, The Froom in flood upon the moor, The mud of Mellstock Leaze, The candle slanting sooty-wick' d, The thuds upon the thatch, The eaves-drops on the window flicked, The clacking garden-hatch, And what they mean to wayfarers, I scarcely heed or mind; He has won that storm-tight roof of hers Which Earth grants all her kind.

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SHUT OUT THAT MOON CLOSE up the casement, draw the blind, Shut out that stealing moon, She wears too much the guise she wore Before our lutes were strewn With years-deep dust, and names we read On a white stone were hewn. Step not forth on the dew-dashed lawn To view the Lady's Chair, Immense Orion's glittering form, The Less and Greater Bear: Stay in; to such sights we were drawn When faded ones were fair. Brush not the bough for midnight scents That come forth lingeringly, And wake the same sweet sentiments They breathed to you and me When living seemed a laugh, and love All it was said to be.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

Within the common lamp-lit room Prison my eyes and thought; Let dingy details crudely loom, Mechanic speech be wrought: Too fragrant was Life's early bloom, Too tart the fruit it brought!

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1904

REMINISCENCES OF A DANCING MAN

WHO now remembers Almack' s balls Willis's sometime named In those two smooth-floored upper halls For faded ones so famed? Where as we trod to trilling sound The fancied phantoms stood around, Or joined us in the maze, Of the powdered Dears from Georgian years, Whose dust lay in sightless sealed-up biers, The fairest of former days.

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II

Who now remembers gay Cremorne, And all its jaunry jills, And those wild whirling figures born Of Jullien's grand quadrilles? With hats on head and morning coats There footed to his prancing notes Our partner-girls and we; And the gas-jets winked, and the lustres clinked, And the platform throbbed as with arms enlinked We moved to the minstrelsy.

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TIME'S LAUGHINGSTOCKS

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III

Who now recalls those crowded rooms Of old yclept 'The Argyll', Where to the deep Drum-polka's booms We hopped in standard style? Whither have danced those damsels now! Is Death the partner who doth moue Their wormy chaps and bare? Do their spectres spin like sparks within The smoky halls of the Prince of Sin To a thunderous Jullien air?

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THE CONFORMERS YES; we'll wed, my little fay, And you shall write you mine, And in a villa chastely gray We'll house, and sleep, and dine. But those night-screened, divine, Stolen trysts of heretofore, We of choice ecstasies and fine Shall know no more.

The formal faced cohue Will then no more upbraid With smiting smiles and whisperings two Who have thrown less loves in shade. We shall no more evade The searching light of the sun, Our game of passion will be played, Our dreaming done. We shall not go in stealth To rendezvous unknown, But friends will ask me of your health, And you about my own. When we abide alone, No leapings each to each, But syllables in frigid tone Of household speech.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

When down to dust we glide Men will not say askance, As now: 'How all the country side Rings with their mad romance!' But as they graveward glance Remark: 'In them we lose A worthy pair, who helped advance Sound parish views.'

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FORMER BEAUTIES market-dames, mid-aged, with lips thin-drawn, And tissues sere, Are they the ones we loved in years agone, And courted here? THESE

Are these the muslined pink young things to whom We vowed and swore In nooks on summer Sundays by the Froom, Or Budmouth shore? Do they remember those gay tunes we trod Clasped on the green; Aye; trod till moonlight set on the beaten sod A satin sheen?

A CHURCH ROMANCE (MELLSTOCK: CIRCA 1835)

SHE turned in the high pew, until her sight Swept the west gallery, and caught its row Of music-men with viol, book, and bow Against the sinking sad tower-window light.

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TIME'S LAUGHINGSTOCKS

She turned again; and in her pride's despite One strenuous viol's inspirer seemed to throw A message from his string to her below, Which said: 'I claim thee as my own forthright!' Thus their hearts' bond began, in due time signed. And long years thence, when Age had scared Romance, At some old attitude of his or glance That gallery-scene would break upon her mind, With him as minstrel, ardent, young, and trim, Bowing 'New Sabbath' or 'Mount Ephraim'.

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THE ROMAN ROAD THE Roman Road runs straight and bare As the pale parting-line in hair Across the heath. And thoughtful men Contrast its days of Now and Then, And delve, and measure, and compare;

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Visioning on the vacant air Helmed legionaries, who proudly rear The Eagle, as they pace again The Roman Road. But no tall brass-helmed legionnaire Haunts it for me. Uprises there A mother's form upon my ken, Guiding my infant steps, as when We walked that ancient thoroughfare, The Roman Road.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

ONE WE KNEW (M.H. 1772-1857)

SHE told how they used to form for the country dances 'The Triumph', 'The New-rigged Ship' To the light of the guttering wax in the panelled manses, And in cots to the blink of a dip. She spoke of the wild 'poussetting' and 'allemanding' On carpet, on oak, and on sod; And the two long rows of ladies and gentlemen standing, And the figures the couples trod. She showed us the spot where the maypole was yearly planted, And where the bandsmen stood While breeched and kerchiefed partners whirled, and panted To choose each other for good. She told of that far-back day when they learnt astounded Of the death of the King of France: Of the Terror; and then of Bonaparte's unbounded Ambition and arrogance. Of how his threats woke warlike preparations Along the southern strand, And how each night brought tremors and trepidations Lest morning should see him land.

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She said she had often heard the gibbet creaking As it swayed in the lightning flash, Had caught from the neighbouring town a small child's shrieking At the cart-tail under the lash .... With cap-framed face and long gaze into the embers 25 We seated around her knees She would dwell on such dead themes, not as one who remembers, But rather as one who sees.

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TIME'S LAUGHINGSTOCKS

She seemed one left behind of a band gone distant So far that no tongue could hail: Past things retold were to her as things existent, Things present but as a tale.

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20 May 1902

THE MAN HE KILLED 'HAD he and I but met By some old ancient inn, We should have sat us down to wet Right many a nipperkin! 'But ranged as infantry, And staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place.

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'I shot him dead because Because he was my foe, Just so: my foe of course he was; That's clear enough; although

10

'He thought he'd 'list, perhaps, Off-hand like - just as I Was out of work- had sold his traps No other reason why. 'Yes, quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You'd treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown.'

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20 1902

From: Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914) 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 Christes 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).'

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SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

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.

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April 1914

THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN (LINES ON THE LOSS OF THE 'TITANIC')

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.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY IV

Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

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v

Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: 'What does this vaingloriousness down here?' . . . 15 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.

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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,

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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.

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SA TIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

'WHEN

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SET OUT FOR LYONNESSE' (1870)

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, All marked with mute surmise My radiance rare and fathomless, When I came back from Lyonnesse With magic in my eyes!

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A THUNDERSTORM IN TOWN (A REMINISCENCE: 1893)

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.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY BEYOND THE LAST LAMP (NEAR TOOTING COMMON)

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.

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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.

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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.

IS

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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.

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SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

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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.

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WESSEX HEIGHTS (I 896)

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 friendHer 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 waysShadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days: They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things Men with a wintry sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

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

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

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. 20 There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night, There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin-lipped and vague, in a shroud of white, There is one in the railway train whenever I do not want it near, I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear. As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers, 25 I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers; Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know; Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go. So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west, Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest, 30 Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me, And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty. IN DEATH DIVIDED

I

rot here, with those whom in their day You never knew, And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay, Met not my view, Will in your distant grave-place ever neighbour you. SHALL

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SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE II

No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower, While earth endures, Will fall on my mound and within the hour Steal on to yours; One robin never haunt our two green covertures.

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III

Some organ may resound on Sunday noons By where you lie, Some other thrill the panes with other tunes Where moulder I; No selfsame chords compose our common lullaby.

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IV

The simply-cut memorial at my head Perhaps may take A rustic form, and that above your bed A stately make; No linking symbol show thereon for our tale's sake.

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v

And in the monotonous moils of strained, hard-run Humanity, The eternal tie which binds us twain in one No eye will see Stretching across the miles that sever you from me. 189-

AT DAY-CLOSE IN NOVEMBER THE ten hours' light is abating, And a late bird wings across, Where the pines, like waltzers waiting, Give their black heads a toss.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY Beech leaves, that yellow the noon-time, Float past like specks in the eye; I set every tree in my June time, And now they obscure the sky. And the children who ramble through here Conceive that there never has been A time when no ta1l trees grew here, That none will in time be seen.

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UNDER THE WATERFALL 'WHENEVER I plunge my arm, like this, In a basin of water, I never miss The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray. Hence the only prime And real love-rhyme That I know by heart, And that leaves no smart, Is the purl of a little valley fall About three spans wide and two spans tall Over a table of solid rock, And into a scoop of the self-same block; The purl of a runlet that never ceases In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces; With a hollow boiling voice it speaks And has spoken since hills were turfless peaks.' 'And why gives this the only prime Idea to you of a real love-rhyme? And why does plunging your arm in a bowl Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul?'

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SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

'Well, under the fall, in a crease of the stone, Though where precisely none ever has known, Jammed darkly, nothing to show how prized, And by now with its smoothness opalized, Is a drinking-glass: For, down that pass My lover and I Walked under a sky Of blue with a leaf-wove awning of green, In the burn of August, to paint the scene, And we placed our basket of fruit and wine By the runlet's rim, where we sat to dine; And when we had drunk from the glass together, Arched by the oak-copse from the weather, I held the vessel to rinse in the fall, Where it slipped, and sank, and was past recall, Though we stooped and plumbed the little abyss With long bared arms. There the glass still is. And, as said, if I thrust my arm below Cold water in basin or bowl, a throe From the past awakens a sense of that time, And the glass we used, and the cascade's rhyme. The basin seems the pool, and its edge The hard smooth face of the brook-side ledge, And the leafy pattern of china-ware The hanging plants that were bathing there. 'By night, by day, when it shines or lours, There lies intact that chalice of ours, And its presence adds to the rhyme of love Persistently sung by the fall above. No lip has touched it since his and mine In turns therefrom sipped lovers' wine.'

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Poems of 1912-13: Veteris vestigia jlammae THE GOING WHY did you give no hint that night That quickly after the morrow's dawn, And calmly, as if indifferent quite, You would close your term here, up and be gone Where I could not follow With wing of swallow To gain one glimpse of you ever anon! Never to bid good-bye, Or lip me the softest call, Or utter a wish for a word, while I Saw morning harden upon the wall, Unmoved, unknowing That your great going Had place that moment, and altered all. Why do you make me leave the house And think for a breath it is you I see At the end of the alley of bending boughs Where so often at dusk you used to be; Till in darkening dankness The yawning blankness Of the perspective sickens me! You were she who abode By those red-veined rocks far West, You were the swan-necked one who rode Along the beetling Beeny Crest, And, reining nigh me, Would muse and eye me, While Life unrolled us its very best.

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SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

Why, then, latterly did we not speak, Did we not think of those days long dead, And ere your vanishing strive to seek That time's renewal? We might have said, 'In this bright spring weather We'll visit together Those places that once we visited.' Well, well! All's past amend, Unchangeable. It must go. I seem but a dead man held on end To sink down soon . . . . 0 you could not know That such swift fleeing No soul foreseeing Not even I -would undo me so!

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December 1912

YOUR LAST DRIVE HERE by the moorway you returned, And saw the borough lights ahead That lit your face - all undiscerned To be in a week the face of the dead, And you told of the charm of that haloed view That never again would beam on you. And on your left you passed the spot Where eight days later you were to lie, And be spoken of as one who was not; Beholding it with a heedless eye As alien from you, though under its tree You soon would halt everlastingly. I drove not with you .... Yet had I sat At your side that eve I should not have seen That the countenance I was glancing at Had a last-time look in the flickering sheen, Nor have read the writing upon your face, 'I go hence soon to my resting-place;

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

'You may miss me then. But I shall not know How many times you visit me there, Or what your thoughts are, or if you go There never at all. And I shall not care. Should you censure me I shall take no heed And even your praises no more shall need.' True: never you'll know. And you will not mind. But shall I then slight you because of such? Dear ghost, in the past did you ever find The thought 'What profit,' move me much? Yet abides the fact, indeed, the same, You are past love, praise, indifference, blame.

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December 1912

RAIN ON A GRAVE spout upon her Their waters amain In ruthless disdain, Her who but lately Had shivered with pain As at touch of dishonour If there had lit on her So coldly, so straightly Such arrows of rain. CLOUDS

One who to shelter Her delicate head Would quicken and quicken Each tentative tread If drops chanced to pelt her That summertime spills In dust-paven rills When thunder-clouds thicken And birds close their bills.

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SA TIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

Would that I lay there And she were housed here! Or better, together Were folded away there Exposed to one weather We both, - who would stray there When sunny the day there, Or evening was clear At the prime of the year. Soon will be growing Green blades from her mound, And daisies be showing Like stars on the ground, Till she form part of them Ay - the sweet heart of them, Loved beyond measure With a child's pleasure All her life's round.

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31 january 1913

'I FOUND HER OUT THERE' I FOUND her out there On a slope few see, That falls westwardly To the salt-edged air, Where the ocean breaks On the purple strand, And the hurricane shakes The solid land.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

I brought her here, And have laid her to rest In a noiseless nest No sea beats near. She will never be stirred In her loamy cell By the waves long heard And loved so well. So she does not sleep By those haunted heights The Atlantic smites And the blind gales sweep, Whence she often would gaze At Dundagel' s famed head, While the dipping blaze Dyed her face fire-red; And would sigh at the tale Of sunk Lyonnesse, As a wind-tugged tress Flapped her cheek like a flail; Or listen at whiles With a thought-bound brow To the murmuring miles She is far from now. Yet her shade, maybe, Will creep underground Till it catch the sound Of that western sea As it swells and sobs Where she once domiciled, And joy in its throbs With the heart of a child.

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SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

49

LAMENT How she would have loved A party to-day! Bright-hatted and gloved, With table and tray And chairs on the lawn Her smiles would have shone With welcomings .... But She is shut, she is shut From friendship's spell In the jailing shell Of her tiny cell. Or she would have reigned At a dinner to-night With ardours unfeigned, And a generous delight; All in her abode She'd have freely bestowed On her guests .... But alas, She is shut under grass Where no cups flow, Powerless to know That it might be so. And she would have sought With a child's eager glance The shy snowdrops brought By the new year's advance, And peered in the rime Of Candlemas-time For crocuses ... chanced It that she were not tranced From sights she loved best; Wholly possessed By an infinite rest!

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY And we are here staying Amid these stale things, Who care not for gaying, And those junketings That used so to joy her, And never to cloy her As us they cloy! . . . But She is shut, she is shut From the cheer of them, dead To all done and said In her yew-arched bed.

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THE HAUNTER HE does not think that I haunt here nightly: How shall I let him know That whither his fancy sets him wandering I, too, alertly go? Hover and hover a few feet from him Just as I used to do, But cannot answer the words he lifts me Only listen thereto! When I could answer he did not say them: When I could let him know How I would like to join in his journeys Seldom he wished to go. Now that he goes and wants me with him More than he used to do, Never he sees my faithful phantom Though he speaks thereto. Yes, I companion him to places Only dreamers know, Where the shy hares print long paces, Where the night rooks go; Into old aisles where the past is all to him, Close as his shade can do, Always lacking the power to call to him, Near as I reach thereto!

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SATIRES

OF

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CIRCUMSTANCE

What a good haunter I am, 0 tell him! Quickly make him know If he but sigh since my loss befell him Straight to his side I go. Tell him a faithful one is doing All that love can do Still that his path may be worth pursuing, And to bring peace thereto.

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THE VOICE WoMAN much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown! Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness Travelling across the wet mead to me here, You being ever dissolved to wan wisdessness, Heard no more again far or near?

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Thus I; faltering forward, Leaves around me falling, Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, And the woman calling. December 1912

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

AFTER A JOURNEY I come to view a voiceless ghost; Whither, 0 whither will its whim now draw me? Up the cliff, down, till I'm lonely, lost, And the unseen waters' ejaculations awe me. Where you will next be there's no knowing, Facing round about me everywhere, With your nut-coloured hair, And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going. HERETO

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Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last; Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you; 10 What have you now found to say of our past Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you? Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division? Things were not lastly as firstly well With us twain, you tell? 15 But all's closed now, despite Time's derision. I see what you are doing: you are leading me on To the spots we knew when we haunted here together, The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone At the then fair hour in the then fair weather, And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago, When you were all aglow, And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

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Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see, 25 The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily; Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me, For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily. Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours, The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again! 30 I am just the same as when Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers. Pentargan Bay

SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

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BEENY CLIFF MARCH 1870-MARCH 1913

0 THE opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me. II

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away 5 In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say, As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that dear-sunned March day. III

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain, And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain, And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main. IV

- Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky, 10 And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh, And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by? v

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore, The woman now is - elsewhere - whom the ambling pony bore, And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there 15 nevermore. AT CASTLE BOTEREL As I drive to the junction of lane and highway, And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette, I look behind at the fading byway, And see on its slope, now glistening wet, Distinctly yet

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

Myself and a girlish form benighted In dry March weather. We climb the road Beside a chaise. We had just alighted To ease the sturdy pony's load When he sighed and slowed.

10

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of Matters not much, nor to what it led, Something that life will not be balked of Without rude reason till hope is dead, And feeling fled.

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It filled but a minute. But was there ever A time of such quality, since or before, In that hill's story? To one mind never, Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore, By thousands more.

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Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border, And much have they faced there, first and last, Of the transitory in Earth's long order; But what they record in colour and cast Is - that we two passed.

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And to me, though Time's unflinching rigour, In mindless rote, has ruled from sight The substance now, one phantom figure Remains on the slope, as when that night Saw us alight.

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I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking, I look back at it amid the rain For the very last time; for my sand is sinking, And I shall traverse old love's domain Never again.

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March 1913

SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

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THE PHANTOM HORSEWOMAN

are the ways of a man I know: He comes and stands In a careworn craze, And looks at the sands And the seaward haze With moveless hands And face and gaze, Then turns to go ... And what does he see when he gazes so? QuEER

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II

They say he sees as an instant thing More clear than to-day, A sweet soft scene That was once in play By that briny green; Yes, notes alway Warm, real, and keen, What his back years bring A phantom of his own figuring.

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III

Of this vision of his they might say more: Not only there Does he see this sight, But everywhere In his brain - day, night, As if on the air It were drawn rose-bright Yea, far from that shore Does he carry this vision of heretofore:

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY IV

A ghost-girl-rider. And though, toil-tried, He withers daily, Time touches her not, But she still rides gaily In his rapt thought On that shagged and shaly Atlantic spot, And as when first eyed Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide.

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1913

WHERE THE PICNIC WAS WHERE we made the fire In the summer time Of branch and briar On the hill to the sea, I slowly climb Through winter mire, And scan and trace The forsaken place Quite readily. Now a cold wind blows, And the grass is gray, But the spot still shows As a burnt circle - aye, And stick-ends, charred, Still strew the sward Whereon I stand, Last relic of the band Who came that day!

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SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE

Yes, I am here Just as last year, And the sea breathes brine From its strange straight line Up hither, the same As when we four came. - But two have wandered far From this grassy rise Into urban roar Where no picnics are, And one - has shut her eyes For evermore

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II. IN CHURCH 'AND now to God the Father,' he ends, And his voice thrills up to the topmost tiles: Each listener chokes as he bows and bends, And emotion pervades the crowded aisles. Then the preacher glides to the vestry-door, And shuts it, and thinks he is seen no more. The door swings softly ajar meanwhile, And a pupil of his in the Bible class, Who adores him as one without gloss or guile, Sees her idol stand with a satisfied smile And re-enact at the vestry-glass Each pulpit gesture in deft dumb-show That had moved the congregation so.

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From: Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917) AFTERNOON SERVICE AT MELLSTOCK (CIRCA 1850)

ON afternoons of drowsy calm We stood in the panelled pew, Singing one-voiced a Tate-and-Brady psalm To the tune of 'Cambridge New'. We watched the elms, we watched the rooks, The clouds upon the breeze, Between the whiles of glancing at our books, And swaying like the trees. So mindless were those outpourings! Though I am not aware That I have gained by subtle thought on things Since we stood psalming there.

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AT THE WORD 'FAREWELL' SHE looked like a bird from a cloud On the clammy lawn, Moving alone, bare-browed In the dim of dawn. The candles alight in the room For my parting meal Made all things withoutdoors loom Strange, ghostly, unreal.

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MOMENTS OF VISION

The hour itself was a ghost, And it seemed to me then As of chances the chance furthermost I should see her again. I beheld not where all was so fleet That a Plan of the past Which had ruled us from birthtime to meet Was in working at last: No prelude did I there perceive To a drama at all, Or foreshadow what fortune might weave From beginnings so small; But I rose as if quicked by a spur I was bound to obey, And stepped through the casement to her Still alone in the gray. 'I am leaving you .... Farewell!' I said, As I followed her on By an alley bare boughs overspread; 'I soon must be gone!' Even then the scale might have been turned Against love by a feather, - But crimson one cheek of hers burned When we came in together.

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HEREDITY I AM the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY The years-heired feature that can In curve and voice and eye Despise the human span Of durance - that is I; The eternal thing in man, That heeds no call to die.

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ON A MIDSUMMER EVE I IDLY cut a parsley stalk, And blew therein towards the moon; I had not thought what ghosts would walk With shivering footsteps to my tune. I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand As if to drink, into the brook, And a faint figure seemed to stand Above me, with the bygone look. I lipped rough rhymes of chance, not choice, I thought not what my words might be; There came into my ear a voice That turned a tenderer verse for me.

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'SOMETHING TAPPED' SoMETHING tapped on the pane of my room When there was never a trace Of wind or rain, and I saw in the gloom My weary Beloved's face. '0 I am tired of waiting,' she said, 'Night, morn, noon, afternoon; So cold it is in my lonely bed, And I thought you would join me soon!'

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MOMENTS OF VISION I rose and neared the window-glass, But vanished thence had she: Only a pallid moth, alas, Tapped at the pane for me.

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August 1913

THE OXEN CHRISTMAS EvE, and 'Now they are all An elder said as we By the embers in

twelve of the clock. on their knees,' sat in a flock hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then. So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, 'Come; see the oxen kneel

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'In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,' I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.

15 1915

TRANSFORMATIONS PoRTION of this yew Is a man my grandsire knew, Bosomed here at its foot: This branch may be his wife, A ruddy human life Now turned to a green shoot.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY These grasses must be made Of her who often prayed, Last century, for repose; And the fair girl long ago Whom I often tried to know May be entering this rose. So, they are not underground, But as nerves and veins abound In the growths of upper air, And they feel the sun and rain, And the energy again That made them what they were!

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GREAT THINGS SwEET cycler is a great thing, A great thing to me, Spinning down to Weymouth town By Ridgway thirstily, And maid and mistress summoning Who tend the hostelry: 0 cycler is a great thing, A great thing to me! The dance it is a great thing, A great thing to me, With candles lit and partners fit For night-long revelry; And going home when day-dawning Peeps pale upon the lea: 0 dancing is a great thing, A great thing to me!

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MOMENTS OF VISION

Love is, yea, a great thing, A great thing to me, When, having drawn across the lawn In darkness silently, A figure flits like one a-wing Out from the nearest tree: 0 love is, yes, a great thing, A great thing to me! Will these be always great things, Great things to me? ... Let it befall that One will call, 'Soul, I have need of thee:' What then? Joy-jaunts, impassioned flings, Love, and its ecstasy, Will always have been great things, Great things to me!

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AT MIDDLE-FIELD GATE IN FEBRUARY THE bars are thick with drops that show As they gather themselves from the fog Like silver buttons ranged in a row, And as evenly spaced as if measured, although They fall at the feeblest jog.

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They load the leafless hedge hard by, And the blades of last year's grass, While the fallow ploughland turned up nigh In raw rolls, clammy and clogging lie Too clogging for feet to pass.

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How dry it was on a far-back day When straws hung the hedge and around, When amid the sheaves in amorous play In curtained bonnets and light array Bloomed a bevy now underground!

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Bockhampton Lane

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY THE MUSICAL BOX LIFELONG to be Seemed the fair colour of the time; That there was standing shadowed near A spirit who sang to the gentle chime Of the self-struck notes, I did not hear, I did not see. Thus did it sing To the mindless lyre that played indoors As she came to listen for me without: '0 value what the nonce outpours This best of life - that shines about Your welcoming!' I had slowed along After the torrid hours were done, Though still the posts and walls and road Flung back their sense of the hot-faced sun, And had walked by Stourside Mill, where broad Stream-lilies throng. And I descried The dusky house that stood apart, And her, white-muslined, waiting there In the porch with high-expectant heart, While still the thin mechanic air Went on inside. At whiles would flit Swart bats, whose wings, be-webbed and tanned, Whirred like the wheels of ancient clocks: She laughed a hailing as she scanned Me in the gloom, the tuneful box Intoning it.

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Lifelong to be I thought it. That there watched hard by A spirit who sang to the indoor tune, '0 make the most of what is nigh!' I did not hear in my dull soul-swoon I did not see.

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OLD FURNITURE I

not how it may be with others Who sit amid relics of householdry That date from the days of their mothers' mothers, But well I know how it is with me Continually. KNOW

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I see the hands of the generations That owned each shiny familiar thing In play on its knobs and indentations, And with its ancient fashioning Still dallying:

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Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler, As in a mirror a candle-flame Shows images of itself, each frailer As it recedes, though the eye may frame Its shape the same.

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On the clock's dull dial a foggy finger, Moving to set the minutes right With tentative touches that lift and linger In the wont of a moth on a summer night, Creeps to my sight.

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On this old viol, too, fingers are dancing As whilom - just over the strings by the nut, The tip of a bow receding, advancing In airy quivers, as if it would cut The plaintive gut.

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And I see a face by that box for tinder, Glowing forth in fits from the dark, And fading again, as the limen cinder Kindles to red at the flinty spark, Or goes out stark.

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Well, well. It is best to be up and doing, The world has no use for one to-day Who eyes things thus - no aim pursuing! He should not continue in this stay, But sink away.

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LOGS ON THE HEARTH A MEMORY OF A SISTER

THE fire advances along the log Of the tree we felled, Which bloomed and bore striped apples by the peck Till its last hour of bearing knelled. The fork that first my hand would reach And then my foot In climbings upward inch by inch, lies now Sawn, sapless, darkening with soot.

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Where the bark chars is where, one year, It was pruned, and bled Then overgrew the wound. But now, at last, Its growings all have stagnated.

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My fellow-climber rises dim From her chilly grave Just as she was, her foot near mine on the bending limb, Laughing, her young brown hand awave. December 1915

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MOMENTS OF VISION

THE SUNSHADE AH - it's the skeleton of a lady's sunshade, Here at my feet in the hard rock's chink, Merely a naked sheaf of wires! Twenty years have gone with their livers and diers Since it was silked in its white or pink.

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Noonshine riddles the ribs of the sunshade, No more a screen from the weakest ray; Nothing to tell us the hue of its dyes, Nothing but rusty bones as it lies In its coffin of stone, unseen till to-day.

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Where is the woman who carried that sunshade Up and down this seaside place? Little thumb standing against its stem, Thoughts perhaps bent on a love-stratagem, Softening yet more the already soft face!

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Is the fair woman who carried that sunshade A skeleton just as her property is, Laid in the chink that none may scan? And does she regret - if regret dust can The vain things thought when she flourished this?

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Swanage Cliffs

THE WIND'S PROPHECY I TRAVEL on by barren farms, And gulls glint out like silver flecks Against a cloud that speaks of wrecks, And bellies down with black alarms. I say: 'Thus from my lady's arms I go; those arms I love the best!' The wind replies from dip and rise, 'Nay; toward her arms thou journeyest.'

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

A distant verge morosely gray Appears, while clots of flying foam Break from its muddy monochrome, And a light blinks up far away. I sigh: 'My eyes now as all day Behold her ebon loops of hair!' Like bursting bonds the wind responds, 'Nay, wait for tresses flashing fair!' From tides the lofty coastlands screen Come smitings like the slam of doors, Or hammerings on hollow floors, As the swell cleaves through caves unseen. Say I: 'Though broad this wild terrene, Her city home is matched of none!' From the hoarse skies the wind replies: 'Thou shouldst have said her sea-bord one. ' The all-prevailing clouds exclude The one quick timorous transient star; The waves outside where breakers are Huzza like a mad multitude. 'Where the sun ups it, mist-imbued,' I cry, 'there reigns the star for me!' The wind outshrieks from points and peaks: 'Here, westward, where it downs, mean ye!' Yonder the headland, vulturine, Snores like old Skrymer in his sleep, And every chasm and every steep Blackens as wakes each pharos-shine. 'I roam, but one is safely mine,' I say. 'God grant she stay my own!' Low laughs the wind as if it grinned: 'Thy Love is one thou' st not yet known.' Rewritten from an old copy

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DURING WIND AND RAIN THEY sing their dearest songs He, she, all of them - yea, Treble and tenor and bass, And one to play; With the candles mooning each face . . . . Ah, no; the years 0! How the sick leaves reel down in throngs! They clear the creeping moss Elders and juniors - aye, Making the pathways neat And the garden gay; And they build a shady seat .... Ah, no; the years, the years; See, the white storm-birds wing across! They are blithely breakfasting all Men and maidens - yea, Under the summer tree, With a glimpse of the bay, While pet fowl come to the knee .... Ah, no; the years 0! And the rotten rose is ript from the wall. They change to a high new house, He, she, all of them - aye, Clocks and carpets and chairs On the lawn all day, And brightest things that are theirs .... Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

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70

POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY 'WHO'S IN THE NEXT ROOM?' 'WHO'S in the next room? - who? I seemed to see Somebody in the dawning passing through, Unknown to me.' 'Nay: you saw nought. He passed invisibly.'

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'Who's in the next room? -who? I seem to hear Somebody muttering firm in a language new That chills the ear.' 'No: you catch not his tongue who has entered there.'

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'Who's in the next room? -who? I seem to feel His breath like a clammy draught, as if it drew From the Polar Wheel.' 'No: none who breathes at all does the door conceal.'

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'Who's in the next room? -who? A figure wan With a message to one in there of something due? Shall I know him anon?' 'Yea he; and he brought such; and you'll know him anon.

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PAYING CALLS I WENT by footpath and by stile Beyond where bustle ends, Strayed here a mile and there a mile And called upon some friends. On certain ones I had not seen For years past did I call, And then on others who had been The oldest friends of all.

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MOMENTS OF VISION

It was the time of midsummer When they had used to roam; But now, though tempting was the air, I found them all at home.

I spoke to one and other of them By mound and stone and tree Of things we had done ere days were dim, But they spoke not to me.

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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.

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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 rwinkled gleams of the lamp's sad beams Like a living thing.

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What past can be yours, 0 journeying boy Towards a world unknown, Who calmly, as if incurious quite On all at stake, can undertake This plunge alone?

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Knows your soul a sphere, 0 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?

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

THE CHOIRMASTER'S BURIAL HE often would ask us That, when he died, After playing so many To their last rest, If out of us any Should here abide, And it would not task us, We would with our lutes Play over him By his grave-brim The psalm he liked best The one whose sense suits 'Mount Ephraim' And perhaps we should seem To him, in Death' s dream, Like the seraphim. As soon as I knew That his spirit was gone I thought this his due, And spoke thereupon. 'I think,' said the vicar, 'A read service quicker Than viols out-of-doors In these frosts and hoars. That old-fashioned way Requires a fine day, And it seems to me It had better not be.' Hence, that afternoon, Though never knew he That his wish could not be, To get through it faster They buried the master Without any tune.

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MOMENTS OF VISION

But 'twas said that, when At the dead of next night The vicar looked out, There struck on his ken Thronged roundabout, Where the frost was graying The headstoned grass, A band all in white Like the saints in church-glass, Singing and playing The ancient stave By the choirmaster's grave.

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Such the tenor man told When he had grown old. IN TIME OF 'THE BREAKING OF NATIONS' 1

ONLY a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. II

Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass.

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III

Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War's annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.

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Jer.

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1915 LI

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

AFTERWARDS WHEN the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, 'He was a man who used to notice such things'? If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink, The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think, 'To him this must have been a familiar sight.' If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.' If, when hearing that I have been stilled at the door, Watching the full-starred heavens that Will this thought rise on those who will 'He was one who had an eye for such

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at last, they stand winter sees, meet my face no more, 15 mysteries'?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom, And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings, Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom, 'He hears it not now, but used to notice such things'? 20

From:

Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922}

WEATHERS

is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly: And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at 'The Travellers' Rest', And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest, And citizens dream of the south and west, And so do I. THIS

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II

This is the weather the shepherd shuns, And so do I; When beeches drip in browns and duns, And thresh, and ply; And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe, And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate-bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go, And so do I.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY VOICES FROM THINGS GROWING IN A CHURCHYARD THESE flowers are I, poor Fanny Hurd, Sir or Madam, A little girl here sepultured. Once I flit-fluttered like a bird Above the grass, as now I wave In daisy shapes above my grave, All day cheerily, All night eerily! - I am one Bachelor Bowring, 'Gent', Sir or Madam; In shingled oak my bones were pent; Hence more than a hundred years I spent In my feat of change from a coffin-thrall To a dancer in green as leaves on a wall, All day cheerily, All night eerily! - I, these berries of juice and gloss, Sir or Madam, Am clean forgotten as Thomas Voss; Thin-urned, I have burrowed away from the moss That covers my sod, and have entered this yew, And turned to clusters ruddy of view, All day cheerily, All night eerily! - The Lady Gertrude, proud, high-bred, Sir or Madam, Am I - this laurel that shades your head; Into its veins I have stilly sped, And made them of me; and my leaves now shine, As did my satins superfine, All day cheerily, All night eerily!

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LATE LYRICS AND EARLIER

- I, who as innocent withwind climb, Sir or Madam, Am one Eve Greensleeves, in olden time Kissed by men from many a clime, Beneath sun, stars, in blaze, in breeze, As now by glowworms and by bees, All day cheerily, All night eerily! 1 - I'm old Squire Audeley Grey, who grew, Sir or Madam, Aweary of life, and in scorn withdrew; Till anon I clambered up anew As ivy-green, when my ache was stayed, And in that attire I have longtime gayed All day cheerily, All night eerily! - And so these maskers breathe to each Sir or Madam Who lingers there, and their lively speech Affords an interpreter much to teach, As their murmurous accents seem to come Thence hitheraround in a radiant hum, All day cheerily, All night eerily! 1

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It was said her real name was Eve Trevillian or Trevelyan; and that she was the handsome mother of two or three illegitimate children, circa 1784-95.

AN ANCIENT TO ANCIENTS once we danced, where once we sang, Gentlemen, The floors are sunken, cobwebs hang, And cracks creep; worms have fed upon The doors. Yea, sprightlier times were then Than now, with harps and tabrets gone, Gentlemen!

WHERE

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

Where once we rowed, where once we sailed, Gentlemen, And damsels took the tiller, veiled Against too strong a stare (God wot Their fancy, then or anywhen!) Upon that shore we are clean forgot, Gentlemen! We have lost somewhat, afar and near, Gentlemen, The thinning of our ranks each year Affords a hint we are nigh undone, That we shall not be ever again The marked of many, loved of one, Gentlemen. In dance the polka hit our wish, Gentlemen, The paced quadrille, the spry schottische, 'Sir Roger'. -And in opera spheres The 'Girl' (the famed 'Bohemian'), And 'Trovatore', held the ears, Gentlemen. This season's paintings do not please, Gentlemen, Like Etty, Mulready, Maclise; Throbbing romance has waned and wanned; No wizard wields the witching pen Of Bulwer, Scott, Dumas, and Sand, Gentlemen. The bower we shrined to Tennyson, Gentlemen, Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust, The spider is sole denizen; Even she who voiced those rhymes is dust, Gentlemen!

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LATE LYRICS AND EARLIER

We who met sunrise sanguine-souled, Gentlemen, Are wearing weary. We are old; These younger press; we feel our rout Is imminent to Aides' den, That evening shades are stretching out, Gentlemen! And yet, though ours be failing frames, Gentlemen, So were some others' history names, Who trode their track light-limbed and fast As these youth, and not alien From enterprise, to their long last, Gentlemen. Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, Gentlemen, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Homer, - yea, Clement, Augustin, Origen, Burnt brightlier towards their setting-day, Gentlemen. And ye, red-lipped and smooth-browed; list, Gentlemen; Much is there waits you we have missed; Much lore we leave you worth the knowing, Much, much has lain outside our ken: Nay, rush not: time serves: we are going, Gentlemen.

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From: Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925)

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.

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HUMAN SHOWS, FAR PHANTASIES

81

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.

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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 5 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.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

NO BUYERS A STREET SCENE

A

of brushes and baskets and cradles and chairs Labours along the street in the rain: With it a man, a woman, a pony with whiteybrown hairs. The man foots in front of the horse with a shambling sway At a slower tread than a funeral train, While to a dirge-like tune he chants his wares, Swinging a Turk's-head brush (in a drum-major's way When the bandsmen march and play). LOAD

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A yard from the back of the man is the whiteybrown pony's nose: He mirrors his master in every item of pace and pose: 10 He stops when the man stops, without being told, And seems to be eased by a pause; too plainly he's old, Indeed, not strength enough shows To steer the disjointed waggon straight, Which wriggles left and right in a rambling line, 15 Deflected thus by its own warp and weight, And pushing the pony with it in each incline. The woman walks on the pavement verge, Parallel to the man: She wears an apron white and wide in span, And carries a like Turk's-head, but more in nursing-wise: Now and then she joins in his dirge, But as if her thoughts were on distant things. The rain clams her apron till it clings. So, step by step, they move with their merchandize, And nobody buys.

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HUMAN SHOWS, FAR PHANTASIES

83

NOBODY COMES TREE-LEAVES labour up and down, And through them the fainting light Succumbs to the crawl of night. Outside in the road the telegraph wire To the town from the darkening land travellers like a spectral lyre to Intones Swept by a spectral hand. A car comes up, with lamps full-glare, That flash upon a tree: It has nothing to do with me, And whangs along in a world of its own, Leaving a blacker air; And mute by the gate I stand again alone, And nobody pulls up there.

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9 October 1924

SHORTENING DAYS AT THE HOMESTEAD THE first fire since the summer is lit, and is smoking into the room: The sun-rays thread it through, like woof-lines in a loom. Sparrows spurt from the hedge, whom misgivings appal That winter did not leave last year for ever, after all. 5 Like shock-headed urchins, spiny-haired, Stand pollard willows, their twigs just bared. Who is this coming with pondering pace, Black and ruddy, with white embossed, His eyes being black, and ruddy his face, And the marge of his hair like morning frost? It's the cider-maker, And appletree-shaker, And behind him on wheels, in readiness, His mill, and tubs, and vat, and press.

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From: Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928)

PROUD SONGSTERS THE thrushes sing as the sun is going, And the finches whistle in ones and pairs, And as it gets dark loud nightingales In bushes Pipe, as they can when April wears, As if all Time were theirs. These are brand-new birds of twelve-months' growing, Which a year ago, or less than twain, No finches were, nor nightingales, Nor thrushes, But only particles of grain, And earth, and air, and rain.

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'I AM THE ONE' I

the one whom ringdoves see Through chinks in boughs When they do not rouse In sudden dread, But stay on cooing, as if they said: 'Oh; it's only he.' AM

I am the passer when up-eared hares, Stirred as they eat The new-sprung wheat, Their munch resume As if they thought: 'He is one for whom Nobody cares.'

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WINTER WORDS

Wet-eyed mourners glance at me As in train they pass Along the grass To a hollowed spot, And think: 'No matter; he quizzes not Our misery.' I hear above: 'We stars must lend No fierce regard To his gaze, so hard Bent on us thus, Must scathe him not. He is one with us Beginning and end.'

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THROWING A TREE NEW FOREST

THE two executioners stalk along over the knolls, Bearing two axes with heavy heads shining and wide, And a long limp two-handled saw toothed for cutting great boles, And so they approach the proud tree that bears the death-mark on its side. Jackets doffed they swing axes and chop away just above ground, 5 And the clips fly about and lie white on the moss and fallen leaves; Till a broad deep gash in the bark is hewn all the way round, And one of them tries to hook upward a rope, which at last he achieves. The saw then begins, till the top of the tall giant shivers: The shivers are seen to grow greater each cut than before: 10 They edge out the saw, tug the rope; but the tree only quivers, And kneeling and sawing again, they step back to try pulling once more.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

Then, lastly, the living mast sways, further sways: with a shout Job and Ike rush aside. Reached the end of its long staying powers The tree crashes downward: it shakes all its neighbours through15 out, And two hundred years' steady growth has been ended in less than two hours. LYING AWAKE You, Morningtide Star, now are steady-eyed, over the east, I know it as if I saw you; You, Beeches, engrave on the sky your thin twigs, even the least; Had I paper and pencil I'd draw you. 5 You, Meadow, are white with your counterpane cover of dew, I see it as if I were there; You, Churchyard, are lightening faint from the shade of the yew, The names creeping out everywhere. HE NEVER EXPECTED MUCH [OR] A CONSIDERATION [A REFLECTION] ON MY EIGHTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY

WELL, World, you have kept faith with me, Kept faith with me; Upon the whole you have proved to be Much as you said you were. Since as a child I used to lie Upon the leaze and watch the sky, Never, I own, expected I That life would all be fair.

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WINTER WORDS

'Twas then you said, and since have said, Times since have said, In that mysterious voice you shed From clouds and hills around: 'Many have loved me desperately, Many with smooth sereniry, While some have shown contempt of me Till they dropped underground. 'I do not promise overmuch, Child; overmuch; Just neutral-tinted haps and such,' You said to minds like mine. Wise warning for your credit's sake! Which I for one failed not to take, And hence could stem such strain and ache As each year might assign.

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CHRISTMAS: 1924 'PEACE upon earth!' was said. We sing it, And pay a million priests to bring it. After rwo thousand years of mass We've got as far as poison-gas. 1924

'WE ARE GETTING TO THE END' WE are getting to the end of visioning The impossible within this universe, Such as that better whiles may follow worse, And that our race may mend by reasoning. We know that even as larks in cages sing Unthoughtful of deliverance from the curse That holds them lifelong in a latticed hearse, We ply spasmodically our pleasuring.

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POEMS: THE FAMILIAR HARDY

And that when nations set them to lay waste Their neighbours' heritage by foot and horse, And hack their pleasant plains in festering seams, They may again, - not warely, or from taste, But tickled mad by some demonic force. Yes. We are getting to the end of dreams!

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HE RESOLVES TO SAY NO MORE 0 MY soul, keep the rest unknown! It is too like a sound of moan When the charnel-eyed Pale Horse has nighed: Yea, none shall gather what I hide!

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Why load men's minds with more to bear That bear already ails to spare? From now alway Till my last day What I discern I will not say.

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Let Time roll backward if it will; (Magians who drive the midnight quill With brain aglow Can see it so,) What I have learnt no man shall know.

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And if my vision range beyond The blinkered sight of souls in bond, - By truth made free I'll let all be, And show to no man what I see.

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THE LESS FAMILIAR HARDY

t

'11 brain spins there till dawn': Personal Poems

A YOUNG MAN'S EPIGRAM ON EXISTENCE A SENSELESS school, where we must give Our lives that we may learn to live! A dolt is he who memorizes Lessons that leave no time for prizes. 16 WP. V, 1866

Time's Laughingstocks (1909)

CYNIC'S EPITAPH A

with the sun as he downed I ran at evetide, Intent who should first gain the ground And there hide. RACE

He beat me by some minutes then, But I triumphed anon, For when he'd to rise up again I stayed on.

Human Shows, Far Phantasies (1925)

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POEMS: THE LESS FAMILIAR HARDY

THE HOUSE OF SILENCE 'THAT is a quiet place That house in the trees with the shady lawn.' ' - If, child, you knew what there goes on You would not call it a quiet place. Why, a phantom abides there, the last of its race, And a brain spins there till dawn.'

'But I see nobody there, Nobody moves about the green, Or wanders the heavy trees between.' ' - Ah, that's because you do not bear The visioning powers of souls who dare To pierce the material screen. 'Morning, noon, and night, Mid those funereal shades that seem The uncanny scenery of a dream, Figures dance to a mind with sight, And music and laughter like floods of light Make all the precincts gleam. 'It is a poet's bower, Through which there pass, in fleet arrays, Long teams of all the years and days, Of joys and sorrows, of earth and heaven, That meet mankind in its ages seven, An aion in an hour.'

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Moments of Vision (1917)

'I ROSE UP AS MY CUSTOM IS' I

up as my custom is On the eve of All-Souls' day, And left my grave for an hour or so To call on those I used to know Before I passed away. ROSE

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PERSONAL POEMS

91

I visited my former Love As she lay by her husband's side; I asked her if life pleased her, now She was rid of a poet wrung in brow, And crazed with the ills he eyed;

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Who used to drag her here and there Wherever his fancies led, And point out pale phantasmal things, And talk of vain vague purposings That she discredited.

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She was quite civil, and replied, 'Old comrade, is that you? Well, on the whole, I like my life. I know I swore I'd be no wife, But what was I to do?

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'You see, of all men for my sex A poet is the worst; Women are practical, and they Crave the wherewith to pay their way, And slake their social thirst.

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'You were a poet - quite the ideal That we all love awhile: But look at this man snoring here He's no romantic chanticleer, Yet keeps me in good style.

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'He makes no quest into my thoughts, But a poet wants to know What one has felt from earliest days, Why one thought not in other ways, And one's Loves of long ago.'

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POEMS: THE LESS FAMILIAR HARDY

Her words benumbed my fond faint ghost; The nightmares neighed from their stalls, The vampires screeched, the harpies Hew, And under the dim dawn I withdrew To Death's inviolate halls.

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Satires of Circumstance (1914) ON AN INVITATION TO THE UNITED STATES

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.

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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.

Poems of the Past and the Present (190 1)

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PERSONAL POEMS

IN A EWELEAZE NEAR WEATHERBURY THE years have gathered grayly Since I danced upon this leaze With one who kindled gaily Love's fitful ecstasies! But despite the term as teacher, I remain what I was then In each essential feature Of the fantasies of men.

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Yet I note the little chisel Of never-napping Time Defacing wan and grizzel The blazon of my prime. When at night he thinks me sleeping I feel him boring sly Within my bones, and heaping Quaintest pains for by-and-by. Still, I'd go the world with Beauty, I would laugh with her and sing, I would shun divinest duty To resume her worshipping. But she'd scorn my brave endeavour, She would not balm the breeze By murmuring 'Thine for ever!' As she did upon this leaze. 1890

Wessex Poems (1898)

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POEMS: THE LESS FAMILIAR HARDY

'I SAID TO LOVE' I SAID to Love, 'It is not now as in old days When men adored thee and thy ways All else above; Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the One Who spread a heaven beneath the sun,' I said to Love. I said to him, 'We now know more of thee than then; We were but weak in judgment when, With hearts abrim, We clamoured thee that thou would' st please Inflict on us thine agonies,' I said to him. I said to Love, 'Thou art not young, thou art not fair, No elfin darts, no cherub air, Nor swan, nor dove Are thine; but features pitiless, And iron daggers of distress,' I said to Love. 'Depart then, Love! ... - Man's race shall perish, threatenest thou, Without thy kinding coupling-vow? The age to come the man of now Know nothing of? We fear not such a threat from thee; We are too old in apathy! Mankind shall cease. - So let it be,' I said to Love.

Poems of the Past and the Present (190 1)

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PERSONAL POEMS

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TRAGEDIAN TO TRAGEDIENNE SHALL I leave you behind me When I play In earnest what we've played in mock to-day? Why, yes; most surely shall I Leave you behind In yet full orbit, when my years upwind.

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I may creep oJf in the night-time, And none know Till comes the morning, bringing news 'tis so. Will you then turn for a moment White or red, Recall those spells of ours; things done, things said? Aye, those adventurous doings And those days Of stress, when I'd the blame and you the praise?

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Still you will meet adventure None knows what Still you will go on changing: I shall not. Still take a call at the mummings Daily or nightly, Yielding to custom, calmly, gloomily, brightly. Last, you will flag, and finish Your masquings too: Yes: end them: I not there to succour you.

Human Shows, Far Phantasies (1925)

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96

POEMS: THE LESS FAMILIAR HARDY THE DEAD MAN WALKING THEY hail me as one living, But don't they know That I have died of late years, Untombed although? I am but a shape that stands here, A pulseless mould, A pale past picture, screening Ashes gone cold. Not at a minute's warning, Not in a loud hour, For me ceased Time's enchantments In hall and bower. There was no tragic transit, No catch of breath, When silent seasons inched me On to this death .... -A Troubadour-youth I rambled With Life for lyre, The beats of being raging In me like fire.

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But when I practised eyeing The goal of men, It iced me, and I perished A little then. When passed my friend, my kinsfolk, Through the Last Door, And left me standing bleakly, I died yet more;

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PERSONAL POEMS

And when my Love's heart kindled In hate of me, Wherefore I knew not, died I One more degree. And if when I died fully I cannot say, And changed into the corpse-thing I am to-day; Yet is it that, though whiling The time somehow In walking, talking, smiling, I live not now.

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Time's Laughingstocks (1909) ON STINSFORD HILL AT MIDNIGHT a woman's muslined form Sing-songing airily Against the moon; and still she sang, And took no heed of me. I

GLIMPSED

Another trice, and I beheld What first I had not scanned, That now and then she tapped and shook A timbrel in her hand. So late the hour, so white her drape, So strange the look it lent To that blank hill, I could not guess What phantastry it meant. Then burst I forth: 'Why such from you? Are you so happy now?' Her voice swam on; nor did she show Thought of me anyhow.

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POEMS: THE LESS FAMILIAR HARDY

I called again: 'Come nearer; much That kind of note I need!' The song kept softening, loudening on, In placid calm unheed.

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'What home is yours now?' then I said; 'You seem to have no care.' But the wild wavering tune went forth As if I had not been there. 'This world is dark, and where you are,' I said, 'I cannot be!' But still the happy one sang on, And had no heed of me.

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Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) HIS IMMORTALITY

I SAW a dead man's finer part Shining within each faithful heart Of those bereft. Then said I: 'This must be His immortality.' II

I looked there as the seasons wore, And still his soul continuously bore A life in theirs. But less its shine excelled Than when I first beheld.

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His fellow-yearsmen passed, and then In later hearts I looked for him again; And found him - shrunk, alas! into a thin And spectral mannikin.

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PERSONAL POEMS IV

Lastly I ask - now old and chill If aught of him remain unperished still; And find, in me alone, a feeble spark, Dying amid the dark.

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February 1899

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

IN A FORMER RESORT AFTER MANY YEARS Do I know these, slack-shaped and wan, Whose substance, one time fresh and furrowless, Is now a rag drawn over a skeleton, As in El Greco's canvases? Whose cheeks have slipped down, lips become indrawn, And statures shrunk to dwarfishness? Do they know me, whose former mind Was like an open plain where no foot falls, But now is as a gallery portrait-lined, And scored with necrologic scrawls, Where feeble voices rise, once full-defined, From underground in curious calls?

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Human Shows, Far Phantasies (1925) THE NEW DAWN'S BUSINESS WHAT are you doing outside my walls, 0 Dawn of another day? I have not called you over the edge Of the heathy ledge, So why do you come this way, With your furtive footstep without sound here, And your face so deedily gray?

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POEMS: THE LESS FAMILIAR HARDY

'I show a light for killing the man Who lives not far from you, And for bringing to birth the lady's child, Nigh domiciled, And for earthing a corpse or two, And for several other such odd jobs round here That Time to-day must do. 'But you he leaves alone (although, As you have often said, You are always ready to pay the debt You don't forget You owe for board and bed): The truth is, when men willing are found here He takes those loth instead.'

Winter Words (1928)

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tt

The Figure in the Scene':

More Poems for Emma

THE FIGURE IN THE SCENE IT pleased her to step in front and sit Where the cragged slope was green, While I stood back that I might pencil it With her amid the scene; Till it gloomed and rained; But I kept on, despite the drifting wet That fell and stained My draught, leaving for curious quizzings yet The blots engrained.

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And thus I drew her there alone, Seated amid the gauze Of moisture, hooded, only her outline shown, With rainfall marked across. - Soon passed our stay; Yet her rainy form is the Genius still of the spot, Immutable, yea, Though the place now knows her no more, and has known her not Ever since that day.

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From an old note

Moments of Vision (191 7)

'A MAN WAS DRAWING NEAR TO ME' ON that gray night of mournful drone, Apart from aught to hear, to see, I dreamt not that from shires unknown In gloom, alone, By Halworthy, A man was drawing near to me.

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POEMS: THE LESS FAMILIAR HARDY

I'd no concern at anything, No sense of coming pull-heart play; Yet, under the silent outspreading Of even's wing Where Otterham lay, A man was riding up my way. I thought of nobody - not of one, But only of trifles - legends, ghosts Though, on the moorland dim and dun That travellers shun About these coasts, The man had passed Tresparret Posts. There was no light at all inland, Only the seaward pharos-fire, Nothing to let me understand That hard at hand By Hennett Byre The man was getting nigh and nigher. There was a rumble at the door, A draught disturbed the drapery, And but a minute passed before, With gaze that bore My destiny, The man revealed himself to me.

Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)

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MORE POEMS FOR EMMA

103

HAD YOU WEPT HAD you wept; had you but neared me with a hazed uncertain ray, Dewy as the face of the dawn, in your large and luminous eye, Then would have come back all the joys the tidings had slain that day, And a new beginning, a fresh fair heaven, have smoothed the things awry. But you were less feebly human, and no passionate need for clinging 5 Possessed your soul to overthrow reserve when I came near; Ay, though you suffer as much as I from storms the hours are bringing Upon your heart and mine, I never see you shed a tear. The deep strong woman is weakest, the weak one is the strong; The weapon of all weapons best for winning, you have not used; 10 Have you never been able, or would you not, through the evil times and long? Has not the gift been given you, or such gift have you refused? When I bade me not absolve you on that evening or the morrow, Why did you not make war on me with those who weep like rain? You felt too much, so gained no balm for all your torrid sorrow, 15 And hence our deep division, and our dark undying pain. Satires of Circumstance (1914) 'SHE DID NOT TURN' SHE did not turn, But passed foot-faint with averted head In her gown of green, by the bobbing fern, Though I leaned over the gate that led From where we waited with table spread; But she did not turn: Why was she near there if love had fled?

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POEMS: THE LESS FAMILIAR HARDY

She did not turn, Though the gate was whence I had often sped In the mists of morning to meet her, and learn Her heart, when its moving moods I read As a book - she mine, as she sometimes said; But she did not turn, And passed foot-faint with averted head.

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Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) THE TRESSES 'WHEN the air was damp It made my curls hang slack As they kissed my neck and back While I footed the salt-aired track I loved to tramp.

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'When it was dry They would roll up crisp and tight As I went on in the light Of the sun, which my own sprite Seemed to outvie.

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'Now I am old; And have not one gay curl As I had when a girl For dampness to unfurl Or sun uphold!'

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Moments of Vision (1917)

MORE POEMS FOR EMMA

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ON A DISCOVERED CURL OF HAIR WHEN your soft welcomings were said, This curl was waving on your head, And when we walked where breakers dinned It sported in the sun and wind, And when I had won your words of grace It brushed and clung about my face. Then, to abate the misery Of absentness, you gave it me. Where are its fellows now? Ah, they For brightest brown have donned a gray, And gone into a caverned ark, Ever unopened, always dark! Yet this one curl, untouched of time, Beams with live brown as in its prime, So that it seems I even could now Restore it to the living brow By bearing down the western road Till I had reached your old abode.

Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)

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February 1913

THE HEAD ABOVE THE FOG SoMETHING do I see Above the fog that sheets the mead, A figure like to life indeed, Moving along with spectre-speed, Seen by none but me. 0 the vision keen! Tripping along to me for love As in the flesh it used to move, Only its hat and plume above The evening fog-fleece seen.

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POEMS: THE LESS FAMILIAR HARDY

In the day-fall wan, When nighted birds break off their song, Mere ghostly head it skims along, Just as it did when warm and strong, Body seeming gone.

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Such it is I see Above the fog that sheets the mead Yea, that which once could breathe and plead! Skimming along with spectre-speed To a last tryst with me.

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Moments ofVision (1917)

ttt 'Coded creeds': Poems of Philosophy and Religion

A CATHEDRAL FA