The Complete Poetical Works. Томас Харди

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">       They stepping steadily—only too readily!—

       Scarce as if stepping brought parting-time nigher.

      III

      Great guns were gleaming there, living things seeming there,

       Cloaked in their tar-cloths, upmouthed to the night;

       Wheels wet and yellow from axle to felloe,

       Throats blank of sound, but prophetic to sight.

      IV

      Gas-glimmers drearily, blearily, eerily

       Lit our pale faces outstretched for one kiss,

       While we stood prest to them, with a last quest to them

       Not to court perils that honour could miss.

      V

      Sharp were those sighs of ours, blinded these eyes of ours,

       When at last moved away under the arch

       All we loved. Aid for them each woman prayed for them,

       Treading back slowly the track of their march.

      VI

      Someone said: “Nevermore will they come: evermore

       Are they now lost to us.” O it was wrong!

       Though may be hard their ways, some Hand will guard their ways,

       Bear them through safely, in brief time or long.

      VII

      —Yet, voices haunting us, daunting us, taunting us,

       Hint in the night-time when life beats are low

       Other and graver things . . . Hold we to braver things,

       Wait we, in trust, what Time’s fulness shall show.

      At the War Office, London

       Table of Contents

      (Affixing the Lists of Killed and Wounded: December, 1899)

      I

      Last year I called this world of gain-givings

       The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly

       If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly,

       So charged it seemed with circumstance whence springs

       The tragedy of things.

      II

      Yet at that censured time no heart was rent

       Or feature blanched of parent, wife, or daughter

       By hourly blazoned sheets of listed slaughter;

       Death waited Nature’s wont; Peace smiled unshent

       From Ind to Occident.

      A Christmas Ghost-Story

       Table of Contents

      South of the Line, inland from far Durban,

       A mouldering soldier lies—your countryman.

       Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,

       And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans

       Nightly to clear Canopus: “I would know

       By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law

       Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,

       Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?

       And what of logic or of truth appears

       In tacking ‘Anno Domini’ to the years?

       Near twenty-hundred livened thus have hied,

       But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.”

      Christmas-eve, 1899.

      The Dead Drummer

       Table of Contents

      I

      They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

       Uncoffined—just as found:

       His landmark is a kopje-crest

       That breaks the veldt around;

       And foreign constellations west

       Each night above his mound.

      II

      Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—

       Fresh from his Wessex home—

       The meaning of the broad Karoo,

       The Bush, the dusty loam,

       And why uprose to nightly view

       Strange stars amid the gloam.

      III

      Yet portion of that unknown plain

       Will Hodge for ever be;

       His homely Northern breast and brain

       Grow up a Southern tree.

       And strange-eyed constellations reign

       His stars eternally.

      A Wife in London

       Table of Contents

      (December, 1899)

      I

       THE TRAGEDY

      She sits in the tawny vapour

       That the City lanes have uprolled,

       СКАЧАТЬ