Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces

Thomas Hardy

Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces

LYRICS AND REVERIES

IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE

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 wreckedCheeks 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, besideLamps 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 rhymeSung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness   Captured me these.For, their lost revisiting manifestations   In their own timeMuch had I slighted, caring not for their purport,   Seeing behindThings more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling   Sweet, sad, sublime.Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser   Stare of the mindAs 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 loomsWhithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,   Save a few tombs?”

CHANNEL FIRING

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-dayAnd sat upright.  While drearisomeArose 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 seaJust as before you went below;The world is as it used to be:“All nations striving strong to makeRed war yet redder.  Mad as hattersThey do no more for Christés sakeThan you who are helpless in such matters.“That this is not the judgment-hourFor some of them’s a blessed thing,For if it were they’d have to scourHell’s floor for so much threatening.“Ha, ha.  It will be warmer whenI blow the trumpet (if indeedI 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 underIn 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. April 1914.

THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

(Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)I   In a solitude of the sea   Deep from human vanity,And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.II   Steel chambers, late the pyres   Of her salamandrine fires,Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.III   Over the mirrors meant   To glass the opulentThe sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.IV   Jewels in joy designed   To ravish the sensuous mindLie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.V   Dim moon-eyed fishes near   Gaze at the gilded gearAnd query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”.VI   Well: while was fashioning   This creature of cleaving wing,The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everythingVII   Prepared a sinister mate   For her – so gaily great —A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.VIII   And as the smart ship grew   In stature, grace, and hue,In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.IX   Alien they seemed to be:   No mortal eye could seeThe intimate welding of their later history,X   Or sign that they were bent   By paths coincidentOn being anon twin halves of one august event,XI   Till the Spinner of the Years   Said “Now!”  And each one hears,And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

THE GHOST OF THE PAST

We two kept house, the Past and I,   The Past and I;I tended while it hovered nigh,   Leaving me never alone.It was a spectral housekeeping   Where fell no jarring tone,As strange, as still a housekeeping   As ever has been known.As daily I went up the stair   And down the stair,I did not mind the Bygone there —   The Present once to me;Its moving meek companionship   I wished might ever be,There was in that companionship   Something of ecstasy.It dwelt with me just as it was,   Just as it wasWhen first its prospects gave me pause   In wayward wanderings,Before the years had torn old troths   As they tear all sweet things,Before gaunt griefs had torn old troths   And dulled old rapturings.And then its form began to fade,   Began to fade,Its gentle echoes faintlier played   At eves upon my earThan when the autumn’s look embrowned   The lonely chambers here,The autumn’s settling shades embrowned   Nooks that it haunted near.And so with time my vision less,   Yea, less and lessMakes of that Past my housemistress,   It dwindles in my eye;It looms a far-off skeleton   And not a comrade nigh,A fitful far-off skeleton   Dimming as days draw by.

AFTER THE VISIT

(To F. E. D.)

   Come again to the placeWhere your presence was as a leaf that skimsDown a drouthy way whose ascent bedims   The bloom on the farer’s face.   Come again, with the feetThat were light on the green as a thistledown ball,And those mute ministrations to one and to all   Beyond a man’s saying sweet.   Until then the faint scentOf the bordering flowers swam unheeded away,And I marked not the charm in the changes of day   As the cloud-colours came and went.   Through the dark corridorsYour walk was so soundless I did not knowYour form from a phantom’s of long ago   Said to pass on the ancient floors,   Till you drew from the shade,And I saw the large luminous living eyesRegard me in fixed inquiring-wise   As those of a soul that weighed,   Scarce consciously,The eternal question of what Life was,And why we were there, and by whose strange laws   That which mattered most could not be.

TO MEET, OR OTHERWISE

Whether to sally and see thee, girl of my dreams,   Or whether to stayAnd see thee not!  How vast the difference seems   Of Yea from NayJust now.  Yet this same sun will slant its beams   At no far dayOn our two mounds, and then what will the difference weigh!Yet I will see thee, maiden dear, and make   The most I canOf what remains to us amid this brake CimmerianThrough which we grope, and from whose thorns we ache,   While still we scanRound our frail faltering progress for some path or plan.By briefest meeting something sure is won;   It will have been:Nor God nor Daemon can undo the done,   Unsight the seen,Make muted music be as unbegun,   Though things terreneGroan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.So, to the one long-sweeping symphony   From times remoteTill now, of human tenderness, shall we   Supply one note,Small and untraced, yet that will ever be   Somewhere afloatAmid the spheres, as part of sick Life’s antidote.

THE DIFFERENCE

ISinking down by the gate I discern the thin moon,And a blackbird tries over old airs in the pine,But the moon is a sorry one, sad the bird’s tune,For this spot is unknown to that Heartmate of mine.IIDid my Heartmate but haunt here at times such as now,The song would be joyous and cheerful the moon;But she will see never this gate, path, or bough,Nor I find a joy in the scene or the tune.

THE SUN ON THE BOOKCASE

(Student’s Love-song)

Once more the cauldron of the sunSmears the bookcase with winy red,And here my page is, and there my bed,And the apple-tree shadows travel along.Soon their intangible track will be run,   And dusk grow strong   And they be fled.Yes: now the boiling ball is gone,And I have wasted another day.But wasted —wasted, do I say?Is it a waste to have imaged oneBeyond the hills there, who, anon,   My great deeds done   Will be mine alway?

“WHEN I SET OUT FOR LYONNESSE”

When I set out for Lyonnesse,   A hundred miles away,   The rime was on the spray,And starlight lit my lonesomenessWhen I set out for Lyonnesse   A hundred miles away.What would bechance at Lyonnesse   While I should sojourn there   No prophet durst declare,Nor did the wisest wizard guessWhat would bechance at Lyonnesse   While I should sojourn there.When I came back from Lyonnesse   With magic in my eyes,   None managed to surmiseWhat meant my godlike gloriousness,When I came back from Lyonnesse   With magic in my eyes.

A THUNDERSTORM IN TOWN

(A Reminiscence)

She wore a new “terra-cotta” dress,And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,Within the hansom’s dry recess,Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless   We sat on, snug and warm.Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,And the glass that had screened our forms beforeFlew up, and out she sprang to her door:I should have kissed her if the rain   Had lasted a minute more.

THE TORN LETTER

II tore your letter into strips   No bigger than the airy feathers   That ducks preen out in changing weathersUpon the shifting ripple-tips.IIIn darkness on my bed alone   I seemed to see you in a vision,   And hear you say: “Why this derisionOf one drawn to you, though unknown?”IIIYes, eve’s quick mood had run its course,   The night had cooled my hasty madness;   I suffered a regretful sadnessWhich deepened into real remorse.IVI thought what pensive patient days   A soul must know of grain so tender,   How much of good must grace the senderOf such sweet words in such bright phrase.VUprising then, as things unpriced   I sought each fragment, patched and mended;   The midnight whitened ere I had endedAnd gathered words I had sacrificed.VIBut some, alas, of those I threw   Were past my search, destroyed for ever:   They were your name and place; and neverDid I regain those clues to you.VIII learnt I had missed, by rash unheed,   My track; that, so the Will decided,   In life, death, we should be divided,And at the sense I ached indeed.VIIIThat ache for you, born long ago,   Throbs on; I never could outgrow it.   What a revenge, did you but know it!But that, thank God, you do not know.

BEYOND THE LAST LAMP

(Near Tooting Common)

IWhile rain, with eve in partnership,Descended darkly, drip, drip, drip,Beyond the last lone lamp I passed   Walking slowly, whispering sadly,   Two linked loiterers, wan, downcast:Some heavy thought constrained each face,And blinded them to time and place.IIThe pair seemed lovers, yet absorbedIn mental scenes no longer orbedBy love’s young rays.  Each countenance   As it slowly, as it sadly   Caught the lamplight’s yellow glanceHeld in suspense a miseryAt things which had been or might be.IIIWhen I retrod that watery waySome hours beyond the droop of day,Still I found pacing there the twain   Just as slowly, just as sadly,   Heedless of the night and rain.One could but wonder who they wereAnd what wild woe detained them there.IVThough thirty years of blur and blotHave slid since I beheld that spot,And saw in curious converse there   Moving slowly, moving sadly   That mysterious tragic pair,Its olden look may linger on —All but the couple; they have gone.VWhither?  Who knows, indeed.. And yetTo me, when nights are weird and wet,Without those comrades there at tryst   Creeping slowly, creeping sadly,   That lone lane does not exist.There they seem brooding on their pain,And will, while such a lane remain.

THE FACE AT THE CASEMENT

   If ever joy leaveAn abiding sting of sorrow,So befell it on the morrow   Of that May eve.   The travelled sun droppedTo the north-west, low and lower,The pony’s trot grew slower,   And then we stopped.   “This cosy house just byI must call at for a minute,A sick man lies within it   Who soon will die.   “He wished to marry me,So I am bound, when I drive near him,To inquire, if but to cheer him,   How he may be.”   A message was sent in,And wordlessly we waited,Till some one came and stated   The bulletin.   And that the sufferer said,For her call no words could thank her;As his angel he must rank her   Till life’s spark fled.   Slowly we drove away,When I turned my head, although notCalled; why so I turned I know not   Even to this day.   And lo, there in my viewPressed against an upper latticeWas a white face, gazing at us   As we withdrew.   And well did I divineIt to be the man’s there dying,Who but lately had been sighing   For her pledged mine.   Then I deigned a deed of hell;It was done before I knew it;What devil made me do it   I cannot tell!   Yes, while he gazed above,I put my arm about herThat he might see, nor doubt her   My plighted Love.   The pale face vanished quick,As if blasted, from the casement,And my shame and self-abasement   Began their prick.   And they prick on, ceaselessly,For that stab in Love’s fierce fashionWhich, unfired by lover’s passion,   Was foreign to me.   She smiled at my caress,But why came the soft embowmentOf her shoulder at that moment   She did not guess.   Long long years has he lainIn thy garth, O sad Saint Cleather:What tears there, bared to weather,   Will cleanse that stain!   Love is long-suffering, brave,Sweet, prompt, precious as a jewel;But O, too, Love is cruel,   Cruel as the grave.

LOST LOVE

I play my sweet old airs —   The airs he knew   When our love was true —   But he does not balk   His determined walk,And passes up the stairs.I sing my songs once more,   And presently hear   His footstep near   As if it would stay;   But he goes his way,And shuts a distant door.So I wait for another morn   And another night   In this soul-sick blight;   And I wonder much   As I sit, why suchA woman as I was born!

“MY SPIRIT WILL NOT HAUNT THE MOUND”

My spirit will not haunt the mound   Above my breast,But travel, memory-possessed,To where my tremulous being found   Life largest, best.My phantom-footed shape will go   When nightfall graysHither and thither along the waysI and another used to know   In backward days.And there you’ll find me, if a jot   You still should careFor me, and for my curious air;If otherwise, then I shall not,   For you, be there.

WESSEX HEIGHTS (1896)

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly handFor thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man’s friend —Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,But mind-chains do not clank where one’s next neighbour is the sky.In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways —Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things —Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass causeCan have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there’s a figure against the moon,Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passedFor everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.There’s a ghost at Yell’ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night,There’s a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white,There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

IN DEATH DIVIDED

I   I shall rot here, with those whom in their day      You never knew,   And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay,      Met not my view,Will in your distant grave-place ever neighbour you.II   No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower,      While earth endures,   Will fall on my mound and within the hour      Steal on to yours;One robin never haunt our two green covertures.III   Some organ may resound on Sunday noons      By where you lie,   Some other thrill the panes with other tunes      Where moulder I;No selfsame chords compose our common lullaby.IV   The simply-cut memorial at my head      Perhaps may take   A Gothic form, and that above your bed      Be Greek in make;No linking symbol show thereon for our tale’s sake.V   And in the monotonous moils of strained, hard-run      Humanity,   The eternal tie which binds us twain in one      No eye will seeStretching across the miles that sever you from me.

THE PLACE ON THE MAP

I   I look upon the map that hangs by me —Its shires and towns and rivers lined in varnished artistry —   And I mark a jutting heightColoured purple, with a margin of blue sea.II   – ’Twas a day of latter summer, hot and dry;Ay, even the waves seemed drying as we walked on, she and I,   By this spot where, calmly quite,She informed me what would happen by and by.III   This hanging map depicts the coast and place,And resuscitates therewith our unexpected troublous case   All distinctly to my sight,And her tension, and the aspect of her face.IV   Weeks and weeks we had loved beneath that blazing blue,Which had lost the art of raining, as her eyes to-day had too,   While she told what, as by sleight,Shot our firmament with rays of ruddy hue.V   For the wonder and the wormwood of the wholeWas that what in realms of reason would have joyed our double soul   Wore a torrid tragic lightUnder order-keeping’s rigorous control.VI   So, the map revives her words, the spot, the time,And the thing we found we had to face before the next year’s prime;   The charted coast stares bright,And its episode comes back in pantomime.

WHERE THE PICNIC WAS

Where we made the fire,In the summer time,Of branch and briarOn the hill to the seaI slowly climbThrough winter mire,And scan and traceThe forsaken placeQuite readily.Now a cold wind blows,And the grass is gray,But the spot still showsAs a burnt circle – aye,And stick-ends, charred,Still strew the swardWhereon I stand,Last relic of the bandWho came that day!Yes, I am hereJust as last year,And the sea breathes brineFrom its strange straight lineUp hither, the sameAs when we four came.– But two have wandered farFrom this grassy riseInto urban roarWhere no picnics are,And one – has shut her eyesFor evermore.

THE SCHRECKHORN

(With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)

(June 1897)Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim;Now that its spare and desolate figure gleamsUpon my nearing vision, less it seemsA looming Alp-height than a guise of himWho scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,Of semblance to his personalityIn its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.At his last change, when Life’s dull coils unwind,Will he, in old love, hitherward escape,And the eternal essence of his mindEnter this silent adamantine shape,And his low voicing haunt its slipping snowsWhen dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?

A SINGER ASLEEP

(Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837–1909)

IIn this fair niche above the unslumbering sea,That sentrys up and down all night, all day,From cove to promontory, from ness to bay,   The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be Pillowed eternally.II– It was as though a garland of red rosesHad fallen about the hood of some smug nunWhen irresponsibly dropped as from the sun,In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes,Upon Victoria’s formal middle time   His leaves of rhythm and rhyme.IIIO that far morning of a summer dayWhen, down a terraced street whose pavements layGlassing the sunshine into my bent eyes,I walked and read with a quick glad surprise   New words, in classic guise, —IVThe passionate pages of his earlier years,Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, kisses, tears;Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel whoBlew them not naïvely, but as one who knew   Full well why thus he blew.VI still can hear the brabble and the roarAt those thy tunes, O still one, now passed throughThat fitful fire of tongues then entered new!Their power is spent like spindrift on this shore;   Thine swells yet more and more.VI– His singing-mistress verily was no otherThan she the Lesbian, she the music-motherOf all the tribe that feel in melodies;Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steepInto the rambling world-encircling deep   Which hides her where none sees.VIIAnd one can hold in thought that nightly hereHis phantom may draw down to the water’s brim,And hers come up to meet it, as a dimLone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere,And mariners wonder as they traverse near,   Unknowing of her and him.VIIIOne dreams him sighing to her spectral form:“O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line;Where are those songs, O poetess divineWhose very arts are love incarnadine?”And her smile back: “Disciple true and warm,   Sufficient now are thine.”.IXSo here, beneath the waking constellations,Where the waves peal their everlasting strains,And their dull subterrene reverberationsShake him when storms make mountains of their plains —Him once their peer in sad improvisations,And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes —I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines   Upon the capes and chines.Bonchurch, 1910.

A PLAINT TO MAN

When you slowly emerged from the den of Time,And gained percipience as you grew,And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime,Wherefore, O Man, did there come to youThe unhappy need of creating me —A form like your own – for praying to?My virtue, power, utility,Within my maker must all abide,Since none in myself can ever be,One thin as a shape on a lantern-slideShown forth in the dark upon some dim sheet,And by none but its showman vivified.“Such a forced device,” you may say, “is meetFor easing a loaded heart at whiles:Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seatSomewhere above the gloomy aislesOf this wailful world, or he could not bearThe irk no local hope beguiles.”– But since I was framed in your first despairThe doing without me has had no playIn the minds of men when shadows scare;And now that I dwindle day by dayBeneath the deicide eyes of seersIn a light that will not let me stay,And to-morrow the whole of me disappears,The truth should be told, and the fact be facedThat had best been faced in earlier years:The fact of life with dependence placedOn the human heart’s resource alone,In brotherhood bonded close and gracedWith loving-kindness fully blown,And visioned help unsought, unknown.1909–10.