Thomas Hardy: Moments of Vision 9781474472548

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M O M E N T S O F V IS IO N

TH E

POEMS

OF

THOMAS

HARDY

GENERAL ED ITO RS: ALAN SHELSTON & TREVOR JO H N SO N

MOMENTS OF VISION AND

M ISCELLANEOUS VERSES BY

THOMAS HARDY

W ITH AN IN TR O D U C T IO N B Y A L A N S H E L ST O N

Edinburgh University Press

© the respective contributors, 1994 First published in 1994 by Rybum Publishing Transferred to digital print 2013 This edition published by Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CRO 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 85331 057 7 (hardback) The right of the respective contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

General Editors’ Preface

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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Moments o f Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

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Contents Index o f Titles and First Lines

v 257

GENERAL EDITORS

PREFACE

According to Hardys own account, at the end o f the last century he took the decision ‘to abandon at once a form o f literary art he had long intended to abandon at some indefinite time, and resume openly that form o f it which had always been more instinctive with him’ . In brief, he gave up the writing o f fiction, and returned to the writing o f verse. Between 1871 and 1897 he had published fourteen novels, together with three volumes o f stories; between 1898 and 1928 he was to publish in addition to his epic poetic drama, The Dynasts, and independently o f the Selected Poems o f 19 16 and the Collected Poems o f 1919 —eight separate volumes o f verse. O f the first o f these, Wessex Poems, only five hundred were printed; the last o f them, Winter Words, published posthumously, had a print run o f 5,000 copies, so firmly had Hardy established himself in his chosen literary form. It is now unusual for readers o f Hardy’s poetry to confront it in its original individual volume form. Hardy’s current readers tend to come to the poems either via selections, or through the medium o f the various ‘collected’ or ‘complete’ editions. The latter do indeed publish the poems in their original volume sequence, but the overall effect o f presenting the reader with nearly one thousand poems in such an edition is inevitably overpowering.

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Each o f Hardy’s original volumes has its own characteristic integrity. It is the intention o f the Ryburn edition to reproduce them in a form as close to the originals as can be achieved. In particular the text o f each volume will be reproduced exactly. Readers will thus be able to read the poems as Hardy first gathered them and as his publishers first produced them, spaciously laid out and boldly and elegantly printed. Such an approach not only allows the opportunity o f seeing the poems on the page as their first readers saw them, it imposes at once a more coherent and a more measured perusal, inviting consideration o f the inter-connectedness o f the poems as they were originally grouped together. Each volume will carry an introductory essay by a Hardy scholar which will examine the contexts, biographical and historical, o f its origins, and offer an independent critical assessment o f the poetry it contains. It will contain a substantial bibliography and, for ease o f refer­ ence, a single unified index o f titles and first lines. We hope thus to present, both to the scholar and to the general reader, the work o f one o f the greatest poets o f this century in a format that will do justice to his genius. H A T! AJS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The text for this volume has been reproduced from a copy o f the first edition o f Moments of Vision, originally in the possession o f Mrs Charlotte Alexander, and now held by the Portico Library, Manchester. I am grateful to the Librarian, Mrs Jo Francis, for making this volume available to me. I should also like to thank Joseph Shelston for his help in the final stages o f the preparation o f this volume.

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IN TR O D U C TIO N

In April 1918 Edmund Gosse, the distinguished man o f letters and friend o f Thomas Hardy, wrote a long survey article for the Edinburgh Review in which he reviewed Hardy’s career as a poet. Noting that Hardy’s first volume o f verse, Wessex Poems, had been published in 1898, and that since that date ‘he has been, persistently and periodically, a poet and nothing else’, Gosse observed that ‘still, after twenty years, there survives a tendency to take the verse o f M r H ardy... as a mere subsidiary and ornamental appendage to his novels’ . After discussing each o f Hardy’s volumes in turn Gosse arrived at the one which had occasioned his article: ‘In the fourth year o f the war the veteran poet has published Moments of Vision. These show a remarkable recovery o f spirit, and an ingenuity never before excelled.’ 1 Moments of Vision was published in an edition o f 3,000 copies by Macmillan and C o on 30th November 19 17, when Hardy was seventy-seven years o f age. The presentation copy which Gosse had received from the publisher was inscribed by Hardy with the words ‘these late notes o f a worn-out lyre’ . I f there is a valedictory note to Gosses review it reflects the impression given by the volume itself which begins and ends with poems in which Hardy anticipates his own death. In Tess of the d’ Urbervilles Hardy’s heroine ruminates on the fact that

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o f all the dates that will mark the passage o f her life there is one that cannot be known to her, the date on which she will die. Hardy too, one suspects, not infre­ quently made the same reflection for he was fascinated by dates, both for the way in which they denote specific occasions and for the way in which, once past, they are irrevocably gone. Such an association o f ideas lies behind the poem ‘Joys o f M em ory’ in this collection: W h en

th e

s p r in g

com es

ro u n d ,

and

a

c e r ta in d a y

Looks out from the brume by the eastern copsetrees And says, Remem ber, I begin again, as if it were new, The life o f that date I once lived through, Whiling it hour by hour away ; So shall I do till my December, When spring comes round. Death comes quickly to Tess, but ironically it came only slowly to Hardy, who never expected longevity: he could hardly have anticipated when he published Moments of Vision that there would be a further decade o f his life and three more collections o f verse still to come. The context o f the First World War could only have intensified for ‘the veteran poet’ the feeling that he was dealing with final things: he concludes his volume with a sequence o f ‘Poems o f War and Patriotism’ in the last o f which he refers, self-deprecatingly, to ‘ ... the blinkered m ind/O f one who wants to write a book/In a world o f such a kind’ (‘I looked up from my writing’).

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In a letter o f 19 15 , Hardy wrote: ‘M y writing days are almost past; moreover I am compelled by the exigencies o f the war to give every scrap I do contrive to write to aid some charitable object that this brutal European massacre has rendered necessary.’ 2 His comment is misleading though, and Gosse was right to detect that ‘remarkable recovery o f spirit’, for Moments of Vision contains more poems than any o f Hardy’s other single volumes, and o f these the war poems form only a minor part. It is not always easy to date individual poems with certainty but it would seem that, as was the case with its predecessor, Satires of Circumstance, Moments of Vision was made up almost entirely o f recent work. Whereas Hardy’s previous collections had contained both new and older poems, the work he was now publishing reflected as never before the urgency o f his current poetic performance. Above all, the poems written at this time are poems provoked by his memories - memories o f past scenes and landscapes, o f friends, o f members o f his family, notably o f his favourite sister M ary who had died in November 19 15 , and above all o f his longsuffering first wife, Emma Gifford, whose death in November 19 12 had occasioned the astonishing personal sequence, ‘Poems o f 19 12 —13 ’ , in Satires of Circumstance. In 1916, replying to a correspondent who had expressed sympathy over the death o f Mary, Hardy wrote, ‘you will know very well that nobody else in the world can quite fill the same place in one’s life as a sister about one’s own age’ (Letters, V, p. 142). Often in these poems he was to project himself as someone who has been left behind by his contemporaries, and who is only waiting for his own summons to the world beyond.

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Hardy sent his manuscript o f the one hundred and fifty-nine poems that made up Moments of Vision to his publisher in the August o f 19 17: only three months therefore elapsed before the book appeared. The speed at which the volume was produced was not untypical: Satires of Circumstance was similarly sent to the publisher in August 19 14 and published in the November o f that year. Between the appearance o f these two collections Hardy had also organised his Selected Poems o f 19 16 , a volume which included nine o f the poems that were to appear in Moments of Vision. As well as the poems which had already appeared in Selected Poems, a small number o f the poems in Moments of Vision had previously appeared in pamphlet form, in especially commissioned publications, or in newspapers and journals like the Times, the Sphere and the Spectator. In particular, o f the sixteen ‘Poems o f War and Patriotism’ , most o f which were in the strict sense o f the term occasional, fourteen had been published before. Hardy’s modern editors, James Gibson and Samuel Hynes, have shown from Hardy’s manuscripts, as well as by the collation o f successive editions, how he would fidget away at the text o f a poem until he felt its wording to be right.3 Hardy always took an active part in seeing his poems through the press and, as with his earlier volumes, after the first publication o f Moments of Vision he went on to make revisions and corrections for suc­ ceeding editions. Furthermore he took the opportunity o f the publication o f Satires of Circumstance and Moments of Vision as a single volume o f the ‘Wessex’ edition o f his works in 19 19 to transfer ‘Men W ho March Away’ — the most famous o f his First World War poems - from

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the position it had occupied as a ‘Postscript’ to the earlier volume to one at the head o f the ‘Poems o f War and Patriotism’ in Moments of Vision, where it remained in succeeding editions. His post-publication amendments to individual poems were mostly confined to minor verbal adjustments as, for example, in ‘During Wind and R ain ’, where the repeated penultimate line o f each stanza, ‘Ah, no; the years O ’ was changed in the second and fourth stanzas to ‘Ah, no; the years, the years’; Hardy presumably preferring a different pattern o f repetition. Sometimes he was to alter single words in the interests o f achieving a greater precision o f meaning or effect. In ‘Afterwards’ for example, the concluding poem o f the volume and a poem much revised from the manuscript, the first edition’s reading o f ‘the people’ in I.3 becomes the more intimate ‘the neighbours’ in later editions, while the rhetorical questions which in the first edition conclude each stanza are converted in the case o f the second and third stanzas to conditional statements by the substitution o f ‘may’ for ‘w ill...?’ For readers going back to the first edition for the first time, therefore, very familar poems may sometimes appear in a slightly different guise. But if Hardy’s later adjustments may sometimes make for verbal or technical improvement, it is fair to say that at no point do they significantly affect the meaning o f the poems as such: for all his sensitivity about his material he was not a poet like Auden, for example, who took the opportunity offered by reprinting to redraft, even to censor, what he had earlier put into print. Hardy described the poems o f Moments of Vision as being ‘o f a very mixed sort’ . ‘To arrange them’ he said,

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‘was beyond me’ (Letters, V, p .2 3 7 ). Nevertheless he does seem to have exercised some care in the ordering o f the poems. The war poems were placed in a section o f their own at the end o f the volume; in addition to this Hardy often links poems that have been inspired by a particular set o f memories or associations. Thus ‘The Figure in the Scene’ is immediately followed by ‘Why did I sketch’ ; both poems, identified as being ‘from an old note’ , were based on a sketch Hardy had made o f Emma, dated 22nd August 1870. Similarly, ‘Overlooking the R iver Stour’ , ‘The Musical B o x ’ and ‘At Sturminster Foot-Bridge’, which appear in sequence, all relate to memories o f the two years when the Hardys had lived at Sturminster Newton (1876-8), a period during which Hardy wrote The Return of the Native, and one which he was to recall as a time o f marital happi­ ness, tinged only by the sadness o f later developments. Elsewhere one can detect similar connections, and while this process is for the most part unobtrusive, there can be no doubt that it exists. Individual poems can some­ times be seen to comment on each other; furthermore the process helps to remind us o f the inter-relatedness o f the poems as a whole. Hardy’s poetry, like his life, so seemingly disparate on the face o f it, was very much o f a piece, most o f all in a volume in which he repeatedly looked back over that life’s experience. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The First World War is the immediate historical context o f Moments of Vision. Hardy’s own attitude to the war, as reflected in his letters o f the time, was one o f

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barely stoic endurance; for one who in The Dynasts had created an epic-drama out o f the Napoleonic wars there was a sense o f history repeating itself, if not as farce, in a way which defied rational analysis. The only appropriate response to the ‘brutal age’ was to ‘sit still in an apathy, & watch the clock spinning backwards’ (Letters, V, p. 45). In ‘Then and N o w ’, Hardy contrasts ‘warfare wherein honour is not’ to the wars o f the past ‘when battles were fought/With a chivalrous sense o f Should and Ought’ : the poem is built upon a phrase ‘Gentlemen o f the Guard, fire first’ - which he had noted from accounts o f the Battle o f Fontenoy in the war o f the Austrian succession in 1745. The most famous o f all these poems, ‘In Time o f “ The Breaking o f Nations’” , was founded on an idea that had come to Hardy at the time o f the Franco-Prussian war: the note o f optimism on which it concludes is arguably less appropriate to the First World War, and is certainly inconsistent with Hardy’s frequently expressed belief that the conclusion o f the war would not come until all parties were exhausted. ‘We shall simply go on till we leave off from exhaustion — Germany unconquered, the Allies unassured, & both sides sullenly picking up the pieces & mending them as well as they can for another smash some day’, he wrote, with striking prescience, to Sir Henry Newbolt in December 19 16 (Letters, V, p. 247). Hardy tended to attribute the war simply to Germanic delusions o f grandeur; he thus took the basically patriotic view that it was a necessary evil and for the most part confined himself either to responding to requests to support specific causes, or to reflections

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on the kind o f ironies thrown up by war itself. ‘A Call to National Service’ , written as late as March 19 17, with its appeal to ‘Up and be doing, all who have a hand/To lift, a back to bend,’ may come as something o f a shock to those whose view o f First World War poetry is based upon a reading o f the poets o f the trenches like Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg. Hardy’s experience o f the war was confined to home territory in Dorset where he saw British recruits in their thousands preparing for embarkation, and where too he saw German prisoners, some o f whom he later employed on the garden o f his house at M ax Gate. It is interesting to note though that he declined an invitation from John Buchan, then a colonel at the Foreign Office, to visit the fighting lines in France in June 19 17, while earlier in the same year he was in touch with Siegfried Sassoon, some o f whose poems he had read and appreciated. (Sassoon, who returned the compliment by admiring Hardy’s work, was to become a close friend o f his later years.) Like everyone at home, he was affected by loss: his distant cousin, Frank George, on whom he may have planned to settle M ax Gate, was killed at Gallipoli in 19 15, and he was saddened by the bereavements suffered by close friends. The ‘Poems o f War and Patriotism’ may lack the direct confrontation with experience o f Hardy’s younger contemporaries, but some o f them cover strikingly similar ground. It can only be coincidence that one o f the titles, ‘The Pity o f It’, anticipates Wilfred Owen’s most famous statement about his poetry made in the ‘Preface’ to the post­ humous publication o f his poems (‘M y subject is War, and the pity o f War’), but the poem itself reflects an

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attitude that Hardy shared with Owen, that the soldiers who fought the war, English and German, were together victims o f a dehumanised process that lay beyond their control. A similarly Owenist theme can be found in ‘Often when warring’ , where an enemy soldiers ‘deed o f grace’ in comforting a dying soldier o f the opposing side reflects ‘natural mindsight, triumphing.. ./O ver the throes o f artificial rage’ . Hardy had visited Germany in the early years o f his marriage, a visit that had concluded in Belgium with a tour o f the battlefield o f Waterloo. The sufferings o f the common soldiery had been a major theme o f The Dynasts: behind the angry perplexity at the actions o f ‘an unscrupulous military oligarchy’ (Letters, V, p. 67), expressed in poems like ‘England to Germany in 19 14 ’ and ‘C ry o f the Homeless’ , lies a very personal awareness o f the historical dimension o f the European cataclysm. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The brooding presence o f the war overshadows many o f the poems in the main body o f Moments of Vision. The hauntingly opaque title-poem o f the volume projects a figure reflecting on some inner understanding o f himself only attainable in the hours o f darkness —and possibly, for he cannot yet know, in the hour o f his death - and it announces what will be a major preoccu­ pation in the poems to come, the review o f a whole life, ‘foul or fair’ . Many o f the poems in Moments of Vision follow a pattern in which Hardy goes over the stages o f a life, each stanza or section introducing a new phase identified by a particular event, the whole poem

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intensifying in effect as the sequence accumulates. This is the format o f one o f the great poems about Emma Gifford, ‘During Wind and R ain ’ , where the sequence o f incidents, in this instance in Emma’s life, is inter­ woven with the overpowering refrain - ‘Ah, no; the years O !’ The patterns o f repetition and o f narrative development, which Hardy inherited from the ballad form, are a powerful feature o f these poems. At the culmination o f ‘Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune’ , another poem structured in this way, Hardy writes o f ‘these turmoiled years o f belligerent fire’, just as in ‘Copying Architecture in an Old Minster’, the ‘shades’ o f the entombed historical figures from the past call to ‘the yet unborn/And caution them not to come/To a world so ancient and trouble-torn’ . The ongoing war thus gives an added, even an apocalyptic, dimension to Hardy’s personal sense o f living in his own last days. But as so often with Hardy, the cosmic is a given, within which the experience o f individual lives is what is ultimately significant: as he says in ‘In Tim e o f “ The Breaking o f Nations’” , ‘these will go onward the same/ Though dynasties pass.’ Going ‘onward the same’ for Hardy at this point in his life meant being a lone survivor, a figure isolated as never before by the succes­ sive deaths o f friends and loved ones. Such a conception o f himself is the basis o f poems like ‘The Five Students’ and ‘Looking Across’ . In the former the ‘five students’ are Hardy, Emma, and three friends o f his youth: at the end o f each stanza one o f them disappears from the poem until only Hardy himself is left. In ‘Looking Across’ , where he is ‘looking across’ to Stinsford churchyard, he alludes in succession to the deaths o f his

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father, his mother, Emma, and finally his sister Mary, all o f whom lie buried there, before expressing his own wish that he could join them: This Life runs dry That once ran rare And rosy in dye, And fleet the days fly, And Four are out there. Tired, tired am I O f this earthly air, And my wraith asks: Why, Since these have passed by, Are not Five out there ? We tend to identify the death o f Emma Gifford as the traumatic moment o f Hardy’s later years, but it was M ary Hardy’s death which most powerfully focussed his sense o f being the last o f a line: she is commemorated in the lovely ‘M olly gone’ , again by a sequence o f memories, in ‘In the Garden’ , and in ‘Logs on the Hearth’, where her ghost — or rather something even less substantial, her incarnate memory - ‘ ...rises dim/ From her chilly grave —/.../Ju st as she was, her foot near mine on the bending limb,/Laughing, her young brown hand awave.’ Hardy’s sense that he had lived too long is expressed most powerfully in ‘Quid Hie Agis?’ , a poem founded on his favourite Old Testament story, that o f the still small voice o f the Lord asking the question o f Elijah, ‘What doest thou here?’ In its first printing in The Spectator,

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this poem was given the title ‘In Time o f Slaughter’, thus relating it more specifically to the war: it is another poem in which Hardy retrospectively considers his life through a sequence o f memories, in this case o f occasions when he has heard the story in the reading o f the lesson in church. Hardys poetry frequently reveals his know­ ledge o f liturgical practice: the lesson in question (I Kings, 19) is appointed to be read for the tenth Sunday after Trinity, which in the church calendar comes in high summer, and again he plays on the recurrence o f a specific date. The first section o f the poem records his memory o f his mothers smile ‘Across the sunned aisle’; the second an occasion when he himself read the lesson ‘on a hot afternoon’ at St Juliot church when he was courting Emma, and the third the time o f writing when he is left alone to relate the biblical language to his current situation: I feel the shake O f wind and earthquake, And consuming fire N igher and nigher, And the voice catch clear, “ What doest thou here ? ” ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ For the most part then, the poems that make up Moments of Vision are poems o f memory, either recalling individual moments from the past, or taking a longer and comprehensive view. Not all o f them relate speci­ fically to Hardy’s own family, or to his first marriage: scattered amongst the poems are a number which

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recreate experiences that are on the face o f it uncon­ nected to these central concerns. Such a poem, for example, is ‘Midnight on the Great Western’ in which Hardy recalls ‘the journeying boy’ who made his appearance as Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure. In the poem he appears less portentously than he does in the novel: Hardy summons up the detail o f the remembered moment: ‘a string/Around his neck bore the key o f his box,/That twinkled gleams o f the lamps s sad beams’ before reflecting on the way in which the boy, ‘calmly, as if indifferent quite/To all at stake,’ travels alone, a symbol o f a larger innocence exposed to ‘This region o f sin’ . Poems like ‘At a Seaside Town in 1869’ , ‘At the Wicket-Gate’ , ‘The Photograph’ and ‘At Mayfair Lodgings’ seem to allude to incidents in Hardy’s life the precise circumstances o f which we can only guess at, while a number o f poems (for example, ‘The D uel’ and ‘The Statue o f Liberty’) are ‘satires o f circumstance’ founded upon incidents either historical or invented that have no autobiographical application at all. But these are exceptions: most o f the poems in Moments of Vision are intensely personal, and they are peopled with the figures who over a lifetime had contributed to Hardy’s most intimate experience. The way in which Hardy recreates his past in his poetry is never a simple matter. His fondness for the retrospective view was not something which came upon him in his final years: it was a habit that had been with him from at least his middle age. Thus ‘At MiddleField Gate in February’ , a poem which contrasts the winter landscape o f the present with ‘a far-back day/ When straws hung the hedge and around,/When amid

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the sheaves in amorous play/In curtained bonnets and light array/Moved a bevy now underground!’, was in fact written in 1889: in including the poem in Moments of Vision the older Hardy is offering a poem written in middle age about his youth. The recollection which concludes the poem formed the opening o f Tess of the d’ Urbervilles, the novel Hardy was writing at just that point in time. Even in poems which so beautifully evoke the simple warmth and security o f childhood, like ‘Afternoon Service at Mellstock’ and ‘The O xen’ , we are aware not only o f the child, ‘full o f wonder, and innocent,/Standing meek-eyed with those o f choric bent’, as he is described in ‘Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune’, but o f the solitude o f the watching poet with his backward view. The now useless violin, once owned by his father, which recalls memories o f ‘homely harmony’ and ‘merry tunes’ cannot reach his father in ‘those Mournful Meads hereunder,/Where no fiddling can be heard’ : it stands - ‘a tangled wreck’ with ‘Ten worm holes in your neck’ and ‘Purflings (a precise technical term describing its inlaid markings) wan/With dusthoar,’ - a silent reminder o f the finality o f death (‘To my Father’s Violin’). As the years advance, so memory itself becomes more tenuous: the violin turns up again in ‘Old furniture’ where Hardy sees ‘the hands o f the generations/That owned each shiny familiar thing’ : Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler, As in a mirror a candle-flame Shows images o f itself, each frailer As it recedes, though the eye may frame Its shape the same.

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Objects - his fathers violin, old furniture, longdeserted houses - remain as testimony to lives that have gone. Personalities - friends, loved relatives, Emma those ‘Prized figures’ he refers to in ‘Conjecture’ , have vanished entirely from the scene and can only be recalled in the imagination. Where his blood relations are concerned Hardy is invariably generous in his recollections: they stand as testimony to the simplicity o f natural affection. Seen in the abstract however, the notion o f family itself is o f something that exercises iron control over our fate. In ‘The Pedigree’, ‘scanning my sire-sown tree’ : . . .did I divine That every heave and coil and move I made Within my brain, and in my mood and speech, Was in the glass portrayed As long forestalled by their so making it; There is no escape from the predetermined destiny that makes us who we are. Hardy was fascinated by the apparently arbitrary but in fact inescapable circum­ stances in which the ‘figure in the scene’ finds itself, circumstances defined by precise moments in time, precise locations o f place. In the novels family represents for Hardy the chain o f events that culminates in the individual situation. Clym Yeobright may be ‘the product o f a long line o f disillusive centuries’ 4 but he is also his mother’s son; Tess Durbeyfield is ‘o f the d’Urbervilles’ .

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I f in the poems Hardys remembered moments o f family happiness seem to temper the austerity o f his viewpoint, that other view o f family, reflected by the ‘family face’ o f which, in ‘Heredity’, he represents himself as the sole remaining possessor, is never far from his mind. Family is a matter o f inheritance: marriage is a consequence o f choice. In ‘Conjecture’ Hardy speculates what his fate might have been if he had chosen otherwise: I f there were in my kalendar

N o Emma, Florence, Mary, What would be my existence now— A herm it’s ?— wanderer’s weary ?— H ow should I live, and how N ear w ould be death, or far ?

Could it have been that other eyes M ight have uplit my highway ? The poem is on the theme o f what, in the title o f one o f his poems, Robert Frost called ‘The R oad not Taken’ and by that token ‘M ary’ should not really be included, since there was nothing Hardy could have done to take her out o f his personal ‘kalendar’ . But the reference to ‘Emma, Florence,’ identifies the most promi­ nent theme that runs through Moments of Vision, Hardy’s memories o f his first wife Emma Gifford, and not only his memories o f her but his feelings about those memories as he relived them. It is hardly to be wondered at that, as Hardy’s biographers have recorded, the poems about Emma caused such distress to ‘Florence’ —Hardy’s

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second wife, Florence Emily Dugdale, whom he married little more than a year after Emma died. Hardy had already written obsessively about Emma in the sequence ‘Poems 1 9 1 2 - 1 3 ’ in Satires of Circumstance. Florence might have been forgiven had she hoped that that would be the end o f the matter: in fact Moments of Vision would seem to contain more poems that have reference to her predecessor than the earlier volume even if, instead o f having attention drawn to them by their being included under a single heading, they are dispersed through the volume as a whole. Hardy scholars have not always agreed on which o f the poems in Moments of Vision can positively be identified as referring to Emma. According to Robert Gittings, ‘there were about thirty poems connected with Emma’ . Gittings argues that some o f the poems often taken as being about Emma in fact refer to Mary Hardy, while there is a further complication in that the shadowy figure o f Tryphena Sparks can be identified behind more than one o f the poems dealing with the earlier period o f Hardys life. Gittingss estimate is supported by that o f Carl J Weber in Hardy’s Love Poems, but if we follow the identifications by J O Bailey and F B Pinion in their commentaries we arrive at a rather larger figure.5 The source o f the problem, o f course, is that these are poems o f allusion rather than direct record: while Hardy may often refer to locations and events which can be identified with those o f his courtship and marriage he never refers to Emma by name, or even in terms o f the direct matrimonial relationship. Where there is nothing specific to guide us difficulties arise. Is ‘You were the sort that men forget’,

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for example, about M ary Hardy, as its opening line and first two stanzas would suggest, or about Emma, who seems a more likely subject o f the lines which follow? For Gittings, ‘obviously M ary’; for Bailey and Pinion, if more cautiously, Emma. Similar questions arise over the immediately following poem, ‘She, I and They’ . Bailey is probably right to suggest either o f Hardy’s wives as the figure with whom the poet is sitting, but a case could be made, from the internal logic o f the poem, for either o f his sisters. Even the ‘I’ o f the poetic voice can be an ambiguous figure. One o f Hardy’s most immediate poetic mentors was Browning, and many o f the poems adopt the voice and manner o f Browning’s dramatic lyrics and monologues. It is biographical evidence, o f course, that tells us we are dealing with personal and not fictive experience, but again the nature o f that experience is a complex one. Emma Gifford lives in these poems not necessarily as she was, but as Hardy’s retrospective view needed her to be, and in that sense they can be said to be about him rather than about her. The poems which are clearly about Emma in Moments of Vision are more diverse than those o f ‘Poems 1 9 1 2 - 1 3 ’ . The earlier sequence was written under the immediate impact o f Emma’s death: their collective subject is Hardy’s shock at her loss, a shock which he tried to ameliorate by returning to the happiness o f his earliest days with her. Very few o f the Moments of Vision poems convey the intensity o f that first sense o f loss; perhaps only one o f them, ‘During Wind and R a in ’, can be said to stand alongside the earlier poems in this respect. Two o f the poems early in the volume which return to the time o f courtship, ‘At the Word

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“ Farewell” ’ and ‘The Day o f First Sight’ , do so to raise the question o f whether it might have been better had the lovers not pledged themselves to each other: ‘Even then the scale might have been turned/Against love by a feather’ (‘At the Word “ Farewell” ’). In so doing they set the tone for many o f the poems which follow, where Hardy seems to be considering what it was that went wrong in his marriage, and what was the source o f ‘The Change’ that afflicted it. Specific incidents are recalled that have an inbuilt threat: thus in ‘Near Lanivet, 1872’ , describing an incident that took place before the actual marriage, an impulsive action o f Emma’s frightens the onlooking poet. ‘We Sat at the W indow’ , with its sub­ heading ‘Bournemouth, 1975’ , recalls a moment from the early days o f the marriage where already the lovers are ‘irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes’ and when ‘two souls in their prime’ were ‘wasted’. (The date o f the marriage was September 1874.) The tension between Hardy and Emma was intensified in the long years during which they lived at M ax Gate, years during which Emma became increasingly isolated from Hardy’s literary achievements, and increasingly resentful o f the stature which he enjoyed. Much o f the time they would seem to have existed together in silence and it is noticeable that in poems referring to this period o f their lives Hardy portrays Emma as an increasingly distant figure to whose presence he had become habituated in ways he only fully comprehended when she was gone. ‘The Shadow on the Stone’ invokes the ‘shade that a well-known head and shoulders/Threw there when she was gardening’ ; Hardy, a latter-day Orpheus, will not turn his head lest he ‘unvision/A shape which somehow,

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there may be’ . In ‘The Last Performance’ , in which he recalls Emma’s piano-playing only a few days before her death, he measures the distance between them in terms o f gently acknowledged regret. If the ‘Emma’ poems in Moments of Vision can be said to have a recurrent subject it is thus not Hardy’s original love for Emma but what became o f it, whether through his fault or hers. In a number o f poems Hardy does indeed accept responsi­ bility for what has happened. At the conclusion o f ‘Overlooking the R iver Stour’, for example, he seems to suggest that preoccupations o f his own have led him to ignore Emma’s situation and while, in ‘The Tree and the Lady’ , he can say ‘I have done all I could/For that lady I knew!’ the terms in which he does so suggest a need to convince himself. But we know also that Hardy believed Emma to be afflicted with mental instability. The incident recalled in ‘Near Lanivet, 1872’, one o f the poems which Hardy himself described as ‘literally true’ (Letters, V, p. 250), can be interpreted as anticipating this possibility. It is hinted at again in ‘On the Heath’ , and it forms the implicit subject o f ‘The Interloper’, one o f the most powerful poems o f the entire volume: Nay : it’s not the pale Form your imagings raise, That waits on us all at a destined time, It is not the Fourth Figure the Furnace show ed; O that it were such a shape sublime In these latter days ! It is that under which best lives corrode ; Would, would it could not be there !

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Hardy concludes Moments of Vision with a ‘Finale’ : two poems which can be said to conclude the subjectmatter o f the volume as a whole. The first o f them, ‘The Coming o f the End’ , concludes the poems about Emma. Stanza by stanza it reviews occasions all except one o f which have earlier formed the subject o f poems in the volume: their first meeting and first parting, the days at Sturminster Newton, the days at M ax Gate, the visits by Hardy to his immediate family. ‘“ How will come to an end/This orbit so smoothly begun...?” / ...W ell it came to an end/Quite silently.’ It came to an end in fact with Emma’s death in the early morning in her separate room, with Hardy having to be called to her from his study. In the second o f the poems, ‘Afterwards’, Hardy anticipates his own death. Earlier in the volume he had imagined the death o f Shakespeare, unnoticed, just as Emma’s had been: ‘ ...at thy last breath, with mindless note/The borough clocks in sameness tongued the hour,/The Avon just as always glassed the tower.’ (‘To Shakespeare’). Shakespeare’s fellow-townsmen knew him not as he would come to be known, as the greatest o f English poets, but ‘just by a neighbour’s nod’ . In the same way Hardy speculates about the reactions o f his neighbours when he will have passed on: ‘will the people say,/“ He was a man who used to notice such things.” ?’ As Gittings has pointed out, the ‘things’ which Hardy described himself as having noticed formed part o f the image patterns o f novels written some forty years earlier,6 but all his poetry is in fact the poetry o f noticing things: the ‘rainy form ’ o f the woman ‘seated amidst the gauze’ in ‘The Figure in the Scene’, the swallows ‘Above the river-

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gleam’ in ‘Overlooking the R iver Stour’ , and in ‘The Last Signal’ the flash across the field from the coffin plate o f another poet, William Barnes, as he was carried on his last journey. Once noticed, such moments become truly visionary. But more than that; in his later poetry Hardy came to question what it was that lay beyond immediate experience: the poems are peopled by ghosts, by phantoms, by unnamed presences: in the next room ? — who ? I seemed to see Somebody in the dawning passing through, Unknown to me.” “ N a y : you saw nought. He passed in­ visibly.” “ W h o ’s

(‘W ho’s in the next room? ’ ) The unanswered rhetorical question becomes the typical mode o f the poems. Moments of Vision opens with a poem composed o f such questions on the grand scale. Its last poem is composed in a similar way, although by now the questions are o f a much more intimate kind. Either way they embody their own answers. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

19 17, the year o f the publication o f Moments of Vision, also saw the publication o f T S Eliot’s Prufrock. In 1920, Ezra Pound would publish Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Hardy, we know, was aware o f both these poems, and one might speculate whether his comment, in a letter

IN TR O D U C TIO N

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o f August 1918, that ‘a fashion for obscurity rages among young poets’ (Letters, V, p. 275) might have been written with Eliot in mind. Certainly there was a sense in which he dealt with things dying, and his younger contemporaries with things new-born, and it is interesting to note that many o f the then distinguished commentators on his verse — figures like Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, and Gosse him self- are names that have a distinctly pre-modernist ring. The extent o f the critical reception o f Moments of Vision was in itself a tribute to Hardy’s status, particularly given the continuation o f the war: he himself refers to having received ‘some fifty reviews’ from Macmillans, by February 1918. If the bulk o f those tended to confirm his low estimate o f ‘the people who write “ notices’” , he was obliged to concede that these reviews were ‘friendly enough’ (Letters, V, p. 250). In fact some o f the more prominent reviews offered unqualified praise to a volume that was seen as the culmination o f a long career. Thus Harold Child, in The Observer, after comparing Hardy with ‘another old man and great poet’ , namely Goethe, praised him as ‘a devoted student and interpreter o f reality as he saw it... [who] has been able in his declining years to prove to the world what he himself knew from the start, that he ... was a poet’ . ‘Each poem’, Child went on, ‘is a “ Moment o f Vision” in which the plain fact, the everyday occurrence, the precise detail is seen and felt with so much intensity that it becomes universal.’ Child’s is a remarkably perceptive review: its conclusion that ‘the light o f intensity, intensity o f vision ... makes all the poetry new, individual, vigorously sincere and alive with

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inextinguishable vitality’ might well stand today as a final judgement. Elsewhere Lascelles Abercrombie, in the Daily Herald, described the poems as 4 a series o f daring experiments in lyrical poetry’ and their author as ‘an insatiable pioneer’ , while John Drinkwater in the Manchester Guardian made a similar point when he referred to the ‘experimental touch, not o f the young artist ... but o f the artist who in his maturity is master o f his technical powers’ . ‘Never has this poet’s faculty been as impressive as it is here’, he wrote, ‘we know o f no other poetry in which ... intellectual mastery over difficult material has so fine and direct a value’ .7 Hardy certainly followed the reception o f the poems closely, thanking each o f these reviewers for the generosity o f their comment. When other commentators questioned either his technical skill or the ‘philosophy’ they claimed to detect in the poems he was quick to anger. Thus Robert Lynd, who in the Nation exemplified what he called Hardy’s ‘musicless verse’ by a reference to ‘On Sturminster Foot-Bridge’ and then compounded the offence by reprinting the review in a collection o f his essays, received an angry rebuttal outlining the poem’s onomatopoeic design, while Alfred Noyes, who in a public lecture had referred to Hardy’s ‘pessimism’, received a long letter o f refutation.8 Criticism on the latter issue touched a long exposed nerve, and when Frederic Harrison made the same mistake in a review o f the 19 19 Collected Poems (‘This monotony o f gloom, with all its poetry, is not human, not social, not true.’) in the Fortnightly Review Hardy was again moved to protest. He was by now, however, a figure who might have some confidence in his own stature. He was the recipient

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o f honorary degrees, he had been awarded the Order o f Merit, he was a freeman o f Dorchester, and in 19 19 came a tribute o f especially personal value: the presen­ tation to him o f a manuscript volume o f verses by his contemporaries that had been compiled in his honour, and in anticipation o f his eightieth year. Forty-three o f his fellow poets contributed, and Hardy would seem to have been punctilious in thanking each o f them individually. He was a man ever sensitive to the nuances o f personal inter-action, a man in fact ‘who used to notice such things’ . If he was alert enough at eighty to respond to the provocations o f the critics he was generous enough to accept the kindness o f friends. References 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

E d in b u rg h R e v ie w , no. ccvii, April 1918, p. 272; reprinted in T h o m a s H a r d y : T h e C ritic a l H e rita g e , ed. R G Cox, 1970, pp. 444-463. T h e C o llected L etters o f T h o m a s H a rd y , ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, 7 vols, 1978-88; vol. V, 1985, p. 117 ; hereafter, Letters, V. T h e C o m p lete P oem s o f Th o m a s H a r d y : A Variorum E d itio n ,

ed. James Gibson, 1979; T h e C o m p le te Poetical W orks o f T h o m a s H a rd y , ed. Samuel Hynes, 3 vols, 1982—5. Thomas Hardy, T h e R e tu r n o f the N a tiv e , 1878, Book Third, Ch. 1 . R obert Gittings, T h e O ld e r H a rd y , 1978, Penguin edn., 1980, p. 235 ; H a r d y ’s L o v e P o em s, ed. Carl J Weber, 1963, p. 102; J O Bailey, T h e P o etry o f T h o m a s H a r d y : A H a n d b o o k a n d C o m m e n ta ry , 1970, pp. 339-427 p a ssim ; F B Pinion, A C o m m e n ta ry on the P oem s o f T h o m a s H a rd y , 1976, pp. 120-161 p a ssim .

(36) 6. 7. 8.

M O M E N T S OF V IS IO N Gittings, p. 237 . T h e O b serv er , 9th February 1919; T h e D a ily H e ra ld , 4th June 1919; T h e M a n c h ester G u a rd ia n , 1st March 1918. Robert Lynd, O ld a n d N e w M asters, 1919, p. 245 ; F o rtn ig h tly R e v ie w , February 1920. Hardy’s response to Noyes is documented in T h e L ife a n d W ork o f T h o m a s H a rd y by T h o m a s H a rd y , ed. Michael Millgate, 1984, pp. 438- 44 I-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In this edition the text o f the poems stands exactly as it did when first printed. Variant readings may be checked in the ‘Variorum’ edition o f Gibson, and the Complete Poetical Works, edited by Hynes (see I below). Where notes occur they are Hardys own and any queries which may arise - as, for example where Hardy has subscribed a poem with initials, or added a date — should be referred to the commentaries by, e.g., Pinion and Bailey, listed in III below. The following listings are selective; sections I—VII are on Hardy generally, section VIII is specific to this volume. Works marked by an asterisk (*) were initially published in the U.S.A.

I. C O M P LET E ED ITIO N S OF H A R D Y ’ S POEM S

The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, The N ew Wessex Edition, ed. J Gibson, 1976 The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Variorum Edition, ed. J Gibson, 1979 The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, 3 vols, ed. S Hynes, 1982-5 There are numerous selections from Hardy’s verse.

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(38) II.

M O M E N T S OF V IS IO N BIB LIO G R APH IES

R L Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, 1954 H Gerber and W Davis, eds, Thomas Hardy: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him, Vol. 1 [18 71-19 6 9 ], 1973; Vol. 2 [1970-1980], 1983 R P Draper and M Ray, An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Thomas Hardy, 1989

III.

B IO G R A P H Y A N D G E N E R A L R E F E R E N C E

F E Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1928; The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1930; published in one volume as The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1962. Although published under the name o f his second wife, the substance o f these volumes is known to have originated from Hardy himself The whole project was edited and reconstructed by Michael Millgate in The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy, 1984 Emma Lavinia Hardy, Some Recollections, 1961 F B Pinion, A Hardy Companion: A Guide to the Works of Thomas Hardy and their Background, 1968 J O Bailey, The Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary, 1970 R Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy, 1975; The Older Hardy, 1978 The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, 7 vols, eds R L Purdy and M Millgate, 1975-88 F B Pinion, A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy, 1976

BIB L IO G R A P H Y

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The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. R H Taylor, 1978 N Page, ed. Thomas Plardy: The Writer and his Background, 1980 M Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography, 1983 The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, 2 vols, ed. L Bjork, 1985 F B Pinion, A Thomas Hardy Dictionary, 1989 M Seymour-Smith, Hardy, 1994

IV.

B O O K -L E N G T H C R IT IC A L STU D IES OF TH E PO ETRY

J G Southworth, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, 1947, rev. 1966* S Hynes, The Pattern of Hardy’s Poetry, 1956* K Marsden, The Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Introduction, 1970 D Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, 1972 P Ziedow, Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Hardy, 1974 * T Paulin, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception, 1977 J C Richardson, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity,

1977 * D Taylor, Hardy’s Poetry, i 8 6 0 - 19 2 8 , 1981 M Mukul Das, Hardy: Poet of Tragic Vision, 1983 W E Buckler, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Study in Art and Ideas, 1983* D Taylor, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Prosody, 1989 J Cullen Brown, A Journey into Hardy’s Poetry, 1989 T Johnson, A Critical Introduction to the Poems of Thomas Hardy, 1991

M O M E N T S OF V IS IO N

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K K Maynard, Thomas Hardy's Tragic Poetry: the Lyrics and the Dynasts, 1991 J Powell Ward, Thomas Hardy's Poetry, 1993

V.

C R IT IC A L SYM P O SIA A N D BO O KS W ITH S U B ST A N T IA L SE C T IO N S ON T H E V E R S E

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SYM P O SIA

The Southern Review: Thomas Hardy Centennial Issue, 6 (Summer), 1940* Agenda: Thomas Hardy Special Issue, 10 (Spring-Summer), 1972 Victorian Poetry: Special Hardy Issue, 17 (Spring-Summer), 1979* Thomas Hardy Poems: A Casebook, eds J Gibson and T Johnson, 1979 The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, eds P Clements and J Grindle, 1980 (ii)

BO O KS

L Abercrombie, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study, 19 12 H Child, Thomas Hardy, 1916 S Chew, Thomas Hardy: Poet and Novelist, 19 2 1* A McDowall, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study, 19 31 E Blunden, Thomas Hardy, 1940 D Brown, Thomas Hardy, 1954 G Wing, Thomas Hardy, 1963 T Johnson, Thomas Hardy, 1968 J Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, 1970 D Hawkins, Thomas Hardy Novelist and Poet, 1970

BIB L IO G R A P H Y

(4i)

J I M Stewart, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography, 1971 F B Pinion, Thomas Hardy: Art and Thought, 1971 J Brooks, Hardy: The Poetic Structure, 1971 H Orel, The Final Years of Thomas Hardy: 1 9 1 2 - 1 9 2 8 , 1976 N Page, Thomas Hardy, 1977 J Bayley, An Essay on Hardy, 1978 F B Pinion, Hardy the Writer: Surveys and Assessments, 1988 P Dalziel and M Millgate, Thomas Hardy's ‘Studies, Specimens, &c2 Notebook, 1994

V I. PER IO D ICA LS D EV O TED TO H A R D Y ’ S W O RK

The Thomas Hardy Yearbook (Toucan Press: Guernsey), 19 7 0 The Thomas Hardy Journal (The Thomas Hardy Society: Dorchester, Dorset D T I 1YH) The Thomas Hardy Annual, ed. N Page, 1983—88

VII. C O N T E M P O R A R Y R EV IEW S

Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. R G Cox, 1970

VIII. A R T IC L E S E T C R E L A T IN G TO

MOMENTS OF VISION

C J Weber, Hardy's Love Poems, 1963 J Mitchell, ‘ “ Churchy” Thomas Hardy’, English, vol. 37 , Summer 1988, pp. 12 9 -4 4

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M O M E N T S OF V IS IO N

D Gewanter, ‘ ‘‘Undervoicings o f loss” in Hardys elegies to his w ife’ , Victorian Poetry, vol. 29, 3, Autumn, 1991, pp. 19 3-20 7 J T Laird, ‘Sick and not-so-sick battle-gods: Thomas Hardy and the literature o f war’ , AU M LA , vol. 76, November 1991, pp. 39 -54 J Ramazani, ‘Hardy and the poetics o f melancholia: “ Poems o f 1 9 1 2 - 1 3 ” and other elegies for Emma’ , E LH , vol. 5 8 , 4 , Winter 1991, pp. 957-77

MOMENTS OF VISION AND

MISCELLANEOUS VERSES

P U B L IS H E R ’ S N O T E.

Pagination and layout follow the First Edition from the facing page (v) to page 2 5 6 .

CONTENTS PAGE

M oments o f Vision

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A fternoon Service at Mellstock At the W icket-gate In a M useum

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Heredity

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Joys o f M em ory .

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To the M oon

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“ You were the sort that men forget ” .

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She, I, and They.

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The Day o f First Sight .

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Apostrophe to an O ld Psalm Tune

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At the Word “ Farewell ”

The Rival .

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Copying Architecture in an O ld Minster v

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To Shakespeare .

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Q uid hie agis ? . O n a M idsummer Eve Tim ing H er

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Before Knowledge

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The Blinded Bird

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“The wind blew words”

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The Faded Face .

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The Riddle

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The Duel .

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At Mayfair Lodgings .

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To my Father’s Violin .

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The Statue o f Liberty .

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The Background and the Figure .

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The Change

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Sitting on the Bridge .

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The Young Churchwarden .

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“I travel as a phantom now ”

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Lines to a M ovement in M ozart’s E-flat Symphony

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“In the seventies”

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The Pedigree

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His Heart. A W omans Dream W here they lived

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The Occultation

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Life laughs Onward

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The Peace-offering

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A M errymaking in Question

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A K i s s ............................................................................... 78 The A nnouncem ent . The Oxen . The Tresses

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In her Precincts .

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Great Things

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The Chimes

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Love the M onopolist .

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The Youth w ho carried a Light .

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Overlooking the River Stour

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Royal Sponsors .

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O ld Furniture

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A Thought in Two Moods .

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The Last Performance.

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Logs on the Hearth

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The Sunshade

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The Ballet .

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The W inds P rophecy.

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D uring W ind and Rain

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H e prefers her Earthly The Dolls . Molly gone

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He wonders about Him self.

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The Robin

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The Clock-winder

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Old Excursions .

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In a W hispering Gallery

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Signs and Tokens

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The Young Glass-stainer

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An Upbraiding .

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Looking at a Picture on an Anniversary

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The Choirmaster s Burial

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The Man w ho forgot .

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W hile drawing in a Churchyard .

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“For Life I had never cared greatly”

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P oems of W a r and P a tr io tism —

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England to Germany in 1914

His C ountry

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O n the Belgian Expatriation

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An Appeal to America on behalf o f the Belgian Destitute .

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CONTENTS

xi PAGE

The Pity o f It

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In Tim e o f Wars and Tumults

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In Tim e o f “the Breaking o f N ations” . Cry o f the Homeless. .

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Before Marching and After .

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“Often w hen w arring”

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T hen and N ow .

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A Call to National Service .

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The Dead and the Living O ne

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“I looked up from my w riting”

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A N ew Year’s Eve in War Tim e . “I met a m an”

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F inale —

The C om ing o f the End

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Afterwards.

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M O M EN TS OF VISION T hat mirror

Which makes of men a transparency, Who holds that mirror And bids us such a breast-bared spectacle see Of you and me ? That mirror Whose magic penetrates like a dart, Who lifts that mirror And throws our mind back on us, and our heart, Until we start ? That mirror Works well in these night hours of ache; Why in that mirror Are tincts we never see ourselves once take When the world is awake ? That mirror Can test each mortal when unaware; Yea, that strange mirror May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair, Reflecting it—where ? i

THE VOICE OF THINGS F orty years—aye, and several more—ago,

When I paced the headlands loosed from dull employ, The waves huzza’d like a multitude below, In the sway of an all-including joy Without cloy. Blankly I walked there a double decade after, When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me, And I heard the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter At the lot of men, and all the vapoury Things that be. Wheeling change has set me again standing where Once I heard the waves huzza at Lammas-tide ; But they supplicate now—like a congregation there Who murmur the Confession—I outside, Prayer denied.

“ W HY BE AT PA IN S ?” ( Wooer’s Song)

W hy be at pains that I should know

You sought not me ? Do breezes, then, make features glow So rosily ? Come, the lit port is at our back, And the tumbling sea ; Elsewhere the lampless uphill track To uncertainty ! O should not we two waifs join hands? I am alone, You would enrich me more than lands By being my own. Yet, though this facile moment flies, Close is your tone, And ere to-morrow’s dewfall dries I plough the unknown.

3

“ WE SAT AT THE W IN D O W ” ( Bournemouth, 1875)

W e sat at the window looking out,

And the rain came down like silken strings That Swithin’s day. Each gutter and spout Babbled unchecked in the busy way Of witless things: Nothing to read, nothing to see Seemed in that room for her and me On Swithin’s day. We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes, For I did not know, nor did she infer How much there was to read and guess By her in me, and to see and crown By me in her. Wasted were two souls in their prime, And great was the waste, that July time When the rain came down.

4

AFTERNOON SERVICE AT MELLSTOCK ( Circa 1850)

O n afternoons of drowsy calm We stood in the panelled pew,

Singing full-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.

5

AT THE WICKET-GATE T here echoed the sounds of church-chiming,

But no one was nigh, Till there came, as a break in the loneness, Her father, she, I. And we slowly moved up to the wicket, And downlooking stood, Till anon people passed, and amid them We parted for good. Greater, wiser, may part there than we three Who parted there then, But never will Fates colder-featured Nod nay there again. Of the churchgoers through the still meadows No single one knew What a play was played under their eyes there As thence we withdrew.

6

IN A MUSEUM

H ere ’ s the mould o f a musical bird long passed from light,

Which over the earth before man came was winging; There’s a contralto voice I heard last night, That lodges in me still with its sweet singing. ii

Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard, In the full-fugued song of the universe unending. E xeter.

7

A PO STR O PH E TO AN OLD PSALM T U N E

I

you first—ah, when did I first meet you ? When I was full of wonder, and innocent, Standing meek - eyed with those of choric bent, While dimming day grew dimmer In the candle-glimmer. m et

Much riper in years I met you—in a temple Where summer sunset streamed upon our shapes, And you spread over me like a gauze that drapes, And flapped from floor to rafters, Sweet as angels’ laughters. But you had been stripped of some of your old vesture By Monk, or another. Now you wore no frill,

TO AN OLD PSALM TU N E

9

And at first you startled me. But I knew you still, Though I missed the minims waver, And the dotted quaver. I grew accustomed to you thus. And you hailed me Through one who evoked you often. Then at last Your raiser was borne off, and I mourned you had passed From my life with your late outsetter ; Till I said, “ ’Tis better ! ” But you waylaid me. I rose and went as a ghost goes, And said, eyes - full: “ I’ll never hear it again ! It is overmuch for scathed and memoried men When sitting among strange people Under their steeple.” Now, a new stirrer of tones calls you up before me And wakes your speech, as she of Endor did (When sought by Saul who, in disguises hid, Fell down on the earth to hear it) Samuel’s spirit.

10

TO AN OLD PSALM TUNE

So, your quired oracles beat till they make me tremble As I discern your mien in the old attire, Here in these turmoiled years of belligerent fire Living still on—and onward, maybe, Till Doom’s great day be ! Sunday, August 13, 1916.

AT THE W O R D “ FAREWELL” S he 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. 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 accomplished at last. No prelude did I there perceive To a drama at all, Or foreshadow what fortune might weave From beginnings so small; 11

12 AT THE W O R D “ FAREW ELL”

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.

TH E DAY OF FIRST SIGHT

A d a y is drawing to its fall I had not dreamed to see ; The first of many to enthrall My spirit, will it be ? Or is this eve the end of all Such new delight for me ? I journey home: the pattern grows Of moonshades on the way: “ Soon the first quarter, I suppose,” Sky-glancing travellers say; I realize that it, for those, Has been a common day.

13

THE RIVAL

I d e t e r m in e d to find out whose it was— The portrait he looked at so, and sighed; Bitterly have I rued my meanness And wept for it since he died ! I searched his desk when he was away, And there was the likeness—yes, my own ! Taken when I was the season’s beauty, And time-lines all unknown. I smiled at my image, and put it back, And he went on cherishing it, until I was chafed that he loved not the me then living, But that past woman still. Well, such was my jealousy at last, I destroyed that face of the former me ; Could you ever have believed a woman Would act so foolishly !

H

H ER ED ITY

I a m 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. The family 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.

15

“ YOU WERE THE SORT THAT MEN FO RG ET” You were the sort that men forget; Though I—not yet !— Perhaps not ever. Your slighted weakness Adds to the strength of my regret ! You had not the art—you never had For good or bad— To make men see how sweet your meaning, Which, visible, had charmed them glad. You would, by words inept let fall, Offend them all, Even if they saw your warm devotion Would hold your life’s blood at their call. You lacked the art to understand Those friends offhand Whose mode was crude, though whose dim meaning Surpassed the courtesies of the bland. I am now the only being who Remembers you It may be. What a waste that Nature Grudged soul so dear the art its due ! 16

SHE, I, AND THEY

I w as sitting, She was knitting, And the portraits of our fore-folk hung around; When there struck on us a sigh; “Ah—what is that ?” said I : “Was it not you ?” said she. “A sigh did sound.” I had not breathed it, Nor the hearth-smoke wreathed it, And how it came to us we could not guess ; And we looked up at each face Framed and glazed there in its place, Still hearkening; but thenceforth was silentness. Half in dreaming, “Then its meaning,” Said we, “ must be surely this; that they repine That we should be the last Of stocks once unsurpassed, And unable to keep up their sturdy line.” 1916.

7

N EA R LANIVET, 1872 T here was a stunted handpost just on the crest,

Only a few feet high: She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight­ time for her rest, At the crossways it stood by.

She leant back, being so weary, against its stem, And laid her arms on its own, Each open hand stretched out to each end of them, Her sad face sideways thrown. Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit end of day Made her look as one crucified In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way, And hurriedly “Don’t,” I cried. I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said, As she stepped forth ready to go, 8

N EA R LANIVET, 1872

19

“I am rested now.—Something strange came into my head; I wish I had not leant so !” And wordless we moved onward down from the hill In the west cloud’s murked obscure, And looking back we could see the handpost still In the solitude of the moor. “ It struck her too,” I thought, for as if afraid She heavily breathed as we trailed; Till she said, “ I did not think how Would look in the shade, When I leant there like one nailed.” I, lightly: “There’s nothing in it. For y o u , anyhow ! —“ O I know there is not,” said she . . . “Yet I wonder . . . If no one is bodily crucified now, In spirit one may be ! And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see In the running of Time’s far glass Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be Some day.—Alas, alas !

JOYS OF MEMORY W hen the spring comes round, and a certain day

Looks out from the brume by the eastern copsetrees And says, Remember, I begin again, as if it were new, The life of that date I once lived through, Whiling it hour by hour away ; So shall I do till my December, When spring comes round. I take my holiday then and my rest Away from the dun life here about me, Old hours re-greeting With the quiet sense that bring they must Such throbs as at first, till I house with dust, And in the numbness my heartsome zest For things that were, be past repeating When spring comes round.

20

TO THE M O O N

have you looked at, Moon, In your time, Now long past your prime ?” “0 , 1 have looked at, often looked at Sweet, sublime, Sore things, shudderful, night and noon In my time.” “ W hat

“What have you mused on, Moon, In your day, So aloof, so far away ? ” “ O, I have mused on, often mused on Growth, decay, Nations alive, dead, mad, aswoon, In my day ! ” “ Have you much wondered, Moon, On your rounds, Self-wrapt, beyond Earth’s bounds ?” “Yea, I have wondered, often wondered At the sounds Reaching me of the human tune On my rounds.” “What do you think of it, Moon, As you go ? Is Life much, or no ?” “O, I think of it, often think of it As a show God means surely to shut up soon, As I go.” 21

COPYING ARCHITECTURE IN AN OLD MINSTER (

Wimborne)

How smartly the quarters of the hour march by That the jack-o’-clock never forgets; Ding-dong; and before I have traced a cusp s eye, Or got the true twist of the ogee over, A double ding-dong ricochetts. Just so did he clang here before I came, And so will he clang when I’m gone Through the Minsters cavernous hollows —the same Tale of hours never more to be will he deliver To the speechless midnight and dawn. I grow to conceive it a call to ghosts, Whose mould lies below and around. Yes; the next “ Come, come,” draws them out from their posts, 22

C O PY IN G A R C H IT E C T U R E

23

And they gather, and one shade appears, and another, As the eve-damps creep from the ground. See—a Courtenay stands by his quatrefoiled tomb, And a Duke and his Duchess near; And one Sir Edmund in columned gloom, And a Saxon king by the presbytery chamber; And shapes unknown in the rear. Maybe they have met for a parle on some plan To better ail-stricken mankind ; I catch their cheepings, though thinner than The overhead creak of a passager’s pinion When leaving land behind. Or perhaps they speak to the yet unborn, And caution them not to come To a world so ancient and trouble-torn, Of foiled intents, vain lovingkindness, And ardours chilled and numb. They waste to fog as I stir and stand, And move from the arched recess, And pick up the drawing that slipped from my hand, And feel for the pencil I dropped in the cranny In a moment’s forgetfulness.

TO SHAKESPEARE AFTER

TH REE

H U N D RED

YEARS

baffling Soul, least capturable of themes, Thou, who display’dst a life of common­ place, Leaving no intimate word or personal trace Of high design outside the artistry Of thy penned dreams, Still shalt remain at heart unread eternally B r ig h t

Through human orbits thy discourse to­ day, Despite thy formal pilgrimage, throbs on In harmonies that cow Oblivion, And, like the wind, with all-uncared effect Maintain a sway Not fore-desired, in tracks unchosen and unchecked. 24

TO SHAKESPEARE

25

And yet, at thy last breath, with mindless note The borough clocks in sameness tongued the hour, The Avon just as always glassed the tower, Thy age was published on thy passing-bell But in due rote With other dwellers’ deaths accorded a like knell. And at the strokes some townsman (met, maybe, And thereon queried by some squire’s good dame Driving in shopward) may have given thy name, With, “Yes, a worthy man and well-to-do ; Though, as for me, I knew him but by just a neighbour’s nod, ’tis true. “ I’ faith, few knew him much here, save by word, He having elsewhere led his busier life ; Though to be sure he left with us his wife.” —“Ah, one of the tradesmen’s sons, I now recall. . . . Witty, I’ve heard. . . . We did not know him. . . . Well, good-day. Death comes to all.”

26

TO SHAKESPEARE

So, like a strange bright bird we sometimes find To mingle with the barn-door brood awhile, Then vanish from their homely domicile— Into man’s poesy, we wot not whence, Flew thy strange mind, Lodged there a radiant guest, and sped for ever thence. 1916.

Q U ID H IC AGIS ?

i

W hen I weekly knew

An ancient pew, And murmured there The forms of prayer And thanks and praise In the ancient ways, And heard read out During August drought That chapter from Kings Harvest-time brings; —How the prophet, broken By griefs unspoken, Went heavily away To fast and to pray, And, while waiting to die, The Lord passed by, And a whirlwind and fire Drew nigher and nigher, And a small voice anon Bade him up and be gone,— 27

28

Q U ID HIC AGIS ?

I did not apprehend As I sat to the end And watched for her smile Across the sunned aisle, That this tale of a seer Which came once a year Might, when sands were heaping, Be like a sweat creeping, Or in any degree Bear on her or on me. ii

When later, by chance Of circumstance, It befel me to read On a hot afternoon At the lectern there The selfsame words As the lesson decreed, To the gathered few From the hamlets near— Folk of flocks and herds Sitting half aswoon, Who listened thereto As women and men Not overmuch Concerned at such— So, like them then, I did not see What drought might be

Q U ID H IC AGIS ?

With me, with her, As the Kalendar Moved on, and Time Devoured our prime. in

But now, at last, When our glory has passed, And there is no smile From her in the aisle, But where it once shone A marble, men say, With her name thereon Is discerned to-day; And spiritless In the wilderness I shrink from sight And desire the night, (Though, as in old wise, I might still arise, Go forth, and stand And prophesy in the land), I feel the shake Of wind and earthquake, And consuming fire Nigher and nigher, And the voice catch clear, “What doest thou here ?” T h e S p ec ta to r:

1916.

29

ON A MIDSUMMER EVE I i d l y 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.

30

TIM IN G H E R ( Written to an old folk-tune)

L alage’s coming: Where is she now, O ? Turning to bow, O, And smile, is she, Just at parting, Parting, parting, As she is starting To come to me ?

Where is she now, O, Now, O, now, O, Shadowing a bough, O, Of hedge or tree As she is rushing, Rushing, rushing, Gossamers brushing To come to me ? Lalage’s coming; Where is she now, O ; 31

32

TIM IN G H E R

Climbing the brow, O, Of hills I see ? Yes, she is nearing, Nearing, nearing, Weather unfearing To come to me. Near is she now, O, Now, O, now, O ; Milk the rich cow, O, Forward the tea; Shake the down bed for her, Linen sheets spread for her, Drape round the head for her Coming to me. Lalage’s coming, Nearer is she now, O, End anyhow, O, To-day’s husbandry ! Would a gilt chair were mine, Slippers of vair were mine, Brushes for hair were mine Of ivory ! What will she think, O, She who’s so comely, Viewing how homely A sort are we !

T IM IN G H E R

Nothing resplendent, No prompt attendant, Not one dependent Pertaining to me ! Lalage’s coming; Where is she now, O ? Fain I’d avow, O, Full honestly Nought here’s enough for her, All is too rough for her, Even my love for her Poor in degree. Nearer is she now, O, Now, O, now, O, She it is, I vow, O, Passing the lea. Rush down to meet her there, Call out and greet her there, Never a sweeter there Crossed to me ! Lalage’s come ; aye, Come is she now, O ! . . . Does Heaven allow, O, A meeting to be ? Yes, she is here now, Here now, here now, Nothing to fear now, Here’s Lalage !

33

BEFORE KNOWLEDGE W hen I walked roseless tracks and wide, Ere dawned your date for meeting me, O why did you not cry Halloo Across the stretch between, and say :

“We move, while years as yet divide, On closing lines which—though it be You know me not nor I know you— Will intersect and join some day !” Then well I had borne Each scraping thorn; But the winters froze, And grew no rose ; No bridge bestrode The gap at all; No shape you showed, And I heard no call !

34

THE BLINDED BIRD

So zestfully canst thou sing ? And all this indignity, With God’s consent, on thee ! Blinded ere yet a-wing By the red-hot needle thou, I stand and wonder how So zestfully thou canst sing ! Resenting not such wrong, T h y g rie v o u s p a in fo r g o t,

Eternal dark thy lot, Groping thy whole life long, After that stab of fire ; Enjailed in pitiless wire ; Resenting not such wrong ! Who hath charity ? This bird. Who suffereth long and is kind, Is not provoked, though blind And alive ensepulchred ? Who hopeth, endureth all things ? Who thinketh no evil, but sings ? Who is divine ? This bird. 35

“ THE WIND BLEW W ORDS” T he wind blew words along the skies,

And these it blew to me Through the wide dusk: “Lift up your eyes, Behold this troubled tree, Complaining as it sways and plies; It is a limb of thee. “Yea, too, the creatures sheltering round— Dumb figures, wild and tame, Yea, too, thy fellows who abound— Either of speech the same Or far and strange—black, dwarfed, and browned, They are stuff of thy own frame.” I moved on in a surging awe Of inarticulateness At the pathetic Me I saw In all his huge distress, Making self-slaughter of the law To kill, bind, or suppress.

36

THE FADED FACE

How was this I did not see Such a look as here was shown Ere its womanhood had blown Past its first felicity ?— That I did not know you young, Faded Face, Know you young ! Why did Time so ill bestead That I heard no voice of yours Hail from out the curved contours Of those lips when rosy red ; Listed not the songs they sung, Faded Face, Songs they sung ! By these blanchings, blooms of old, And the relics of your voice— Leavings rare of rich and choice From your early tone and mould— Let me mourn,—aye, overwrung, Faded Face, Overwrung ! 37

THE RIDDLE i

Stretching eyes west

Over the sea, Wind foul or fair, Always stood she Prospect-impressed; Solely out there Did her gaze rest, Never elsewhere Seemed charm to be.

Always eyes east Ponders she now, As in devotion, Hills of blank brow Where no waves plough. Never the least Room for emotion Drawn from the ocean Does she allow. 38

TH E DUEL “ I a m here to time, you see ; The glade is well-screened—eh ?—against alarm; Fit place to vindicate by my arm The honour of my spotless wife, Who scorns your libel upon her life In boasting intimacy !

“ ‘All hush-offerings you’ll spurn, My husband. Two must come ; one only go,’ She said. ‘That he’ll be you I know ; To faith like ours Heaven will be just, And I shall abide in fullest trust Your speedy glad return.’” “ Good. Here am also I ; And we’ll proceed without more waste of words To warm your cockpit. Of the swords 39

40

TH E DUEL

Take you your choice. I shall thereby Feel that on me no blame can lie, Whatever Fate accords.” So stripped they there, and fought, And the swords clicked and scraped, and the onsets sped; Till the husband fell; and his shirt was red With streams from his hearts hot cistern. Nought Could save him now; and the other, wrought Maybe to pity, said: “ Why did you urge on this ? Your wife assured you; and ’t had better been That you had let things pass, serene In confidence of long-tried bliss, Holding there could be nought amiss In what my words might mean.” Then, seeing nor ruth nor rage Could move his foeman more—now Death’s deaf thrall— He wiped his steel, and, with a call Like turtledove to dove, swift broke Into the copse, where under an oak His horse cropt, held by a page.

TH E DUEL

4

i

“All’s over, Sweet,” he cried To the wife, thus guised; for the young page was she. “ ’Tis as we hoped and said’t would be. He never guessed. . . . We mount and ride To where our love can reign uneyed. He’s dust, and we are free.”

AT MAYFAIR LODGINGS

How could I be aware, The opposite window eyeing As I lay listless there, That through its blinds was dying One I had rated rare Before I had set me sighing For another more fair ? Had the house-front been glass, My vision unobscuring, Could aught have come to pass More happiness-insuring To her, loved as a lass When spouseless, all-alluring ? I reckon not, alas ! So, the square window stood, Steadily night-long shining In my close neighbourhood, Who looked forth undivining That soon would go for good One there in pain reclining, Unpardoned, unadieu’d. 42

AT MAYFAIR LODGINGS

Silently screened from view Her tragedy was ending That need not have come due Had she been less unbending. How near, near were we two At that last vital rending,— And neither of us knew !

43

TO MY FA TH ER ’S V IO LIN D oes he want you down there

In the Nether Glooms where The hours may be a dragging load upon him, As he hears the axle grind Round and round Of the great world, in the blind Still profound Of the night-time ? He might liven at the sound Of your string, revealing you had not forgone him. In the gallery west the nave, But a few yards from his grave, Did you, tucked beneath his chin, to his bowing Guide the homely harmony Of the quire Who for long years strenuously— Son and sire— Caught the strains that at his fingering low or higher From your four thin threads and eff-holes came outflowing. 44

TO MY FA THER ’S VIOLIN

4$

And, too, what merry tunes He would bow at nights or noons That chanced to find him bent to lute a measure, When he made you speak his heart As in dream, Without book or music-chart, On some theme Elusive as a jack-o’-lanthorn’s gleam, And the psalm of duty shelved for trill of pleasure.

Well, you can not, alas, The barrier overpass That screens him in those Mournful Meads hereunder, Where no fiddling can be heard In the glades Of silentness, no bird Thrills the shades; Where no viol is touched for songs or serenades, No bowing wakes a congregation’s wonder.

He must do without you now, Stir you no more anyhow To yearning concords taught you in your glory;

46

TO MY FATHER’S VIOLIN

While, your strings a tangled wreck, Once smart drawn, Ten worm-holes in your neck, Purflings wan With dust-hoar, here alone I sadly con Your present dumbness, shape your olden story. 1916.

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY T his statue of Liberty, busy man,

Here erect in the city square, I have watched while your scrubbings, this early morning, Strangely wistful, And half tristful, Have turned her from foul to fair ; With your bucket of water, and mop, and brush, Bringing her out of the grime That has smeared her during the smokes of winter With such glumness In her dumbness, And aged her before her time. You have washed her down with motherly care— Head, shoulders, arm, and foot, To the very hem of the robes that drape her— 47

48

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

All expertly And alertly, Till a long stream, black with soot, Flows over the pavement to the road, And her shape looms pure as snow: I read you are hired by the City guardiansMay be yearly, Or once merely— To treat the statues so ? “ Oh, I’m not hired by the Councilmen To cleanse the statues here. I do this one as a self-willed duty, Not as paid to, Or at all made to, But because the doing is dear.” Ah, then I hail you brother and friend ! Liberty’s knight divine. What you have done would have been doing, Yea, most verily, Well, and thoroughly, Had but your courage been mine ! “ Oh I care not for Liberty’s mould, Liberty charms not me ; What’s Freedom but an idler’s vision,

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

49

Vain, pernicious, Often vicious, Of things that cannot be ! “Memory it is that brings me to this— Of a daughter—my one sweet own. She grew a famous carver’s model, One of the fairest And of the rarest:— She sat for the figure as shown. “But alas, she died in this distant place Before I was warned to betake Myself to her side ! . . . And in love of my darling, In love of the fame of her, And the good name of her I do this for her sake.” Answer I gave not. Of that form The carver was I at his side ; His child, my model, held so saintly, Grand in feature, Gross in nature, In the dens of vice had died.

THE BACKGROUND AND THE FIGURE (Lover's Ditty)

I t h i n k of the slope where the rabbits fed, Of the periwinks’ rockwork lair, Of the fuchsias ringing their bells of red— And the something else seen there. Between the blooms where the sod basked bright, By the bobbing fuchsia trees, Was another and culminating sight— The sight that richened these. I shall seek those beauties in the spring, When the days are fit and fair, But only as foils to the one more thing That also will flower there.

50

THE CHANGE O ut of the past there rises a week—

Who shall read the years O !— Out of the past there rises a week Enringed with a purple zone. Out of the past there rises a week When thoughts were strung too thick to speak, And the magic of its lineaments remains with me alone. In that week there was heard a singing— Who shall spell the years O !— In that week there was heard a singing, And the white owl wondered why. In that week there was heard a singing, And forth from the casement were candles flinging Radiance that fell on the deodar and lit up the path thereby. Could that song have a mocking note ?— Who shall unroll the years O !— 51

52

THE CHANGE

Could that song have a mocking note To the white owl’s sense as it fell ? Could that song have a mocking note As it trilled out warm from the singer’s throat, And who was the mocker and who the mocked when two felt all was well ?

In a tedious trampling crowd, far later— Who shall bare the years O !— In a tedious trampling crowd, far later, When silvery singings were dumb ; In a tedious trampling crowd, far later, In the murky night I stood to await her, And the twanging of iron wheels gave out the signal that she was come.

She said with a travel-tired smile— Who shall lift the years O !— She said with a travel-tired smile, Half scared by scene so strange ; She said with a travel-tired smile, The blurred lamps wanning her face the while, “O Love, I am here ; I am with you !” . . . Ah, that there should have come a change !

THE CHANGE

53

O the doom by someone spoken— Who shall unseal the years O !— O the doom by someone spoken When nothing of bale saw we: O the doom by someone spoken, O the heart by someone broken, The heart whose sweet reverberances are all time leaves to me. Ja n .-F e b . 1 9 1 3 .

SITTING ON THE BRIDGE (Echo of an old song)

S itting on the bridge

Past the barracks, town and ridge, At once the spirit seized us To sing a song that pleased us— As “ The Fifth” were much in rumour; It was “Whilst I’m in the humour, Take me, Paddy, will you now ?” And a lancer drew nigh, And his Royal Irish eye Said, “Willing, faith, am I, O, to take you anyhow, dears, To take you anyhow.” But, lo !—dad walking by, Cried, “What, you lightheels ! Fie ! Is this the way you roam And mock the sunset gleam ?” And he marched us straightway home, Though we said, “ We are only, daddy, Singing, ‘Will you take me, Paddy ?’” 54

SITTING O N THE BRIDGE

—Well, we never saw from then, If we sang there anywhen, The soldier dear again, Except at night in dream-time, Except at night in dream. Perhaps that soldiers fighting In a land that’s far away, Or he may be idly plighting Some foreign hussy gay ; Or perhaps his bones are whiting In a graveless decay ! . . . Ah !—does he mind him how The girls he saw that day On the bridge, were sitting singing At the time of curfew-ringing, “ Take me, Paddy ; will you now, dear ? Paddy, will you now ?” G

r e y ’s

B

r id g e .

55

THE YOUNG CHURCHWARDEN W hen he lit the candles there,

And the light fell on his hand, And it trembled as he scanned Her and me, his vanquished air Hinted that his dream was done, And I saw he had begun To understand. When Love s viol was unstrung, Sore I wished the hand that shook Had been mine that shared her book While that evening hymn was sung, His the victor’s, as he lit Candles where he had bidden us sit With vanquished look. Now her dust lies listless there, His afar from tending hand, What avails the victory scanned ? Does he smile from upper air : “Ah, my friend, your dream is done ; And ’tis y o u who have begun To understand ! ” 56

“ I TRAVEL AS A PHANTOM N O W ” I t r a v e l as a phantom now, For people do not wish to see In flesh and blood so bare a bough As Nature makes of me. And thus I visit bodiless Strange gloomy households often at odds, And wonder if Man’s consciousness Was a mistake of God’s. And next I meet you, and I pause, And think that if mistake it were, As some have said, O then it was One that I well can bear ! 1 9 1 5 .

57

LINES TO A M O V E M EN T

IN M O Z A R T ^

E-FLA T

SYM PH ONY

Show me again the time When in the Junetide’s prime We flew by meads and mountains northerly !— Yea, to such freshness, fairness, fulness, fineness, freeness, Love lures life on.

Show me again the day When from the sandy bay We looked together upon the pestered sea !— Yea, to such surging, swaying, sighing, swelling, shrinking, Love lures life on. Show me again the hour When by the pinnacled tower We eyed each other and feared futurity !— 58

LINES TO A SYM PHONY

59

Yea, to such bodings, broodings, beatings, blanchings, blessings, Love lures life on. Show me again just this: The moment of that kiss Away from the prancing folk, by the strawberry-tree !— Yea, to such rashness, ratheness, rareness, ripeness, richness, Love lures life on. Begun N ovem ber

1898.

“ IN THE SEVENTIES” “ Qui deridetur ab amico suo sicut ego.”—-Job.

In the seventies I was bearing in my breast,

Penned tight, Certain starry thoughts that threw a magic light On the worktimes and the soundless hours of rest In the seventies ; aye, I bore them in my breast Penned tight. In the seventies when my neighbours—even my friend— Saw me pass, Heads were shaken, and I heard the words, “Alas, For his onward years and name unless he mend !” In the seventies, when my neighbours and my friend Saw me pass. 60

“ IN THE SEV EN TIES”

61

In the seventies those who met me did not know Of the vision That immuned me from the chillings of mis­ prision And the damps that choked my goings to and fro In the seventies; yea, those nodders did not know Of the vision. In the seventies nought could darken or destroy it, Locked in me, Though as delicate as lamp-worm s lucency ; Neither mist nor murk could weaken or alloy it In the seventies !—could not darken or destroy it, Locked in me.

THE PEDIGREE i I b e n t in the deep of night Over a pedigree the chronicler gave As mine; and as I bent there, halfunrobed, The uncurtained panes of my window-square let in the watery light Of the moon in its old age : And green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it globed Like a dying dolphin’s eye seen through a lapping wave.

ii

So, scanning my sire-sown tree, And the hieroglyphs of this spouse tied to that, With offspring mapped below in lineage, Till the tangles troubled me, 62

THE PEDIGREE

63

The branches seemed to twist into a seared and cynic face Which winked and tokened towards the window like a Mage Enchanting me to gaze again thereat. hi

It was a mirror now, And in it a long perspective I could trace Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each All with the family look, Whose names had since been inked down in their place On the recorder’s book, Generation and generation of my mien, and build, and brow. IV

And then did I divine That every heave and coil and move I made Within my brain, and in my mood and speech, Was in the glass portrayed As long forestalled by their so making

THE PEDIGREE

64

The first of them, the primest fuglemen of my line, Being fogged in far antiqueness past surmise and reasons reach. v Said I then, sunk in tone, “ I am mere continuator and counter­ feit !— Though thinking, I am /, A n d w h a t I do I do m y s e lf a lo n e ”

—The cynic twist of the page thereat unknit Back to its normal figure, having wrought its purport wry, The Mage’s mirror left the windowsquare, And the stained moon and drift retook their places there. 1916.

HIS HEART a w om an’ s dream

A t midnight, in the room where he lay dead

Whom in his life I had never clearly read, I thought if I could peer into that citadel

His heart, I should at last know full and well What hereto had been known to him alone, Despite our long sit-out of years foreflown, “And if,” I said, “ I do this for his memory’s sake, It would not wound him, even if he could wake.” So I bent over him. He seemed to smile With a calm confidence the whole long while That I, withdrawing his heart, held it and, bit by bit, Perused the unguessed things found written on it. 65

66

HIS HEART

It was inscribed like a terrestrial sphere With quaint vermiculations close and clear— His graving. Had I known, would I have risked the stroke Its reading brought, and my own heart nigh broke ! Yes, there at last, eyes opened, did I see His whole sincere symmetric history; There were his truth, his simple singleminded­ ness, Strained, maybe, by time’s storms, but there no less. There were the daily deeds from sun to sun In blindness, but good faith, that he had done ; There were regrets, at instances wherein he swerved (As he conceived) from cherishings I had deserved. There were old hours all figured down as bliss— Those spent with me—(how little had I thought this !) There those when, at my absence, whether he slept or waked, (Though I knew not ’twas so !) his spirit ached.

HIS HEART

67

There that when we were severed, how day dulled Till time joined us anew, was chronicled : And arguments and battlings in defence of me That heart recorded clearly and ruddily. I put it back, and left him as he lay While pierced the morning pink and then the gray Into each dreary room and corridor around, Where I shall wait, but his step will not sound.

WHERE THEY LIVED leaves come down Upon that bank to-day, Some green, some yellow, and some pale brown ; The wet bents bob and sway; The once warm slippery turf is sodden Where we laughingly sat or lay. D is h e v e l l e d

The summerhouse is gone, Leaving a weedy space ; The bushes that veiled it once have grown Gaunt trees that interlace, Through whose flayed fingers I see too clearly The nakedness of the place. And where were hills of blue, Blind drifts of vapour blow, And the names of former dwellers few, If any, people know, And instead of a voice that called, “ Come in, Dears,” Time calls, “Pass below !” 68

THE O C CU LTA TION W hen the cloud shut down on the morning shine,

And darkened the sun, I said, “ So ended that joy of mine Years back begun.” But day continued its lustrous roll In upper air; And did my late irradiate soul Live on somewhere ?

69

LIFE LAUGHS ONWARD R a m b l in g I looked for an old abode Where, years back, one had lived I knew; Its site a dwelling duly showed, But it was new.

I went where, not so long ago, The sod had riven two breasts asunder ; Daisies throve gaily there, as though No grave were under. I walked along a terrace where Loud children gambolled in the sun ; The figure that had once sat there Was missed by none. Life laughed and moved on unsubdued, I saw that Old succumbed to Young: ’Twas well. My too regretful mood Died on my tongue.

70

THE PEA CE-O FFERIN G It was but a little thing,

Yet I knew it meant to me Ease from what had given a sting To the very birdsinging Latterly. But I would not welcome i t ; And for all I then declined O the regrettings infinite When the night-processions flit Through the mind !

71

“ SOMETHING TAPPED” 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.

S o m e t h in g

“ O 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 !” I rose and neared the window-glass, But vanished thence had she : Only a pallid moth, alas, Tapped at the pane for me. A u g u st

1913.

72

THE W O U N D

I c l i m b e d to the crest, And, fog-festooned, The sun lay west Like a crimson wound : Like that wound of mine Of which none knew, For I’d given no sign That it pierced me through.

73

A MERRYMAKING IN QUESTION I w il l get a new string for my fiddle, And call to the neighbours to come, And partners shall dance down the middle Until the old pewter-wares hum : And we’ll sip the mead, cyder, and rum ! ” “

From the night came the oddest of answers: A hollow wind, like a bassoon, And headstones all ranged up as dancers, And cypresses droning a croon, And gurgoyles that mouthed to the tune.

74

“ I SAID AND SANG HER EXCELLENCE ” (Fickle Lover's Song)

I s a id and sang her excellence : They called it laud undue. (Have your way, my heart, O !) Yet what was homage far above The plain deserts of my olden Love Proved verity of my new. “ She moves a sylph in picture-land, Where nothing frosts the air : ” (Have your way, my heart, O !) “To all winged pipers overhead She is known by shape and song,” I said, Conscious of licence there. I sang of her in a dim old hall Dream-built too fancifully, (Have your way, my heart, O !) But lo, the ripe months chanced to lead My feet to such a hall indeed, Where stood the very She. 75

76 “ I SANG HER EXCELLENCE” Strange, startling, was it then to learn I had glanced down unborn time, (Have your way, my heart, O !) And prophesied, whereby I knew That which the years had planned to do In warranty of my rhyme. B

y

R

u sh y- P o n d .

A JANUARY NIGHT (1879) T he rain smites more and more,

The east wind snarls and sneezes; Through the joints of the quivering door The water wheezes. The point of each ivy-shoot Writhes on its neighbours face ; There is some hid dread afoot That we cannot trace. Is it the spirit astray Of the man at the house below Whose coffin they took in to-day ? We do not know.

77

A KISS B y a wall the stranger now calls his,

Was born of old a particular kiss, Without forethought in its genesis; Which in a trice took wing on the air. And where that spot is nothing shows: There ivy calmly grows, And no one knows What a birth was there. That kiss is gone where none can tell— Not even those who felt its spell: It cannot have died; that know we well. Somewhere it pursues its flight, One of a long procession of sounds Travelling aethereal rounds Far from earth’s bounds In the infinite.

78

THE A N N O U N C E M E N T T hey came, the brothers, and took two chairs

In their usual quiet way ; And for a time we did not think They had much to say. And they began and talked awhile Of ordinary things, Till spread that silence in the room Which a pent thought brings. And then they said: “The end has come. Yes: it has come at last.” And we looked down, and knew that day A spirit had passed.

79

THE OXEN C hristmas E ve , and twelve o f the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in 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 “ 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.

80

THE TRESSES “ W h e n 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.

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

THE PH O T O G R A P H T he flame crept up the portrait line by line

As it lay on the coals in the silence of night’s profound, And over the arm’s incline, And along the edge of the silkwork superfine, And gnawed at the delicate bosom’s defence­ less round. Then I vented a cry of hurt, and averted my eyes, The spectacle was one that I could not bear, To my deep and sad surprise; But, compelled to heed, I again looked furtivewise Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth, and hair. “Thank God, she is out of it now !” I said at last, In a great relief of heart when the thing was done That had set my soul aghast, 82

THE P H O T O G R A P H

83

And nothing was left of the picture unsheathed from the past But the ashen ghost of the card it had figured on. She was a woman long hid amid packs of years, She might have been living or dead; she was lost to my sight, And the deed that had nigh drawn tears Was done in a casual clearance of life’s arrears; But I felt as if I had put her to death that night ! . . .

—Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive, And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead ; Yet—yet—if on earth alive Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive ? If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head ?

ON A HEATH I c o u l d hear a gown-skirt rustling Before I could see her shape, Rustling through the heather That formed the common’s drape, On that evening of dark weather When I hearkened, lips agape. And the town-shine in the distance Did but baffle here the sight, And then a voice came forward: “Are you there ? I fear the night ! And the herons flapped to norward In the firs upon my right. There was another looming Whose build we did not see ; There was one meekly blooming In close propinquity; There was a shade entombing All that was bright of me.

84

AN ANNIVERSARY I t was at the very date to which we have come,

In the month of the matching name, When, at a like minute, the sun had upswum, Its couch-time at night being the same. And the same path stretched here that people now follow, And the same stile crossed their way, And beyond the same green hillock and hollow The same horizon lay ; And the same man passes now hereby who passed hereby that day. Let so much be said of the date-day’s sameness; But the tree that neighbours the track, And stoops like a pedlar afflicted with lameness, Had no waterlogged wound or windcrack. 85

AN ANNIVERSARY

86

And the stones of that wall were not enshrouded With mosses of many tones, And the garth up afar was not over­ crowded With a multitude of white stones, And the man’s eyes then were not so sunk that you saw the socket-bones. K

in g s t o n - M a u r w a r d

E

w elease.

“ BY THE R U N IC S T O N E ” B y the Runic Stone They sat, where the grass sloped down, And chattered, he white-hatted, she in brown, Pink-faced, breeze-blown.

Rapt there alone In the newness of talking so In such a place, there was nothing to let them know What hours had flown. And the die thrown By them heedlessly there, the dent It was to cut in their encompassment, Were, too, unknown. It might have strown Their zest with qualms to see, As in a glass, Time toss their history From zone to zone !

87

THE PINK FROCK

“ O m y pretty pink frock, I sha’n’t be able to wear it ! Why is he dying just now ? I hardly can bear it ! “ He might have contrived to live on ; But they say there’s no hope whatever : And must I shut myself up, And go out never ? “ O my pretty pink frock, Puff-sleeved and accordion-pleated ! He might have passed in July, And me uncheated ! ”

88

TRANSFORMATIONS P ortion of this yew

Is a man my grandsire knew, Bosomed here at its foot: This branch maybe his wife, A ruddy human life Now turned to a green shoot. 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

89

IN HER PRECINCTS H er house looked cold from the foggy lea, And the square of each window a dull black blur Where showed no stir : Yes, her gloom within at the lack of me Seemed matching mine at the lack of her.

The black squares grew to be squares of light As the eveshade swathed the house and lawn, And viols gave tone ; There was glee within. And I found that night The gloom of severance mine alone. K in g s t o n - M a u rw ard P a r k .

90

THE LAST SIGNAL ( Oct. i i ,

1886)

A M E M O R Y OF W I LL I A M B A R N E S

S i l e n t l y I footed by an uphill road That led from my abode to a spot yewboughed; Yellowly the sun sloped low down to west­ ward, And dark was the east with cloud.

Then, below the shadow of that livid sad east, Where the light was least, and a gate stood wide, Flashed a reflection of the sun that was facing it, Like a brief blaze on that side. Looking hard and harder I knew what it meant— The sudden shine sent from the livid east scene ; 9

THE LAST SIGNAL

92

It meant the sun mirrored by the coffin of my friend there, Turning to the road from his green, To take his last journey forth—he who in his prime Trudged so many a time from that gate athwart the land ! Thus a farewell to me he signalled on his grave-way, As with a wave of his hand. W

in t e r b o r n e -

C

ame

Path.

THE HOUSE OF SILENCE “ T h a t 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. 93

94

TH E H O U SE OF SIL E N C E

“ 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 his ages seven, An aeon in an hour.”

GREAT THINGS Sweet cyder 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 : O cyder 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 : O dancing is a great thing, A great thing to me ! Love is, yea, a great thing, A great thing to me, When, having drawn across the lawn In darkness silently, 95

96

GREAT THINGS

A figure flits like one a-wing Out from the nearest tree : O 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, 44Soul, 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 !

THE CHIMES T hat morning I walked up the town The twitching chimes of long renown Played out to me The sweet Sicilian sailors’ tune, And I knew not if late or soon My day would be :

A day of sunshine beryl-bright And windless; yea, think as I might, I could not say, Even to within years’ measure, when One would be at my side who then Was far away. When hard utilitarian times Had stilled the sweet Saint-Peter’s chimes I learnt to see That bale may spring where blisses are, And one desired might be afar Though near to me.

97

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. And thus I drew her there alone, Seated amid the gauze Of moisture, hooded, only her outline shown, With rain-lines 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. F ro m an o ld note.

98

“ WHY DID I SKETCH” W hy did I sketch an upland green,

And put the figure in Of one on the spot with me ?— For now that one has ceased to be seen The picture waxes akin To a wordless irony. If you go drawing on down or cliff Let no soft curves intrude Of a womans silhouette, But show the escarpments stark and stiff As in utter solitude ; So shall you half forget. Let me sooner pass from sight of the sky Than again on a thoughtless day Sketch, laugh, and sing, and rhyme With a woman sitting near, whom I Paint in for love, and who may Be called hence in my time ! F ro m an o ld note.

99

CONJECTURE I f there were in my kalendar

No Emma, Florence, Mary, What would be my existence now— A hermits ?—wanderers weary ?— How should I live, and how Near would be death, or far ? Could it have been that other eyes Might have uplit my highway ? That fond, sad, retrospective sight Would catch from this dim byway Prized figures different quite From those that now arise ? With how strange aspect would there creep The dawn, the night, the daytime, If memory were not what it is In song-time, toil, or pray-time.— O were it else than this, I’d pass to pulseless sleep !

IOO

THE BLOW T hat no man schemed it is my hope— Yea, that it fell by will and scope Of That Which some enthrone, And for whose meaning myriads grope.

For I would not that of my kind There should, of his unbiassed mind, Have been one known Who such a stroke could have designed; Since it would augur works and ways Below the lowest that man assays To have hurled that stone Into the sunshine of our days ! And if it prove that no man did, And that the Inscrutable, the Hid, Was cause alone Of this foul crash our lives amid, I’ll go in due time, and forget In some deep graveyard’s oubliette The thing whereof I groan, And cease from troubling; thankful yet oi

102

THE BLOW

Time’s finger should have stretched to show No aimful author’s was the blow That swept us prone, But the Immanent Doer’s That does not know, Which in some age unguessed of us May lift Its blinding incubus, And see, and own: “ It grieves me I did thus and thus !”

LOVE THE M O N O P O L IST (Young Lover's Reverie)

train draws forth from the station-yard, And with it carries me. I rise, and stretch out, and regard The platform left, and see An airy slim blue form there standing, And know that it is she. T

he

While with strained vision I watch on, The figure turns round quite To greet friends gaily ; then is gone. . . . The import may be slight, But why remained she not hard gazing Till I was out of sight ? “ O do not chat with others there,” I brood. “They are not I. O strain your thoughts as if they were Gold bands between us; eye All neighbour scenes as so much blankness Till I again am by ! 103

104

LOVE THE M O N O P O L IST

44A troubled soughing in the breeze And the sky overhead Let yourself feel; and shadeful trees, Ripe corn, and apples red, Read as things barren and distasteful While we are separated ! 44When I come back uncloak your gloom, And let in lovely day ; Then the long dark as of the tomb Can well be thrust away With sweet things I shall have to practise, And you will have to say !” Begun

1871: f in is h e d

AT MIDDLE-FIELD GATE IN FEBRUARY T h e bars are thick with drops that show As they gather themselves from the fog Like silver buttons set in a row, And as equally spaced as if measured, although They fall at the feeblest jog. They load the leafless hedge hard by, And the blades of last year’s grass, While the arable ridges turned up nigh In brown lines, clammy and clogging lie— Too clogging for feet to pass. 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 Moved a bevy now underground ! B o ckh am pton L a n e .

10 5

THE YOUTH WHO CARRIED A LIGHT I

saw

him pass as the new day dawned,

Murmuring some musical phrase ; Horses were drinking and floundering in the pond, And the tired stars thinned their gaze ; Yet these were not the spectacles at all that he conned, But an inner one, giving out rays. Such was the thing in his eye, walking there, The very and visible thing, A close light, displacing the gray of the morn­ ing air, And the tokens that the dark was taking wing; And was it not the radiance of a purpose rare That might ripe to its accomplishing ? What became of that light ? I wonder still its fate ! Was it quenched at its very apogee ? 106

YOUTH WHO CARRIED A LIGHT 107 Did it struggle frail and frailer to a beam emaciate ? Did it thrive till matured in verity ? Or did it travel on, to be a new young dreamer’s freight, And thence on infinitely ? 1 91 5.

THE HEAD ABOVE THE FOG S omething 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.

O the vision keen, Tripping along to me for love As in the flesh it used to move, Only its hat and plume above The filmy fog-fleece seen. 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. 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. 108

O V ER LO O K IN G THE R IV E R S T O U R

swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam In the wet June’s last beam : Like little crossbows animate The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam. T he

Planing up shavings made of spray A moor-hen darted out From the bank thereabout, And through the stream-shine ripped his way; Planing up shavings made of spray A moor-hen darted out. Closed were the kingcups; and the mead Dripped in monotonous green, Though the day’s morning sheen Had shown it golden and honeybee’d ; Closed were the kingcups; and the mead Dripped in monotonous green. 109

n o O V ER LO O K IN G THE S T O U R

And never I turned my head, alack, While these things met my gaze Through the pane’s drop-drenched glaze, To see the more behind my back. . . . O never I turned, but let, alack, These less things hold my gaze !

THE MUSICAL BOX L ifelong 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: “ O 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. h i

1 12

THE MUSICAL BOX

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 fly of ancient clocks : She laughed a hailing as she scanned Me in the gloom, the tuneful box Intoning it. Lifelong to be I thought it. That there watched hard by A spirit who sang to the indoor tune, “ O make the most of what is nigh ! I did not hear in my dull soul-swoon— I did not see.

O N ST U R M IN S T E R FOO T-BRID G E R eticulations creep upon the slack stream’s face

When the wind skims irritably past, The current clucks smartly into each hollow place That years of flood have scrabbled in the pier’s sodden base ; The floating-lily leaves rot fast. On a roof stand the swallows equidistantly in rows, Till they arrow off and drop like stones Among the eyot-withies at whose roots the river flows; And beneath the roof is she who in the dark world shows As a lattice-gleam when midnight moans.

ROYAL SPO NSO RS

king and the queen will stand to the child; ’Twill be handed down in song; And it’s no more than their deserving, With my lord so faithful at Court so long, And so staunch and strong. “ T he

“ O never before was known such a thing ! ’Twill be a grand time for all; And the beef will be a whole-roasted bullock, And the servants will have a feast in the hall, And the ladies a ball. “While from Jordan’s stream by a traveller, In a flagon of silver wrought, And by caravan, stage-coach, wain, and waggon A precious trickle has been brought, Clear as when caught.”

ROYAL SPO NSO RS

115

The morning came. To the park of the peer The royal couple bore ; And the font was filled with the Jordan water, And the household awaited their guests before The carpeted door. But when they went to the silk-lined cot The child was found to have died. “What’s now to be done ? We can dis­ appoint not The king and queen ! ” the family cried With eyes spread wide. “Even now they approach the chestnutdrive ! The service must be read.” “Well, since we can’t christen the child alive, By God we shall have to christen him dead !” The marquis said. Thus, breath-forsaken, a corpse was taken To the private chapel—yea— And the king knew not, nor the queen, God wot, That they answered for one returned to clay At the font that day.

OLD F U R N IT U R E

I k n o w 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. 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: 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. On the clock’s dull dial a foggy finger, Moving to set the minutes right

OLD F U R N IT U R E

117

With tentative touches that lift and linger In the wont of a moth on a summer night, Creeps on my sight. On this old viol, too, fingers are dancingAs 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. And I see a face by that box for tinder, Glowing forth in fits from the dark, And fading again, as the linten cinder Kindles to red at the flinty spark, Or goes out stark. 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.

A THOUGHT IN TWO MOODS I sa w it—pink and white—revealed Upon the white and green; The white and green was a daisied field, The pink and white Ethleen. And as I looked it seemed in kind That difference they had none ; The two fair bodiments combined As varied miens of one. A sense that, in some mouldering year, As one they both would he, Made me move quickly on to her To pass the pale thought by. She laughed and said : “ Out there, to me, You looked so weather-browned, And brown in clothes, you seemed to be Made of the dusty ground ! ”

118

THE LAST PE R F O R M A N C E

“ I am playing my oldest tunes,” declared she, “All the old tunes I know,— Those I learnt ever so long ago.” —Why she should think just then she’d play them Silence cloaks like snow. When I returned from the town at nightfall Notes continued to pour As when I had left two hours before: “ It’s the very last time,” she said in closing; “ From now I play no more.” A few morns onward found her fading, And, as her life outflew, I thought of her playing her tunes right through; And I felt she had known of what was coming, And wondered how she knew. 1912.

119

“ YOU O N THE TO W E R ”

i “You on the tower of my factory— What do you see up there ? Do you see Enjoyment with wide wings Advancing to reach me here ?” —“Yea ; I see Enjoyment with wide wings Advancing to reach you here.”

“Good. Soon I’ll come and ask you To tell me again thereon. . . . Well, what is he doing now ? Hoi, there !” —“He still is flying on.” “Ah, waiting till I have full-finished. Good. Tell me again anon. . . . hi

Hoi, Watchman ! I’m here. When comes he ? Between my sweats I am chill.” —“ Oh, you there, asking still ? 120

“ YOU O N THE T O W E R ”

Why, surely he reached you a time back, And took you miles from your mill ? He duly came in his winging, And now he has passed out of view. How can it be that you missed him ? He brushed you by as he flew.”

121

THE IN T E R L O P E R T here are three folk driving in a quaint old chaise,

And the cliff-side track looks green and fair; I view them talking in quiet glee As they drop down towards the puffins’ lair By the roughest of ways; But another with the three rides on, I see, Whom I like not to be there ! No : it’s not anybody you think of. Next A dwelling appears by a slow sweet stream Where two sit happy and half in the dark: They read, helped out by a frail-wick’d gleam, Some rhythmic text; But one sits with them whom they don’t mark, One I’m wishing could not be there. N o : not whom you knew and name. And now I discern gay diners in a mansion-place, 122

THE IN T E R L O P E R

123

And the guests dropping wit—pert, prim, or choice, And the hostess’s tender and laughing face, And the host’s bland brow ; But I cannot help hearing a hollow voice, And I’d fain not hear it there. N o : it’s not from the stranger you met once. Ah, Yet a goodlier scene than that succeeds; People on a lawn—quite a crowd of them. Yes, And they chatter and ramble as fancy leads; And they say, “Hurrah !” To a blithe speech made ; save one, shadow­ less, Who ought not to be there. Nay : it’s not the pale Form your imagings raise, That waits on us all at a destined time, It is not the Fourth Figure the Furnace showed; O that it were such a shape sublime In these latter days ! It is that under which best lives corrode ; Would, would it could not be there !

LOGS O N THE HEARTH T he fire advances along the log

Of the tree we felled That time O !— 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 That time O !— In climbings upward inch by inch, lies now Sawn, sapless, darkening with soot. Where the bark chars is where, one year, It was pruned, and bled— That time O !— Then overgrew the wound. But now, at last, Its growings all have stagnated. 124

LOGS O N THE HEARTH

125

My fellow-climber rises dim From her chilly grave— That time O ! Just as she was, her foot near mine on the bending limb, Laughing, her young brown hand awave. December 1 9 1 5 .

THE SUNSHADE A h—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. 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 Where is the woman who carried that sun­ shade Up and down this seaside place ?— Little thumb standing against its stem, Thoughts perhaps bent on a love-strata­ gem, Softening yet more the already soft face ! 126

THE SUNSHADE

127

Is not the 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 ? S wanage C

li f fs.

THE AGEING HOUSE W hen the walls were red

That now are seen To be overspread With a mouldy green, A fresh fair head Would often lean From the sunny casement And scan the scene, While blithely spoke the wind to the sycamore tree. But storms have raged Those walls about, And the head has aged That once looked out; And zest is suaged And trust is doubt, And slow effacement Proceeds throughout, While fiercely girds the wind at the sycamore tree !

128

THE CAGED G O LD FIN CH W ithin a churchyard, on a recent grave, I saw a little cage

That jailed a goldfinch. All was silence save Its hops from stage to stage. There was inquiry in its wistful eye, And once it tried to sing; Of him or her who placed it there, and why, No one knew anything. True, a woman was found drowned the day ensuing, And some at times averred The grave to be her false one’s, who when wooing Gave her the bird.

129

AT MADAME TUSSAUD’S IN VICTORIAN YEARS “ T hat same first fiddler who leads the orchestra to-night

Here fiddled four decades of years ago ; He bears the same babe-like smile of selfcentred delight, Same trinket on watch-chain, same ring on the hand with the bow. “But his face, if regarded, is woefully wanner, and drier, And his once dark beard has grown straggling and gray; Yet a blissful existence he seems to have had with his lyre, In a trance of his own, where no wearing or tearing had sway. “Mid these wax figures, who nothing can do, it may seem That to do but a little thing counts a great deal; 130

AT MADAME TUSSAUD’S

131

To be watched by kings, councillors, queens, may be flattering to him— With their glass eyes longing that they could wake notes that appeal.” Ah, but he played staunchly—that fiddler— whoever he was, With the innocent heart and the soul­ touching string: May he find the Fair Haven! For did he not smile with good cause ? Yes; gamuts that graced forty years’-flight were not a small thing !

THE BALLET T hey crush together—a rustling heap of

flesh— Of more than flesh, a heap of souls; and then They part, enmesh, And crush together again, Like the pink petals of a too sanguine rose Frightened shut just when it blows. Though all alike in their tinsel livery, And indistinguishable at a sweeping glance, They muster, maybe, As lives wide in irrelevance ; A world of her own has each one underneath, Detached as a sword from its sheath. Daughters, wives, mistresses; honest or false, sold, bought; Hearts of all sizes; gay, fond, gushing, or penned, Various in thought Of lover, rival, friend; Links in a one-impulsed chain, all showing one smile, Yet severed so many a mile ! 32

THE FIVE STUDENTS T he sparrow dips in his wheel-rut bath,

The sun grows passionate-eyed, And boils the dew to smoke by the paddockpath ; As strenuously we stride,— Five of us; dark He, fair He, dark She, fair She, I, All beating by. The air is shaken, the high-road hot, Shadowless swoons the day, The greens are darkened and cattle at rest; but not We on our urgent way,— Four of us; fair She, dark She, fair He, I, are there, But one—elsewhere. Autumn moulds the hard fruit mellow, And forward still we press Through moors, briar-meshed plantations, clay-pits yellow, 33

134

THE FIVE STUDENTS

As in the spring hours—yes, Three of us: fair He, fair She, I, as here­ tofore, But—fallen one more. The leaf drops: earthworms draw it in At night-time noiselessly, The fingers of birch and beech are skeletonthin, And yet on the beat are we,— Two of us; fair She, I. But no more left to go The track we know. Icicles tag the church-aisle leads, The flag-rope gibbers hoarse, The home - bound foot - folk wrap their snow-flaked heads, Yet I still stalk the course,— One of us. . . . Dark and fair He, dark and fair She, gone : The rest—anon.

THE W IN D ’S PR O PH ECY 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.” 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. 135

136

THE W IN D ’S PR O PH ECY

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 a giant 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.

D U RIN G WIND AND RAIN T hey 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 O ! How the sick leaves reel down in throngs ! They clear the creeping moss— Elders and juniors—yea, Making the pathways neat And the garden gay; And they build a shady seat. . . . Ah, no; the years O ! See, the webbed 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 birds come to the knee. . . 37

138 D U R IN G W IN D AND R A IN

Ah, no ; the years O ! And the rotten rose is ript from the wall. They change to a high new house, He, she, all of them—yea, Clocks and carpets and chairs On the lawn all day, And brightest things that are theirs. . Ah, no ; the years O ! Down their chiselled names the rainploughs.

HE PREFERS H E R EARTHLY T his after-sunset is a sight for seeing,

Cliff-heads of craggy cloud surrounding it. —And dwell you in that glory-show ? You may; for there are strange strange things in being, Stranger than I know. Yet if that chasm of splendour claim your presence Which glows between the ash cloud and the dun, How changed must be your mortal mould ! Changed to a firmament - riding earthless essence From what you were of old : All too unlike the fond and fragile creature Then known to me. . . .Well, shall I say it plain ? I would not have you thus and there, But still would grieve on, missing you, still feature You as the one you were. 139

THE DOLLS “ W henever you dress me dolls, mammy,

Why do you dress them so, And make them gallant soldiers, When never a one I know; And not as gentle ladies With frills and frocks and curls, As people dress the dollies Of other little girls?” Ah—why did she not answer:— “Because your mammy’s heed Is always gallant soldiers, As well may be, indeed. One of them was your daddy, His name I must not tell; He’s not the dad who lives here, But one I love too well.”

40

MOLLY GO N E

No more summer for Molly and me ; There is snow on the tree, And the blackbirds plump large as the rooks are, almost, And the water is hard Where they used to dip bills at the dawn ere her figure was lost To these coasts, now my prison closebarred. No more planting by Molly and me Where the beds used to be Of sweet - william; no training the clambering rose By the framework of fir Now bowering the pathway, whereon it swings gaily and blows As if calling commendment from her. No more jauntings by Molly and me To the town by the sea, Or along over Whitesheet to Wynyard’s green Gap,

142

MOLLY GONE

Catching Montacute Crest To the right against Sedgmoor, and CortonHill’s far-distant cap, And Pilsdon and Lewsdon to west. No more singing by Molly to me In the evenings when she Was in mood and in voice, and the candles were lit, And past the porch-quoin The rays would shine out on the laurels; and dumbledores hit On the pane, as if wishing to join. Where, then, is Molly, who’s no more with me ? —As I stand on this lea, Thinking thus, there’s a many-rayed star in the air, That flickers a sign That her glance is regarding its face from her home, so that there Her eyes may have meetings with mine.

A BACKWARD SPRING T he trees are afraid to put forth buds,

And there is timidity in the grass; The plots lie gray where broken by spuds, And whether next week will pass Free of sly sour winds is the fret of each bush Of barberry waiting to bloom. Yet the snowdrop’s face betrays no gloom, And the primrose pants in its heedless push, Though the myrtle asks if it’s worth the fight This year with frost and rime To venture one more time On delicate leaves and buds of white From the selfsame bough as at last year’s prime, And never to ruminate on or remember What happened to it in mid-December. April 1917 .

143

LO O K IN G ACROSS

i It is dark in the sky,

And silence is where We said Good-bye; And recall do I That One is out there. ii

The dawn is not nigh, And the trees are bare, And the waterways sigh That a year has drawn by, And Two are out there. iii

The wind drops to die Like the phantom of Care Too frail for a cry, And it’s in my minds eye That Three are out there. 144

LO O K IN G ACROSS IV

This Life runs dry That once ran rare And rosy in dye, And fleet the days fly, And Four are out there. v

Tired, tired am I Of this earthly air, And my wraith asks: Why, Since these have passed by, Are not Five out there ? December 1 9 1 5 .

145

AT A SEASIDE TO W N IN 1869 ( Young Lover’s Reverie)

I went and stood outside myself, Spelled the dark sky And ship-lights nigh, And grumbling winds that passed thereby. Then next inside myself I looked, And there, above All, shone my Love, That nothing matched the image of. Beyond myself again I ranged ; And saw the free Life by the sea, And folk indifferent to me. O ’twas a charm to draw within Thereafter, where But she was; care For one thing only, her hid there ! 146

AT A SEASIDE TO W N

But so it chanced, without myself I had to look, And then I took More heed of what I had long forsook. The boats, the sands, the esplanade, The laughing crowd; Light-hearted, loud Greetings from some not ill-endowed: The evening sunlit cliffs, the talk, Hailings and halts, The keen sea-salts, The band, the Morgenblatter Waltz. Still, when at night I drew inside Forward she came, Sad, but the same As when I first had known her name. Then rose a time when, as by force, Outwardly wooed By contacts crude, Her image in abeyance stood. . . At last I said : This outside life Shall not endure ; I’ll seek the pure Thought-wo rid, and bask in her allure.

147

148

AT A SEASIDE TO W N

Myself again I crept within, Scanned with keen care The temple where She’d shone, but could not find her there. I sought and sought. But O her soul Has not since thrown Upon my own One beam ! Yea, she is gone, is gone. F ro m a n o ld note.

THE GLIMPSE S he sped through the door And, following in haste, And stirred to the core, I entered hot-faced; But I could not find her, No sign was behind her. “Where is she ?” I said: —“Who ?” they asked that sat there ; “Not a soul’s come in sight.” —“A maid with red hair.” —“Ah.” They paled. “ She is dead. . . People see her at night, But you are the first On whom she has burst In the keen common light.”

It was ages ago, When I was quite strong: I have waited since,—O, I have waited so long ! —Yea, I set me to own The house, where now lone I dwell in void rooms Booming hollow as tombs ! 149

150

THE GLIMPSE

But I never come near her, Though nightly I hear her. And my cheek has grown thin And my hair has grown gray With this waiting therein; But she still keeps away !

THE PED ESTRIA N A N I N C I D E N T OF I 8 8 3

“ S ir , will you let me give you a rid e ?

The night gets dense, the heath is wide.” —My phaeton-lantern shone on one Young, fair, even fresh, But burdened with flesh : A leathern satchel at his side, His breathings short, his coat undone. ’Twas as if his corpulent figure slopped With the shake of his walking when he stopped, And, though the night’s pinch grew acute, He wore but a thin Wind-thridded suit, Yet well-shaped shoes for walking in, Artistic garments, cane gold-topped. “Alas, my friend,” he said with a smile, “ I am daily bound to foot ten mile— Wet, dry, or dark—before I rest.

152

THE PED ESTRIA N

Six months to live My doctors give Me as my prospect here, at best, Unless I vamp my sturdiest !” His voice was that of a man refined, A man, one well could feel, of mind, Quite winning in its musical ease ; But in mould maligned By some disease; And I asked again. But he shook his head; Then, as if more were due, he said :— “A student was I—of Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel,—and the fountained bower Of the Muses, too, knew my regard : But ah—I fear me The grave gapes near me ! . . . Would I could this gross sheath discard, And rise an ethereal shape, unmarred !” How I remember him !—his short breath, His aspect, marked for early death, As he dropped into the night for ever ; One caught in his prime Of high endeavour; From all philosophies soon to sever Through an unconscienced trick of Time

“ W H O ’S IN TH E N EX T R O O M ? ”

in the next room ?—who ? I seemed to see Somebody in the dawning passing through, Unknown to me.” “Nay: you saw nought. He passed in­ visibly.” “ W h o ’s

“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.” “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.” 153

154 “ W H O ’S IN N EX T R O O M ?

“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.”

AT A COUNTRY FAIR At a bygone Western country fair I saw a giant led by a dwarf With a red string like a long thin scarf; How much he was the stronger there The giant seemed unaware. And then I saw that the giant was blind, And the dwarf a shrewd-eyed little thing ; The giant, mild, timid, obeyed the string As if he had no independent mind, Or will o f any kind.

Wherever the dwarf decided to go At his heels the other trotted meekly, (Perhaps—I know not—reproaching weakly) Like one Fate bade that it must be so, Whether he wished or no. Various sights in various climes I have seen, and more I may see yet, But that sight never shall I forget, And have thought it the sorriest of panto­ mimes. If once, a hundred times ! 155

THE M EM ORIA L BRASS: 186“ W hy do you weep there, O sweet lady, Why do you weep before that brass ?— (I’m a mere student sketching the mediaeval) Is some late death lined there, alas ?— Your father’s? . . .Well, all pay the debt that paid he !”

“ Young man, O must I tell !—My husband’s ! And under His name I set mine, and my d ea th !— Its date left vacant till my heirs should fill it, Stating me his till my last breath.” —“ Madam, that you are a widow wakes my wonder !” “ O wait! For last month I—re­ married ! And now I fear ’twas a deed amiss. We’ve just come home. And I am sick and saddened At what he’ll say when he sees this; And will he think—think that I should have tarried ? 156

THE M EM ORIA L BRASS

157

“ I may add, surely,—with no wish to harm him— He has a temper—yes, I fear ! And when he comes to church next Sunday morning, And sees that written . . . O dear, O dear !” —“ Madam, I swear your beauty will disarm him !”

H E R LOVE-BIRDS

I looked up at my love-birds That Sunday afternoon, There was in their tiny tune A dying fetch like broken words, When I looked up at my love-birds That Sunday afternoon. W

hen

When he, too, scanned the love-birds On entering there that day, ’Twas as if he had nought to say Of his long journey citywards, When he, too, scanned the love-birds, On entering there that day. And billed and billed the love-birds, As Were in fond despair At the stress of silence where Had once been tones in tenor thirds, And billed and billed the love-birds As ’twere in fond despair. 158

H E R LOVE-BIRDS

159

O, his speech that chilled the love-birds, And smote like death on me, As I learnt what was to be, And knew my life was broke in sherds ! O, his speech that chilled the love-birds, And smote like death on me !

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. 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 path and stone and tree Of things we had done ere days were dim, But they spoke not to me.

160

THE U PPE R BIRCH-LEAVES a r m yellowy-green In the blue serene, How they skip and sway On this autumn day ! They cannot know What has happened below,— That their boughs down there Are already quite bare, That their own will be When a week has passed,— For they jig as in glee To this very last.

W

But no ; there lies At times in their tune A note that cries What at first I fear I did not hear : “ O we remember At each wind’s hollo— Though life holds yet— We go hence soon, For ’tis November ; —But that y o u follow You may forget !” 161

“ IT NEVER LOOKS LIKE SUMMER never looks like summer here On Beeny by the sea.” But though to her its look was drear, Summer it seemed to me. “ It

It never looks like summer now Whatever weathers there ; But then it cannot anyhow, On Beeny or elsewhere ! B o sca stle,

March 8, 1 9 1 3 .

EVERYTHING COMES “ T he house is bleak and cold

Built so new for me ! All the winds upon the wold Search it through for me ; No screening trees abound, And the curious eyes around Keep on view for me.” “My Love, I am planting trees As a screen for you Both from winds, and eyes that tease And peer in for you. Only wait till they have grown, No such bower will be known As I mean for you.” “ Then I will bear it, Love, And will wait,” she said. —So, with years, there grew a grove. “ Skill how great !” she said. “As you wished, Dear ?”— Yes, I see But—I’m dying ; and for me ’Tis too late,” she said. 163

THE MAN W IT H A PAST T here was merry-making When the first dart fell As a heralding,— Till grinned the fully bared thing, And froze like a spell— Like a spell.

Innocent was she, Innocent was I, Too simple we ! Before us we did not see, Nearing, aught wryAught wry ! I can tell it not now, It was long ago ; And such things cow ; But that is why and how Two lives were so— Were so.

THE M AN W ITH A PAST

165

Yes, the years matured, And the blows were three That time ensured On her, which she dumbly endured; And one on me— One on me.

HE FEARS HIS G O O D FO R TU N E T here was a glorious time At an epoch of my prime ; Mornings beryl-bespread, And evenings golden-red; Nothing gray: And in my heart I said, “ However this chanced to be, It is too full for me, Too rare, too rapturous, rash, Its spell must close with a crash Some day !”

The radiance went on Anon and yet anon, And sweetness fell around Like manna on the ground. “ Ive no claim,” Said I, 44to be thus crowned : I am not worthy this:— Must it not go amiss ?— Well . . . let the end foreseen Come duly !—I am serene.” —And it came.

HE WONDERS ABOUT HIMSELF No use hoping, or feeling vext, Tugged by a force above or under Like some fantocine, much I wonder What I shall find me doing next ! Shall I be rushing where bright eyes be ? Shall I be suffering sorrows seven ? Shall I be watching the stars of heaven, Thinking one of them looks like thee ? Part is mine of the general Will, Cannot my share in the sum of sources Bend a digit the poise of forces, And a fair desire fulfil ? N ov.

1893.

167

JUBILATE he very last time I ever was here,” he said, “ I saw much less of the quick than I saw of the dead.” —He was a man I had met with somewhere before, But how or when I now could recall no more.

“T

“The hazy mazy moonlight at one in the morning Spread out as a sea across the frozen snow, Glazed to live sparkles like the great breast­ plate adorning The priest of the Temple, with Urim and Thummim aglow. “The yew-tree arms, glued hard to the stiff stark air, Hung still in the village sky as theatre-scenes When I came by the churchyard wall, and halted there At a shut-in sound of fiddles and tambourines. 168

JUBILATE

169

“And as I stood hearkening, dulcimers, haut­ boys, and shawms, And violoncellos, and a three-stringed doublebass, Joined in, and were intermixed with a singing of psalms; And I looked over at the dead men’s dwellingplace. “Through the shine of the slippery snow I now could see, As it were through a crystal roof, a great company Of the dead minueting in stately step under­ ground To the tune of the instruments I had before heard sound. “ It was ‘Eden New,’ and dancing they sang in a chore, ‘We are out of it all !—yea, in Little-Ease cramped no more !’ And their shrouded figures pacing with joy I could see As you see the stage from the gallery. And they had no heed of me. “And I lifted my head quite dazed from the churchyard wall And I doubted not that it warned I should soon have my call.

JUBILATE

But—” . . . Then in the ashes he emptied the dregs of his cup, And onward he went, and the darkness swallowed him up.

HE REVISITS HIS FIRST SC H O O L

I s h o u l d not have shown in the flesh, I ought to have gone as a ghost; It was awkward, unseemly almost, Standing solidly there as when fresh, Pink, tiny, crisp-curled, My pinions yet furled From the winds of the world. After waiting so many a year To wait longer, and go as a sprite From the tomb at the mid of some night Was the right, radiant way to appear; Not as one wanzing weak From life’s roar and reek, His rest still to seek: Yea, beglimpsed through the quaint quarried glass Of green moonlight, by me greener made, When they’d cry, perhaps, “ There sits his shade 71

172

HE REVISITS HIS OLD SCH O O L

In his olden haunt—-just as he was When in Walkingame he Conned the grand Rule-of-Three With the bent of a bee.” But to show in the afternoon sun, With an aspect of hollow-eyed care, When none wished to see me come there, Was a garish thing, better undone. Yes; wrong was the way ; But yet, let me say, I may right it—some day.

“ I THOUGHT, MY HEART” I t h o u g h t , my Heart, that you had healed Of those sore smartings of the past, And that the summers had oversealed All mark of them at last. But closely scanning in the night I saw them standing crimson-bright Just as she made them: Nothing could fade them ; Yea, I can swear That there they were— They still were there ! Then the Vision of her who cut them came, And looking over my shoulder said, “ I am sure you deal me all the blame For those sharp smarts and red; But meet me, dearest, to-morrow night, In the churchyard at the moon’s half-height, And so strange a kiss Shall be mine, I wis, That you’ll cease to know If the wounds you show Be there or no !” 173

FRAGMENT A t last I entered a long dark gallery,

Catacomb-lined; and ranged at the side Were the bodies of men from far and wide Who, motionless, were nevertheless not dead. “The sense of waiting here strikes strong ; Everyone’s waiting, waiting, it seems to me ; What are you waiting for so long ?— What is to happen ?” I said. “O we are waiting for one called God,” said they, “ (Though by some the Will, or Force, or Laws; And, vaguely, by some, the Ultimate Cause ;) Waiting for him to see us before we are clay. Yes; waiting, waiting, for God to k n o w it” . . . “To know what ?” questioned I. “ To know how things have been going on earth and below i t : 174

FRAGM ENT

175

It is clear he must know some day.” I thereon asked them why. “ Since he made us humble pioneers Of himself in consciousness of Life’s tears, It needs no mighty prophecy To tell that what he could mindlessly show His creatures, he himself will know. “By some still close-cowled mystery We have reached feeling faster than he, But he will overtake us anon, If the world goes on.”

MIDNIGHT ON THE GREAT WESTERN I n 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. 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 twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams Like a living thing. What past can be yours, O journeying boy Towards a world unknown, Who calmly, as if indifferent quite To all at stake, can undertake This plunge alone ? Knows your soul a sphere, O 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 ? 176

H O N E Y M O O N -T IM E AT AN IN N A t the shiver o f morning, a little before the false dawn,

The moon was at the window-square, Deedily brooding in deformed decay— The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze ; At the shiver of morning a little before the false dawn So the moon looked in there. Her speechless eyeing reached across the chamber, Where lay two souls opprest, One a white lady sighing, “Why am I sad !” To him who sighed back, “ Sad, my Love, am I !” And speechlessly the old moon conned the chamber, And these two reft of rest. 177

178

H O N E Y M O O N -T IM E

While their large-pupilled vision swept the scene there, Nought seeming imminent, Something fell sheer, and crashed, and from the floor Lay glittering at the pair with a shattered gaze, While their large-pupilled vision swept the scene there, And the many-eyed thing outleant. With a start they saw that it was an old-time pier-glass Which had stood on the mantel near, Its silvering blemished,—yes, as if worn away By the eyes of the countless dead who had smirked at it Ere these two ever knew that old-time pierglass And its vague and vacant leer. As he looked, his bride like a moth skimmed forth, and kneeling Quick, with quivering sighs, Gathered the pieces under the moons sly ray, Unconscious as an automaton what she did;

H O N E Y M O O N -T IM E

179

Till he entreated, hasting to where she was kneeling, “Let it stay where it lies !” “ Long years of sorrow this means !” said the lady As they retired. “Alas !” And she lifted one pale hand across her eyes. “Don’t trouble, Love; it’s nothing,” the bridegroom said. “Long years of sorrow for us !” murmured the lady, “ Or ever this evil pass !” And the Spirits Ironic laughed behind the wainscot, And the Spirits of Pity sighed. “ It’s good,” said the Spirits Ironic, “ to tickle their minds With a portent of their wedlock’s after­ grinds.” And the Spirits of Pity sighed behind the wainscot, “ It’s a portent we cannot abide ! “More, what shall happen to prove the truth of the portent ?”

i8o

H O N E Y M O O N -T IM E

—“ Oh ; in brief, they will fade till old, And their loves grow numbed ere death, by the cark of care.” —“But nought see we that asks for por­ tents there ?— ’Tis the lot of all.”—“Well, no less true is a portent That it fits all mortal mould.”

THE R O B IN

W h e n u p aloft I fly an d fly,

I see in pools The shining sky, And a happy bird Am I, am I ! When I descend Towards their brink I stand, and look, And stoop, and drink, And bathe my Wings, And chink and prink. When winter frost Makes earth as steel I search and search But find no meal, And most unhappy Then I feel.

182

THE R O B IN

But when it lasts, And snows still fall, I get to feel No grief at all, For I turn to a cold stiff Feathery ball !

“ I ROSE AND WENT TO ROU’TOR TOWN ” I r o s e and went to Rou’tor Town With gaiety and good heart, And ardour for the start, That morning ere the moon was down That lit me off to Rou’tor Town With gaiety and good heart. When sojourn soon at Rou’tor Town Wrote sorrows on my face, I strove that none should trace The pale and gray, once pink and brown, When sojourn soon at Rou’tor Town Wrote sorrows on my face. The evil wrought at Rou’tor Town On him I’d loved so true I cannot tell anew : But nought can quench, but nought can drown The evil wrought at Rou’tor Town On him I’d loved so true !

183

THE NETTLES T his, then, is the grave o f my son,

Whose heart she won ! And nettles grow Upon his mound ; and she lives just below. How he upbraided me, and left, And our lives were cleft, because I said She was hard, unfeeling, caring but to wed. Well, to see this sight I have fared these miles, And her firelight smiles from her window there, Whom he left his mother to cherish with tender care ! It is enough. I’ll turn and go ; Yes, nettles grow where lone lies he, Who spurned me for seeing what he could not see.

184

IN A W AITING R O O M O n a morning sick as the day of doom

With the drizzling gray Of an English May, There were few in the railway waiting room. About its walls were framed and varnished Pictures of liners, fly-blown, tarnished. The table bore a Testament For travellers’ reading, if suchwise bent. I read it on and on, And, thronging the Gospel of Saint John, Were figures—additions, multiplications— By some one scrawled, with sundry emenda­ tions ; Not scoffingly designed, But with an absent mind,— Plainly a bagman’s counts of cost, What he had profited, what lost; And whilst I wondered if there could have been Any particle of a soul In that poor man at all, 185

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IN A W AITING R O O M

To cypher rates of wage Upon that printed page, There joined in the dreary scene And stood over me and the scribbled book (To lend the hour’s mean hue A smear of tragedy too) A soldier and wife, with haggard look Subdued to stone by strong endeavour; And then I heard From a casual word They were parting as they believed for ever. But next there came Like the eastern flame Of morning in April, children—a pair— Who laughed at the fly-blown pictures there. “ Here are the lovely ships that we, Mother, are by and by going to see ! When we get there it’s ’most sure to be fine, And the band will play, and the sun will shine !” It rained on the skylight with a din As we waited and still no train came in ; But the words of the child in the squalid room Had spread a glory through the gloom.

THE C L O C K -W IN D E R I t is dark as a cave,

Or a vault in the nave When the iron door Is closed, and the floor Of the church relaid With trowel and spade. But the parish-clerk Cares not for the dark As he winds in the tower At a regular hour The rheumatic clock, Whose dilatory knock You can hear when praying At the day’s decaying, Or at any lone while From a pew in the aisle. Up, up from the ground Around and around In the turret stair He clambers, to where The machinery is, 187

188

THE C L O C K -W IN D E R

With its tick, click, whizz, Deliberately measuring Each day to its end That mortal men spend In sorrowing and pleasuring. Nightly thus does he climb To the trackway of Time. Him I followed one night To this place without light, And, ere I spoke, heard Him say, word by word, At the end of his winding, The darkness unminding :— “ So I wipe out one more, My Dear, of the sore Sad days that still be, Like a drying Dead Sea, Between you and me !” Who she was no man knew: He had long borne him blind To all womankind; And was ever one who Kept his past out of view.

OLD E X C U R SIO N S “ W hat’s the good of going to Ridgeway,

Cerne, or Sydling Mill, Or to Yell’ham Hill, Blithely bearing Casterbridge-way As we used to do ? She will no more climb up there, Or be visible anywhere In those haunts we knew.” But to-night, while walking weary, Near me seemed her shade, Come as ’twere to upbraid This my mood in deeming dreary Scenes that used to please ; And, if she did come to me, Still solicitous, there may be Good in going to these. So, I’ll care to roam to Ridgeway, Cerne, or Sydling Mill, Or to Yell’ham Hill, 89

190

OLD EX C U R SIO N S

Blithely bearing Casterbridge-way As we used to do, Since her phasm may flit out there, And may greet me anywhere In those haunts we knew. April 1 9 1 3 .

TH E MASKED FACE

I f o u n d me in a great surging space, At either end a door, And I said: “What is this giddying place, With no firm-fixed floor, That I knew not of before ?” “ It is Life,” said a mask-clad face. I asked: “But how do I come here, Who never wished to come ; Can the light and air be made more clear, The floor more quietsome, And the doors set wide ? They numb Fast-locked, and fill with fear.” The mask put on a bleak smile then, And said, “ O vassal-wight, There once complained a goosequill pen To the scribe of the Infinite Of the words it had to write Because they were past its ken.”

IN A WHISPERING GALLERY T hat whisper takes the voice

Of a Spirit, speaking to me, Close, but invisible, And throws me under a spell At the kindling vision it brings; And for a moment I rejoice, And believe in transcendent things That would make of this muddy earth A spot for the splendid birth Of everlasting lives, Whereto no night arrives; And this gaunt gray gallery A tabernacle of worth On this drab-aired afternoon, When you can barely see Across its hazed lacune If opposite aught there be Of fleshed humanity Wherewith I may commune ; Or if the voice so near Be a soul’s voice floating here.

192

THE SOMETHING THAT SAVED HIM It was when

Whirls of thick waters laved me Again and again, That something arose and saved me ; Yea, it was then. In that day Unseeing the azure went I On my way, And to white winter bent I, Knowing no May. Reft of renown, Under the night clouds beating Up and down, In my wistfulness greeting Cit and clown Long there had been Much of a murky colour In the scene, Dull prospects meeting duller ; Nought between. 93

194

SO M ETH IN G THAT SAVED HIM

Last, there loomed A closing-in blind alley, Though there boomed A feeble summons to rally Where it gloomed. The clock rang; The hour brought a hand to deliver ; I upsprang, And looked back at den, ditch and river, And sang.

THE EN EM Y ’S P O R T R A IT H e saw the portrait of his enemy, offered At auction in a street he journeyed nigh, That enemy, now late dead, who in his life­ time Had injured deeply him the passer-by “ To get that picture, pleased be God, I’ll try, And utterly destroy i t ; and no more Shall be inflicted on man’s mortal eye A countenance so sinister and sore !”

And so he bought the painting. Driving homeward, “The frame will come in useful,” he declared, “The rest is fuel.” On his arrival, weary, Asked what he broe with him, and how he fared, He said he had bid for a picture, though he cared For the frame only : on the morrow he Would burn the canvas, which could well be spared, Seeing that it portrayed his enemy. 195

196

THE EN E M Y ’S P O R T R A IT

Next day some other duty found him busy : The foe was laid his face against the wall; But on the next he set himself to loosen The straining-strips. And then a casual call Prevented his proceeding therewithal; And thus the picture waited, day by day, Its owner’s pleasure, like a wretched thrall, Until a month and more had slipped away And then upon a morn he found it shifted, Hung in a corner by a servitor. “Why did you take on you to hang that picture ? You know it was the frame I bought it for.” “ It stood in the way of every visitor, And I just hitched it there.”— “Well, it must go : I don’t commemorate men whom I abhor. Remind me ’tis to do. The frame I’ll stow.” But things become forgotten. In the shadow Of the dark corner hung it by its string, And there it stayed—once noticed by its owner, Who said, “Dear me—I must destroy that thing !” But when he died, there, none remembering, It hung, till moved to prominence, as one sees; And comers pause and say, examining, “ I thought they were the bitterest enemies ?”

IMAGININGS S he saw herself a lady

With fifty frocks in wear, And rolling wheels, and rooms the best, And faithful maidens’ care, And open lawns and shady For weathers warm or drear. She found herself a striver, All liberal gifts debarred, With days of gloom, and movements stressed, And early visions marred, And got no man to wive her But one whose lot was hard. Yet in the moony night-time She steals to stile and lea During his heavy slumberous rest When homecome wearily, And dreams of some blest bright-time She knows can never be.

197

ON THE DOORSTEP T h e rain imprinted the step’s wet shine With target-circles that quivered and crossed As I was leaving this porch of mine ; When from within there swelled and paused A song’s sweet note ; And back I turned, and thought, “Here I’ll abide.”

The step shines wet beneath the rain, Which prints its circles as heretofore ; I watch them from the porch again, But no song-notes within the door Now call to me To shun the dripping lea ; And forth I stride. Jan . 1914.

198

SIGNS AND TOKENS the red-cloaked crone In a whispered moan :

S aid

“ The dead man was limp When laid in his chest; Yea, limp ; and why But to signify That the grave will crimp Ere next year’s sun Yet another one

Of those in that house— It may be the best— For its endess drowse !” Said the brown-shawled dame To confirm the same : “And the slothful flies On the rotting fruit Have been seen to wear While crawling there Crape scarves, by eyes That were quick and acute ; 199

200

SIGNS AND TOKENS

As did those that had pitched On the cows by the pails, And with flaps of their tails Were far away switched.” Said the third in plaid, Each word being weighed : “And trotting does In the park, in the lane, And just outside The shuttered pane, Have also been heard— Quick feet as light As the feet of a sprite— And the wise mind knows What things may betide When such has occurred.” Cried the black-craped fourth, Cold faced as the north: “O, the ugh giving such Some head-room, I smile At your falterings When noting those things Round your domicile ! For what, what can touch One whom, riven of all That makes life gay, No hints can appal Of more takings away !”

PATHS OF FORMER TIME No ; no ; It must not be so : They are the ways we do not go. Still chew The kine, and moo In the meadows we used to wander through; Still purl The rivulets and curl Towards the weirs with a musical swirl; Haymakers As in former years Rake rolls into heaps that the pitchfork rears; Wheels crack On the turfy track The waggon pursues with its toppling pack. 201

202

PATHS OF F O R M E R TIME

“Why then shun— Since summer’s not done— All this because of the lack of one ?” Had you been Sharer of that scene You would not ask while it bites in keen Why it is so We can no more go By the summer paths we used to know ! 1913-

THE CLO CK OF THE YEARS “ A spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up.” A n d the Spirit said, “I can make the clock of the years go backward, But am loth to stop it where you will.” And I cried, “Agreed To that. Proceed: It’s better than dead !”

He answered, “ Peace” ; And called her up—as last before me ; Then younger, younger she grew, to the year I first had known Her woman-grown, And I cried, “ Cease !— “Thus far is good— It is enough—let her stay thus always !” But alas for me. He shook his head : 203

204 THE CLO CK OF THE YEARS

No stop was there ; And she waned child-fair, And to babyhood. Still less in mien To my great sorrow became she slowly, And smalled till she was nought at all In his checkless griff; And it was as if She had never been. “Better,” I plained, “ She were dead as before ! The memory of her Had lived in me ; but it cannot now !” And sternly his voice : “ It was your choice To mar the ordained.” 1916.

AT THE PIAN O

A woman was playing, A man looking on ; And the mould of her face, And her neck, and her hair, Which the rays fell upon Of the two candles there, Sent him mentally straying In some fancy-place Where pain had no trace. A cowled Apparition Came pushing between; And her notes seemed to sigh, And the lights to burn pale, As a spell numbed the scene. But the maid saw no bale, And the man no monition ; And Time laughed awry, And the Phantom hid nigh.

205

THE SHADOW O N THE STONE

I w e n t by the Druid stone That stands in the garden white and lone, And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows That at some moments there are thrown From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing, And they shaped in my imagining To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders Threw there when she was gardening. I thought her behind my back, Yea, her I long had learned to lack, And I said: “ I am sure you are standing behind me, Though how do you get into this old track ?” And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf As a sad response ; and to keep down grief I would not turn my head to discover That there was nothing in my belief. 206

SHADOW O N THE STONE

207

Yet I wanted to look and see That nobody stood at the back of me ; But I thought once more: “Nay, I’ll not unvision A shape which, somehow, there may be.” So I went on softly from the glade, And left her behind me throwing her shade, As she were indeed an apparition— My head unturned lest my dream should fade. Begun 1913: finished 1916.

IN THE G A RD EN ( m . h .)

W e waited for the sun

To break its cloudy prison (For day was not yet done, And night still unbegun) Leaning by the dial. After many a trial— We all silent there— It burst as new-arisen, Throwing a shade to where Time travelled at that minute. Little saw we in it, But this much I know, Of lookers on that shade, Her towards whom it made Soonest had to go. 1915.

208

TH E TR EE AND THE LADY

I h a v e done all I could For that lady I knew ! Through the heats I have shaded her, Drawn to her songsters when summer has jaded her, Home from the heath or the wood. At the mirth-time of May, When my shadow first lured her, I’d donned my new bravery Of greenth: ’twas my all. Now I shiver in slavery, Icicles grieving me gray Plumed to every twig’s end I could tempt her chair under me. Much did I treasure her During those days she had nothing to pleasure her; Mutely she used me as friend. 209

2io THE TR EE AND THE LADY

I’m a skeleton now, And she’s gone, craving warmth. The rime sticks like a skin to me ; Through me Arcturus peers; Nor’lights shoot into me ; Gone is she, scorning my bough !

AN U PB R A ID IN G

Now I am dead you sing to me The songs we used to know, But while I lived you had no wish Or care for doing so. Now I am dead you come to me In the moonlight, comfortless; Ah, what would I have given alive To win such tenderness ! When you are dead, and stand to me Not differenced, as now, But like again, will you be cold As when we lived, or how ?

2 11

THE YOUNG GLASS-STAINER Gothic windows, how they wear me out With cusp and foil, and nothing straight or square, Crude colours, leaden borders roundabout, And fitting in Peter here, and Matthew there !

‘ T hese

‘What a vocation ! Here do I draw now The abnormal, loving the Hellenic norm ; Martha I paint, and dream of Hera’s brow, Mary, and think of Aphrodite’s form.” N ov.

1893.

212

LOOKING AT A PICTURE ON AN ANNIVERSARY B ut don’t you know it, my dear,

Don’t you know it, That this day of the year (What rainbow-rays embow it !) We met, strangers confessed, But parted—blest ? Though at this query, my dear, There in your frame Unmoved you still appear, You must be thinking the same, But keep that look demure Just to allure. And now at length a trace I surely vision Upon that wistful face Of old-time recognition, Smiling forth, “Yes, as you say, It is the day.” 213

214

LO O K IN G AT A P IC T U R E

For this one phase of you Now left on earth This great date must endue With pulsings of rebirth ?— I see them vitalize Those two deep eyes ! But if this face I con Does not declare Consciousness living on Still in it, little I care To live myself, my dear, Lone-labouring here ! Spring 1 9 1 3 .

THE C H O IR M A S T E R ’S BURIAL H e 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. 215

216

C H O IR M A S T E R ’S BURIAL

“ 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. 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. Such the treble man told When he had grown old.

THE M AN W H O FO R G O T A t a lonely cross where bye-roads met I sat upon a gate; I saw the sun decline and set,

And still was fain to wait. A trotting boy passed up the way And roused me from my thought; I called to him, and showed where lay A spot I shyly sought. “A summer-house fair stands hidden where You see the moonlight thrown; Go, tell me if within it there A lady sits alone.” He half demurred, but took the track, And silence held the scene ; I saw his figure rambling back ; I asked him if he had been. 217

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THE M AN W H O FO R G O T

“ I went just where you said, but found No summer-house was there : Beyond the slope ’tis all bare ground ; Nothing stands anywhere. “A man asked what my brains were worth The house, he said, grew rotten, And was pulled down before my birth, And is almost forgotten !” My right mind woke, and I stood dumb ; Forty years’ frost and flower Had fleeted since I’d used to come To meet her in that bower.

WHILE DRAWING IN A CHURCH­ YARD is sad that so many of worth, Still in the flesh,” soughed the yew, “Misjudge their lot whom kindly earth Secludes from view. “ It

“ They ride their diurnal round Each day-span’s sum of hours In peerless ease, without jolt or bound Or ache like ours. “ If the living could but hear What is heard by my roots as they creep Round the restful flock, and the things said there, No one would weep.” “ ‘Now set among the wise,’ They say : ‘Enlarged in scope, That no god trumpet us to rise We truly hope.’ ” 219

220

IN A C H U R C H Y A R D

I listened to his strange tale In the mood that stillness brings, And I grew to accept as the day wore That view of things.

“ FOR LIFE I HAD NEVER CARED GREATLY” F or Life I had never cared greatly,

As worth a man’s while ; Peradventures unsought, Peradventures that finished in nought, Had kept me from youth and through man­ hood till lately Unwon by its style. In earliest years—why I know not— I viewed it askance ; Conditions of doubt, Conditions that leaked slowly out, May haply have bent me to stand and to show not Much zest for its dance. With symphonies soft and sweet colour It courted me then, Till evasions seemed wrong, 221

222

“ F O R L IF E ”

Till evasions gave in to its song And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller Than life among men. Anew I found nought to set eyes on, When, lifting its hand, It uncloaked a star, Uncloaked it from fog-damps afar, And showed its beams burning from pole to horizon As bright as a brand. And so, the rough highway forgetting, I pace hill and dale Regarding the sky, Regarding the vision on high, And thus re-illumed have no humour for letting My pilgrimage fail.

POEM S OF W AR AN D PA TR IO TISM

223

HIS COUNTRY I j o u r n e y e d from my native spot Across the south sea shine, And found that people in hall and cot Laboured and suffered each his lot Even as I did mine.

He travels southward, and looks around;

Thus noting them in meads and marts It did not seem to me That my dear country with its hearts, Minds, yearnings, worse and better parts, Had ended with the sea.

and cannot discover the boundary

I further and further went anon, As such I still surveyed, And further yet—yea, on and on, And all the men I looked upon Had heart-strings fellow-made. I traced the whole terrestrial round, Homing the other side ; Then said I, “What is there to bound My denizenship ? It seems I have found Its scope to be world-wide.” 'W ritten before the war.

225

of his native country;

or where his duties to his fellowcreatures end;

226 nor who are his enemies.

But he is set right by a wise man who pities his blindness.

HIS C O U N T R Y

I asked me: “Whom have I to fight, And whom have I to dare, And whom to weaken, crush, and blight My country seems to have kept in sight On my way everywhere.” “Ah, you deceive you by such pleas !” Said one with pitying eye. “ Foreigners—not like us—are these ; Stretch country-love beyond the seas ?— Too Christian !”—“Strange,” said I.

ENGLAND TO GERMANY IN 1914 “ O E n g l a n d , may God punish thee !” —Is it that Teuton genius flowers Only to breathe malignity Upon its friend of earlier hours ? —We have eaten your bread, you have eaten ours, We have loved your burgs, your pines’ green moan, Fair Rhine-stream, and its storied towers; Your shining souls of deathless dowers Have won us as they were our own : We have nursed no dreams to shed your blood, We have matched your might not rancorously, Save a flushed few whose blatant mood You heard and marked as well as we To tongue not in their country’s key; But yet you cry with face aflame, “ O England, may God punish thee !” And foul in onward history, And present sight, your ancient name. A u tu m n

1914. 227

ON THE BELGIAN EXPATRIATION that people from the Land of Chimes Arrived one autumn morning with their bells, To hoist them on the towers and citadels Of my own country, that the musical rhymes I

d r ea m t

Rung by them into space at measured times Amid the market s daily stir and stress, And the night’s empty star-lit silentness, Might solace souls of this and kindred climes. Then I awoke; and lo, before me stood The visioned ones, but pale and full of fear ; From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend, No carillons in their train. Foes of mad mood Had shattered these to shards amid the gear Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end. October 18 , 1 9 1 4 .

228

AN APPEAL TO AMERICA ON BEHALF OF THE BELGIAN DESTITUTE S e v e n millions stand Emaciate, in that ancient Delta-land :— We here, full-charged with our own maimed and dead, And coiled in throbbing conflicts slow and sore, Can poorly soothe these ails unmerited Of souls forlorn upon the facing shore !— Where naked, gaunt, in endless band on band Seven millions stand.

No man can say To your great country that, with scant delay, You must, perforce, ease them in their loud need: We know that nearer first your duty lies; But—is it much to ask that you let plead Your lovingkindness with you—wooingwise— Albeit that aught you owe, and must repay, No man can say ? December 1 9 1 4 .

229

THE PITY OF IT I w a l k e d in loamy Wessex lanes, afar From rail-track and from highway, and I heard In field and farmstead many an ancient word Of local lineage like “Thu bist,” “Er war,” “ Ich woll,” “Er sholl,” and by-talk similar, Even as they speak who in this month’s moon gird At England’s very loins, thereunto spurred By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are. Then seemed a Heart crying: “ Whosoever they be At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we, “ Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame ; May their familiars grow to shun their name, And their breed perish everlastingly.” April 1915. (“ Fortnightly Review.” ) 230

IN TIM E OF WARS AND TUM ULTS

that I’d not drawn breath here !” some one said, “To stalk upon this stage of evil deeds, Where purposelessly month by month proceeds A play so sorely shaped and blood-bespread.” “ W

o u ld

Yet had his spark not quickened, but lain dead To the gross spectacles of this our day, And never put on the proffered cloak of clay, He had but not known things now manifested; Life would have swirled the same. Morns would have dawned On the uprooting by the night-gun s stroke Of what the yester noonshine brought to flower; Brown martial brows in dying throes have wanned Despite his absence; hearts no fewer been broke By Empery s insatiate lust of power. 1915231

IN TIME OF “ THE BREAKING OF NATIONS” 1 i a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. O

n ly

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

Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by : War’s annals will cloud into night Ere their story die. 1915. (“ Saturday Review” ) 'Jer. li. 20. 232

CRY OF THE HOMELESS A F T E R T H E P R U S S IA N IN V A S IO N O F B E L G I U M

of the ruin— Whichsoever thou mayst be Of the masterful of Europe That contrived our misery— Hear the wormwood-worded greeting From each city, shore, and lea Of thy victims: “ I n s t ig a t o r

“ Conqueror, all hail to thee ! ”

“Yea: ‘All hail !’ we grimly shout thee That wast author, fount, and head Of these wounds, whoever proven When our times are throughly read. ‘May thy loved be slighted, blighted, And forsaken,’ be it said By thy victims, ‘And thy children beg their bread !’ “Nay : a richer malediction !— Rather let this thing befall 233

234

C R Y OF T H E H O M ELESS

In time’s hurling and unfurling On the night when comes thy call; That compassion dew thy pillow And absorb thy senses all For thy victims, Till death dark thee with his pall.” August 1915.

BEFO RE M A R C H IN G AND A FTER (In Memoriam F. W. G .)

O r i o n swung southward aslant Where the starved Egdon pine-trees had thinned, The Pleiads aloft seemed to pant With the heather that twitched in the wind; But he looked on indifferent to sights such as these, Unswayed by love, friendship, home joy or home sorrow, And wondered to what he would march on the morrow.

The crazed household - clock with its whirr Rang midnight within as he stood, He heard the low sighing of her Who had striven from his birth for his good; 235

236

MARCHING AND AFTER

But he still only asked the spring starlight, the breeze, What great thing or small thing his history would borrow From that Game with Death he would play on the morrow. When the heath wore the robe of late summer, And the fuchsia-bells, hot in the sun, Hung red by the door, a quick comer Brought tidings that marching was done For him who had joined in that game over­ seas Where Death stood to win, though his name was to borrow A brightness therefrom not to fade on the morrow. September 1 9 1 5 .

“ OFTEN WHEN W ARRING” O ften when warring for he wist not what,

An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak, Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek, And cooled the lips so black and clammed and h o t; Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgot The deed of grace amid the roar and reek ; Yet larger vision than the tongue can speak He there has reached, although he has known it not. For natural mindsight, triumphing in the act Over the throes of artificial rage, Has thereby muffled victory’s peal of pride, Rended to ribands policy’s specious page That deals but with evasion, code, and pact, And war’s apology wholly stultified. 1915.

237

T H E N AND N O W W hen battles were fought With a chivalrous sense of Should and Ought, In spirit men said, “End we quick or dead, Honour is some reward ! Let us fight fair—for our own best or worst; So, Gentlemen of the Guard, Fire first !”

In the open they stood, Man to man in his knightlihood : They would not deign To profit by a stain On the honourable rules, Knowing that practise perfidy no man durst Who in the heroic schools Was nurst. But now, behold, what Is warfare wherein honour is not ! Rama laments Its dead innocents: 238

T H E N AND N O W

239

Herod breathes: “ Sly slaughter Shall rule! Let us, by modes once called accurst, Overhead, under water, Stab first.” Written 1915 : published in “ The Times,” 1917.

A CALL TO NATIONAL SERVICE p and be doing, all who have a hand To lift, a back to bend. It must not be In times like these that vaguely linger we To air our vaunts and hopes; and leave our land

U

Untended as a wild of weeds and sand. —Say, then, “ I come !” and go, O women and men Of palace, ploughshare, easel, counter, pen; That scareless, scathless, England still may stand. Would years but let me stir as once I stirred At many a dawn to take the forward track, And with a stride plunged on to enterprize, I now would speed like yester wind that whirred Through yielding pines; and serve with never a slack, So loud for promptness all around outcries ! March 1917. 240

THE DEAD AND THE LIVING ONE T he dead woman lay in her first night’s grave,

And twilight fell from the clouds’ concave, And those she had asked to forgive forgave. The woman passing came to a pause By the heaped white shapes of wreath and cross, And looked upon where the other was. And as she mused there thus spoke she : “Never your countenance did I see, But you’ve been a good good friend to me !” Came a plaintive voice from the sod below : “ O woman whose accents I do not know, What is it that makes you approve me so ?” “ O dead one, ere my soldier went, I heard him saying, with warm intent, To his friend, when won by your blandishment: 241

242 THE DEAD AND THE LIVING

“ ‘I would change for that lass here and now ! And if I return I may break my vow To my present Love, and contrive somehow “ ‘To call my own this new-found pearl, Whose eyes have the light, whose lips the curl, I always have looked for in a girl !’ “—And this is why that by ceasing to be— Though never your countenance did I see— You prove you a good good friend to me ; “And I pray each hour for your soul’s repose In gratitude for your joining those No lover will clasp when his campaigns close.” Away she turned, when arose to her eye A martial phantom of gory dye, That said, with a thin and far-off sigh : “ O sweetheart, neither shall I clasp you, For the foe this day has pierced me through, And sent me to where she is. Adieu !— “And forget not when the night-wind’s whine Calls over this turf where her limbs decline, That it travels on to lament by mine.”

THE DEAD AND THE LIVING 243

There was a cry by the white-flowered mound, There was a laugh from underground, There was a deeper gloom around. 1915.

(“ The Sphere.” )

A NEW YEAR’S EVE IN WAR TIME i P hantasmal fears,

And the flap of the flame, And the throb of the clock, And a loosened slate, And the blind night’s drone, Which tiredly the spectral pines intone ! ii

And the blood in my ears Strumming always the same, And the gable-cock With its fitful grate, And myself, alone. in The twelfth hour nears Hand-hid, as in shame ; I undo the lock, And listen, and wait For the Young Unknown. 244

NEW YEAR’S EVE IN WAR 245 IV

In the dark there careers— As if Death astride came To numb all with his knock— A horse at mad rate Over rut and stone. v

No figure appears, No call of my name, No sound but “Tic-toc” Without check. Past the gate It clatters—is gone. VI

What rider it bears There is none to proclaim; And the Old Year has struck, And, scarce animate, The New makes moan. VII

Maybe that “More Tears !— More Famine and Flame— More Severance and Shock !” Is the order from Fate That the Rider speeds on To pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone. 1915-1916.

“ I MET A MAN ”

I m e t a man when night was nigh, Who said, with shining face and eye Like Moses’ after Sinai:— “I have seen the Moulder of Monarchies, Realms, peoples, plains and hills, Sitting upon the sunlit seas !— And, as He sat, soliloquies Fell from Him like an antiphonic breeze That pricks the waves to thrills. “Meseemed that of the maimed and dead Mown down upon the globe,— Their plenteous blooms of promise shed Ere fruiting-time—His words were said, Sitting against the western web of red Wrapt in His crimson robe. “And I could catch them now and then: —‘Why let these gambling clans Of human Cockers, pit liege men From mart and city, dale and glen, In death-mains, but to swell and swell again Their swollen All-Empery plans, 246

I MET A M A N ”

247

“ ‘When a mere nod (if my malign Compeer but passive keep) Would mend that old mistake of mine I made with Saul, and ever consign All Lords of War whose sanctuaries enshrine Liberticide, to sleep ? “ ‘With violence the lands are spread Even as in Israel’s day, And it repenteth me I bred Chartered armipotents lust-led To feuds. . . . Yea, grieves my heart, as then I said, To see their evil way !’ —“The utterance grew, and flapped like flame, And further speech I feared; But no Celestial tongued acclaim, And no huzzas from earthlings came, And the heavens mutely masked as ’twere in shame Till daylight disappeared.” Thus ended he as night rode high— The man of shining face and eye, Like Moses’ after Sinai. 1916.

I LOOKED UP FROM MY

WRITING I l o o k e d up from my writing, And gave a start to see, As if rapt in my inditing, The moon’s full gaze on me. Her meditative misty head Was spectral in its air, And I involuntarily said, “What are you doing there ?” “ Oh, I’ve been scanning pond and hole And waterway hereabout For the body of one with a sunken soul Who has put his life-light out. “Did you hear his frenzied tattle ? It was sorrow for his son Who is slain in brutish battle, Though he has injured none. 248

FROM MY W R I T I N G ”

“And now I am curious to look Into the blinkered mind Of one who wants to write a book In a world of such a kind.” Her temper overwrought me, And I edged to shun her view, For I felt assured she thought me One who should drown him too.

249

FIN A L E

251

THE C O M IN G OF THE END

How it came to an end ! The meeting afar from the crowd, And the love-looks and laughters unpenned, The parting when much was avowed, How it came to an end ! It came to an end; Yes, the outgazing over the stream, With the sun on each serpentine bend, Or, later, the luring moon-gleam ; It came to an end. It came to an end, The housebuilding, furnishing, planting, As if there were ages to spend In welcoming, feasting, and jaunting; It came to an end. It came to an end, That journey of one day a week : (“ It always goes on,” said a friend, “Just the same in bright weathers or bleak ; ”) But it came to an end. 253

254

THE C O M IN G OF THE END

“ H o w will come to an end This orbit so smoothly begun, Unless some convulsion attend ?” I often said. “What will be done When it comes to an end ?”

Well, it came to an end Quite silently—stopped without jerk ; Better close no prevision could lend ; Working out as One planned it should work Ere it came to an end.

AFTERWARDS W hen 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 people say, “He was a man who used to notice such things” ? If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelids soundless blink, The dewfall - hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think, “To him this must have been a familiar sight” ? If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mo thy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, 255

256

AFTERWARDS

Will they 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 last, they stand at the door, Watching the full - starred heavens that winter sees, Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, “ He was one who had an eye for such 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” ? THE END

IN D EX OF TITLES A N D F IR S T LIN E S

Titles are in italics; first lines in Rom an type. The figures in square brackets refer to the numbering o f the poems in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Variorum Edition, ed James Gibson (1979).

A day is drawing to its fall [361] A woman was playing, [482] Afternoon Service at Mellstock [356] Afterwards [511] Ageing House, The [435] Ah —it’s the skeleton o f a lady’s sunshade, [434] And the Spirit said, [481] Anniversary, An [407] Announcement, The [402] Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune [359] Appeal to America on Behalf of the Belgian Destitute, An [497] At a bygone Western country fair [451] At a Country Fair [451] At a lonely cross where bye-roads met [490] At a Seaside Town in 1 8 6 9 [447] At last I entered a long dark gallery, [464] At Madame Tussaud’s in Victorian Years [437] At Mayfair Lodgings [380]

257

13 205 5 255 128 126 203 85 79 8 229 155 155 2 17 146 174 130 42

258

M O M E N T S OF V IS IO N

[421] At midnight, in the room where he lay dead [391] A t the P iano [482] At the shiver o f morning, a little before the false dawn, [466] A t the W icket-G ate [357] A t the Word “ F a re w e ll” [360] A t M id d le -F ie ld G a te in F ebru ary

Background and the Figure, T h e B ackw ard Spring, A B allet, T h e

[383]

[445]

65

205 177 6 11

50 143

[438]

Before K n o w led ge

105

132 [374]

B lin d e d B ird , T h e

34 235 35

Blow , T h e

IOI

Before M arching and A fte r

[502]

[375] [419] Bright baffling Soul, least capturable o f themes, [370] But don’t you know it, my dear, [488] B y a wall the stranger now calls his, [401] B y the Runic Stone [408]

C a ged G oldfin ch , T h e

[436] [505]

C a ll to N a tio n a l Service, A

[384] C him es, T h e [415] C hange, T h e

Choirm aster's B u ria l, T h e [489] Christmas Eve, and twelve o f the clock. [403] C lock o f the Years, T h e [481] C lock -W in der, T h e [471] C o m in g o f the E n d , T h e [510]

24 213 78

87 129 240 51 97 215 80 203 187 253

IN D E X

259

Conjecture [418] Copying Architecture in an Old Minster [369] Cry of the Homeless [501]

100 22 233

Day of First Sight, The [361] Dead and the Living One, The [506] Dishevelled leaves come down [392] Does he want you down there [381] Dolls, The [443] Duel, The [379] During Wind and Rain [441]

13 241 68 44 140 39 137

Enemy’s Portrait, The [476] England to Germany in 1 9 1 4 [495] Everything Comes [457]

195 227 163

Faded Face, The [377] Figure in the Scene, The [416] Five Students, The [439] For Life I had never cared greatly, [492] Forty years - aye, and several more - ago, [353] Fragment [464]

37 98 133 221 2 174

Glimpse, The [448] Great Things [414]

149 95

He Fears His Good Fortune [459] He often would ask us [485] He Prefers Her Earthly [442] He Revisits His First School [462]

166 215 139 17 1

260

M O M E N T S OF V IS IO N

He saw the portrait o f his enemy, offered [476] [460] H e a d above the Fog, T h e [423] Her house looked cold from the foggy lea, [411]

195 167 108 90

H e r L o v e-B ird s [ 453 ]

158

H e Wonders A b o u t H im s e lf

Here’s the mould o f a musical bird long passed from light, [358] H eredity [363] H is C o u n try [494] H is H eart [391] H on eym oon T im e at an In n [466] H ou se o f Silence, T h e [413] H ow could I be aware, [380] H ow it came to an end! [514] H ow smartly the quarters o f the hour march by [369] H ow was this I did not see [377]

“ I am here to time, you see; [379] “ I am playing my oldest tunes,” declared she, [430] I am the family face; [363] I bent in the deep o f night [390] I climbed to the crest, [397] I could hear a gown-skirt rustling [406] I determined to find out whose it was - [362] I dreamt that people from the Land o f Chimes [496] I found me in a great surging space, [473] I have done all I could [485] I idly cut a parsley stalk, [372]

7 15 225 65 177 93 42 253 22 37

39 119 15 62 73 84 14 228 19 1 209 30

IN D E X I journeyed from my native spot [494] I know not how it may be with others [428] I looked up from my writing, [509] I met a man when night was nigh, [508] I met you first - ah, when did I first meet you? [359] I rose and went to R o u ’tor Town [468] I said and sang her excellence: [399] I saw him pass as the new day dawned, [422] I saw it - pink and white - revealed [489] I should not have shown in the flesh [462] I think o f the slope where the rabbits fed, [383] I thought, my Heart, that you had healed [463] I travel as a phantom now, [387] I travel on by barren farms, [440] I walked in loamy Wessex lanes, afar [498] I was sitting, [365] I went and stood outside myself, [447] I went by footpath and by stile [454] I went by the Druid stone [483] “ I will get a new string for my fiddle, [398] If there were in my kalendar [418] Im aginings [477] In a M u seu m [358] In a W aiting R o o m [470] In a W hispering G a lle ry [474] In H e r Precincts [411] In the G a rden [484] In the seventies I was bearing in my breast, [389] In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy, [465] In T im e o f (