Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces. Thomas Hardy

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      Plunging and labouring on in a tide of visions,

         Dolorous and dear,

      Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters

         Stretching around,

      Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape

         Yonder and near,

      Blotted to feeble mist.  And the coomb and the upland

         Foliage-crowned,

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

         Stroked by the light,

      Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial

         Meadow or mound.

      What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost

         Under my sight,

      Hindering me to discern my paced advancement

         Lengthening to miles;

      What were the re-creations killing the daytime

         As by the night?

      O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,

         Some as with smiles,

      Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled

         Over the wrecked

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

         Harrowed by wiles.

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

         Halo-bedecked —

      And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,

         Rigid in hate,

      Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,

         Dreaded, suspect.

      Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons

         Further in date;

      Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion

         Vibrant, beside

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

         Now corporate.

      Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect

         Gnawed by the tide,

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

         Guilelessly glad —

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

         Scantly descried.

      Later images too did the day unfurl me,

         Shadowed and sad,

      Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,

         Laid now at ease,

      Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow

         Sepulture-clad.

      So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,

         Over the leaze,

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

         – Yea, as the rhyme

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

         Captured me these.

      For, their lost revisiting manifestations

         In their own time

      Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,

         Seeing behind

      Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling

         Sweet, sad, sublime.

      Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser

         Stare of the mind

      As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast

         Body-borne eyes,

      Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them

         As living kind.

      Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying

         In their surmise,

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

         Round him that looms

      Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,

         Save a few tombs?”

      That night your great guns, unawares,

      Shook all our coffins as we lay,

      And broke the chancel window-squares,

      We thought it was the Judgment-day

      And sat upright.  While drearisome

      Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

      The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

      The worms drew back into the mounds,

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

      It’s gunnery practice out at sea

      Just as before you went below;

      The world is as it used to be:

      “All nations striving strong to make

      Red war yet redder.  Mad as hatters

      They do no more for Christés sake

      Than you who are helpless in such matters.

      “That this is not the judgment-hour

      For some of them’s a blessed thing,

      For if it were they’d have to scour

      Hell’s floor for so much threatening.

      “Ha, ha.  It will be warmer when

      I blow the trumpet (if indeed

      I ever do; for you are men,

      And rest eternal sorely need).”

      So down we lay again.  “I wonder,

      Will the world ever saner be,”

      Said one, “than when He sent us under

      In our indifferent century!”

      And many a skeleton shook his head.

      “Instead of preaching forty year,”

      My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

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

      Again the guns disturbed the hour,

      Roaring their readiness to avenge,

      As far inland as Stourton Tower,

      And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

         In a solitude of the sea

         Deep from human vanity,

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

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