Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1008 page)

A MUSICAL INCIDENT

When I see the room it hurts me
As with a pricking blade,
Those women being the memoried reason why my cheer deserts me. —
‘Twas thus. One of them played
To please her friend, not knowing
That friend was speedily growing,
Behind the player’s chair,
Somnolent, unaware
Of any music there.

I saw it, and it distressed me,
For I had begun to think
I loved the drowsy listener, when this arose to test me
And tug me from love’s brink.
“Beautiful!” said she, waking
As the music ceased. “Heart-aching!”
Though never a note she’d heard
To judge of as averred —
Save that of the very last word.

All would have faded in me,
But that the sleeper brought
News a week thence that her friend was dead. It stirred within me
Sense of injustice wrought
That dead player’s poor intent —
So heartily, kindly meant —
As blandly added the sigher:
“How glad I am I was nigh her,
To hear her last tune!” — ”Liar!”
I lipped. — This gave love pause,
And killed it, such as it was.

JUNE LEAVES AND AUTUMN

I

Lush summer lit the trees to green;
But in the ditch hard by
Lay dying boughs some hand unseen
Had lopped when first with festal mien
They matched their mates on high.
It seemed a melancholy fate
That leaves but brought to birth so late
Should rust there, red and numb,
In quickened fall, while all their race
Still joyed aloft in pride of place
With store of days to come.

II

At autumn-end I fared that way,
And traced those boughs fore-hewn
Whose leaves, awaiting their decay
In slowly browning shades, still lay
Where they had lain in June
And now, no less embrowned and curst
Than if they had fallen with the first,
Nor known a morning more,
Lay there alongside, dun and sere,
Those that at my last wandering here
Had length of days in store.

November 19, 1898.

NO BELL-RINGING

A BALLAD OF DURNOVER

The little boy legged on through the dark,
To hear the New-Year’s ringing:
The three-mile road was empty, stark,
No sound or echo bringing.

When he got to the tall church tower
Standing upon the hill,
Although it was hard on the midnight hour
The place was, as elsewhere, still;

Except that the flag-staff rope, betossed
By blasts from the nor’-east,
Like a dead man’s bones on a gibbet-post
Tugged as to be released.

“Why is there no ringing to-night?”
Said the boy to a moveless one
On a tombstone where the moon struck white;
But he got answer none.

“No ringing in of New Year’s Day.”
He mused as he dragged back home;
And wondered till his head was gray
Why the bells that night were dumb.

And often thought of the snowy shape
That sat on the moonlit stone,
Nor spoke nor moved, and in mien and drape
Seemed like a sprite thereon.

And then he met one left of the band
That had treble-bobbed when young,
And said: “I never could understand
Why, that night, no bells rung.”

“True. There’d not happened such a thing
For half a century; aye,
And never I’ve told why they did not ring
From that time till to-day. . . .

“Through the week in bliss at
The Hit or Miss
We had drunk — not a penny left;
What then we did — well, now ‘tis hid, —
But better we’d stooped to theft!

“Yet, since none other remains who can,
And few more years are mine,
I may tell you,” said the cramped old man.
“We — swilled the Sacrament-wine.

“Then each set-to with the strength of two,
Every man to his bell;
But something was wrong we found ere long
Though what, we could not tell.

“We pulled till the sweat-drops fell around,
As we’d never pulled before,
An hour by the clock, but not one sound
Came down through the bell-loft floor.

“On the morrow all folk of the same thing spoke,
They had stood at the midnight time
On their doorsteps near with a listening ear,
But there reached them never a chime.

“We then could read the dye of our deed,
And we knew we were accurst;
But we broke to none the thing we had done,
And since then never durst.”

An old tavern now demolished. The full legend over the door ran, “Hit or Miss: Luck’s All!”

I LOOKED BACK

I looked back as I left the house,
And, past the chimneys and neighbour tree,
The moon upsidled through the boughs: —
I thought: “I shall a last time see
This picture; when will that time be?”

I paused amid the laugh-loud feast,
And selfward said: “I am sitting where,
Some night, when ancient songs have ceased,
‘Now is the last time I shall share
Such cheer,’” will be the thought I bear.

An eye-sweep back at a look-out corner
Upon a hill, as forenight wore,
Stirred me to think: “Ought I to warn her
That, though I come here times three-score,
One day ‘twill be I come no more?”

Anon I reasoned there had been,
Ere quite forsaken was each spot,
Bygones whereon I’d lastly seen
That house, that feast, that maid forgot;
But when? — Ah, I remembered not!

THE AGED NEWSPAPER SOLILOQUIZES

Yes; yes; I am old. In me appears
The history of a hundred years;
Empires’, kings’, captives’, births and deaths,
Strange faiths, and fleeting shibboleths.
 — Tragedy, comedy, throngs my page
Beyond all mummed on any stage:
Cold hearts beat hot, hot hearts beat cold,
And I beat on. Yes; yes; I am old.

CHRISTMAS: 1 “Peace upon earth!” was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

1924.

THE SINGLE WITNESS

“Did no one else, then, see them, man,
Lying among the whin?
Did no one else, behold them at all
Commit this shameless sin,
But you, in the hollow of the down
No traveller’s eye takes in?”

“Nobody else, my noble lord,
Saw them together there —
Your young son’s tutor and she. I made
A short cut from the fair,
And lit on them. I’ve said no word
About it anywhere.”

“Good. . . . Now, you see my father’s sword,
Hanging up in your view;
No hand has swung it since he came
Home after Waterloo.
I’ll show it you. . . . There is the sword:
And this is what I’ll do.”

He ran the other through the breast,
Ere he could plead or cry.
“It is a dire necessity,
But — since no one was nigh
Save you and they, my historied name
Must not be smirched thereby.”

HOW SHE WENT TO IRELAND

Dora’s gone to Ireland
Through the sleet and snow:
Promptly she has gone there
In a ship, although
Why she’s gone to Ireland
Dora does not know.

That was where, yea, Ireland,
Dora wished to be:
When she felt, in lone times,
Shoots of misery,
Often there, in Ireland,
Dora wished to be.

Hence she’s gone to Ireland,
Since she meant to go,
Through the drift and darkness
Onward labouring, though
That she’s gone to Ireland
Dora does not know.

DEAD WESSEX THE DOG TO THE HOUSEHOLD

Do you think of me at all,
Wistful ones?
Do you think of me at all
As if nigh?
Do you think of me at all
At the creep of evenfall,
Or when the sky-birds call
As they fly?

Do you look for me at times,
Wistful ones?
Do you look for me at times
Strained and still?
Do you look for me at times,
When the hour for walking chimes,
On that grassy path that climbs
Up the hill?

You may hear a jump or trot,
Wistful ones,
You may hear a jump or trot —
Mine, as ‘twere —
You may hear a jump or trot
On the stair or path or plot;
But I shall cause it not,
Be not there.

Should you call as when I knew you,
Wistful ones,
Should you call as when I knew you,
Shared your home;

Should you call as when I knew you,
I shall not turn to view you,
I shall not listen to you,
Shall not come.

THE WOMAN WHO WENT EAST

“Where is that woman of the west,
Good Sir, once friends with me,
In rays of her own rareness drest,
And fired by sunset from the sea?
Yes, she — once friends with me.”

“ — She went to sojourn in the east,
O stranger Dame, one day;
Her own west land she reckoned least
Of all lands, with its weird old way,
So left it, Dame, one day:

“Doubtless they prized her marvellous mould
At its right worth elsewhere,
Yea, Dame, and kept her shrined in gold,
So speaking, as one past compare;
Aye, prized her worth elsewhere!”

— ”Must, must I then a story tell,
Old native, here to you,
Of peradventures that befel
Her eastward — shape it as ‘twere new,
Old native, here to you?

“O unforgotten day long back,
When, wilful, east she sped
From you with her new Love. Alack,
Her lips would still be ripe and red
Had she not eastward sped!

“For know, old lover, dull of eyes,
That woman, I am she:
This skeleton that Time so tries
Your rose of rareness used to be;
Yes, sweetheart, I am she.”

NOT KNOWN

They know the wilings of the world,
The latest flippancy;
They know each jest at hazard hurled,
But know not me.

They know a phasm they name as me,
In whom I should not find
A single self-held quality
Of body or mind.

THE BOY’S DREAM

Provincial town-boy he, — frail, lame,
His face a waning lily-white,
A court the home of his wry, wrenched frame,
Where noontide shed no warmth or light.

Over his temples — flat and wan,
Where bluest veins were patterned keen,
The skin appeared so thinly drawn
The skull beneath was almost seen.

Always a wishful, absent look
Expressed it in his face and eye;
At the strong shape this longing took
One guessed what wish must underlie.

But no. That wish was not for strength,
For other boys’ agility,
To race with ease the field’s far length,
Now hopped across so painfully.

He minded not his lameness much,
To shine at feats he did not long,
Nor to be best at goal and touch,
Nor at assaults to stand up strong.

But sometimes he would let be known
What the wish was: — to have, next spring,
A real green linnet — his very own —
Like that one he had late heard sing.

And as he breathed the cherished dream
To those whose secrecy was sworn,
His face was beautified by the theme,
And wore the radiance of the morn.

THE GAP IN THE WHITE

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178*)

Something had cracked in her mouth as she slept,
Having danced with the Prince long, and sipped his gold tass;
And she woke in alarm, and quick, breathlessly, leapt
Out of bed to the glass.

And there, in the blue dawn, her mouth now displayed
To her woe, in the white
Level line of her teeth, a black gap she had made
In a dream’s nervous bite.

“O how can I meet him to-morrow!” she said.
“I’d won him — yes, yes! Now, alas, he is lost!”
(That age knew no remedy.) Duly her dread
Proved the truth, to her cost.

And if you could go and examine her grave
You’d find the gap there,
But not understand, now that science can save,
Her unbounded despair.

FAMILY PORTRAITS

Three picture-drawn people stepped out of their frames —
The blast, how it blew!
And the white-shrouded candles flapped smoke-headed flames;
 — Three picture-drawn people came down from their frames,
And dumbly in lippings they told me their names,
Full well though I knew.

The first was a maiden of mild wistful tone,
Gone silent for years,
The next a dark woman in former time known;
But the first one, the maiden of mild wistful tone,
So wondering, unpractised, so vague and alone,
Nigh moved me to tears.

The third was a sad man — a man of much gloom;
And before me they passed
In the shade of the night, at the back of the room,
The dark and fair woman, the man of much gloom,
Three persons, in far-off years forceful, but whom
Death now fettered fast.

They set about acting some drama, obscure,
The women and he,
With puppet-like movements of mute strange allure;
Yea, set about acting some drama, obscure,
Till I saw ‘twas their own lifetime’s tragic amour,
Whose course begot me;

Yea — a mystery, ancestral, long hid from my reach
In the perished years past,
That had mounted to dark doings each against each
In those ancestors’ days, and long hid from my reach;
Which their restless enghostings, it seemed, were to teach
Me in full, at this last.

But fear fell upon me like frost, of some hurt
If they entered anew
On the orbits they smartly had swept when expert
In the law-lacking passions of life, — of some hurt
To their souls — and thus mine — which I fain would avert
So, in sweat cold as dew,

“Why wake up all this?” I cried out. “Now, so late!
Let old ghosts be laid!”
And they stiffened, drew back to their frames and numb state,
Gibbering: “Thus are your own ways to shape, know too late!”
Then I grieved that I’d not had the courage to wait
And see the play played.