The Complete Poetical Works. Томас Харди

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      VI

      Even as when the trackway thundered

       With the charge of grenadiers,

       And the blood of forty hundred

       Splashed its parapets and piers . . .

      VII

      Any ancient crone I’d toady

       Like a lass in young-eyed prime,

       Could she tell some tale of Lodi

       At that moving mighty time.

      VIII

      So, I ask the wives of Lodi

       For traditions of that day;

       But alas! not anybody

       Seems to know of such a fray.

      IX

      And they heed but transitory

       Marketings in cheese and meat,

       Till I judge that Lodi’s story

       Is extinct in Lodi’s street.

      X

      Yet while here and there they thrid them

       In their zest to sell and buy,

       Let me sit me down amid them

       And behold those thousands die . . .

      XI

      —Not a creature cares in Lodi

       How Napoleon swept each arch,

       Or where up and downward trod he,

       Or for his memorial March!

      XII

      So that wherefore should I be here,

       Watching Adda lip the lea,

       When the whole romance to see here

       Is the dream I bring with me?

      XIII

      And why sing “The Bridge of Lodi”

       As I sit thereon and swing,

       When none shows by smile or nod he

       Guesses why or what I sing? . . .

      XIV

      Since all Lodi, low and head ones,

       Seem to pass that story by,

       It may be the Lodi-bred ones

       Rate it truly, and not I.

      XV

      Once engrossing Bridge of Lodi,

       Is thy claim to glory gone?

       Must I pipe a palinody,

       Or be silent thereupon?

      XVI

      And if here, from strand to steeple,

       Be no stone to fame the fight,

       Must I say the Lodi people

       Are but viewing crime aright?

      XVII

      Nay; I’ll sing “The Bridge of Lodi”—

       That long-loved, romantic thing,

       Though none show by smile or nod he

       Guesses why and what I sing!

      On an Invitation to the United States

       Table of Contents

      I

      My ardours for emprize nigh lost

       Since Life has bared its bones to me,

       I shrink to seek a modern coast

       Whose riper times have yet to be;

       Where the new regions claim them free

       From that long drip of human tears

       Which peoples old in tragedy

       Have left upon the centuried years.

      II

      For, wonning in these ancient lands,

       Enchased and lettered as a tomb,

       And scored with prints of perished hands,

       And chronicled with dates of doom,

       Though my own Being bear no bloom

       I trace the lives such scenes enshrine,

       Give past exemplars present room,

       And their experience count as mine.

      Miscellaneous Poems

       Table of Contents

The Mother Mourns

       Table of Contents

      When mid-autumn’s moan shook the night-time,

       And sedges were horny,

       And summer’s green wonderwork faltered

       On leaze and in lane,

      I fared Yell’ham-Firs way, where dimly

       Came wheeling around me

       Those phantoms obscure and insistent

       That shadows unchain.

      Till airs from the needle-thicks brought me

       A low lamentation,

       As ’twere of a tree-god disheartened,

       Perplexed, or in pain.

      And, heeding, it awed me to gather

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