Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other VersesHardy, Thomas
General
Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses
Hardy, Thomas
English poetry
THE curtains now are drawn,
And the spindrift strikes the glass,
Blown up the jagged pass
By the surly salt sou’-west,
And the sneering glare is gone
Behind the yonder crest,
While she sings to me:
“O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,
And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,
And death may come, but loving is divine.”
II
I stand here in the rain,
With its smite upon her stone,
And the grasses that have grown
Over women, children, men,
And their texts that “Life is vain”;
But I hear the notes as when
Once she sang to me:
“O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,
And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,
And death may come, but loving is divine.”
1913.
“ACCORDING TO THE MIGHTY WORKING”
I
WHEN moiling seems at cease
In the vague void of night-time,
And heaven’s wide roomage stormless
Between the dusk and light-time,
And fear at last is formless,
We call the allurement Peace.
II
Peace, this hid riot, Change,
This revel of quick-cued mumming,
This never truly being,
This evermore becoming,
This spinner’s wheel onfleeing
Outside perception’s range.
1917.
“I WAS NOT HE”
(SONG)
I WAS not he—the man
Who used to pilgrim to your gate,
At whose smart step you grew elate,
And rosed, as maidens can,
For a brief span.
It was not I who sang
Beside the keys you touched so true
With note-bent eyes, as if with you
It counted not whence sprang
The voice that rang . . .
Yet though my destiny
It was to miss your early sweet,
You still, when turned to you my feet,
Had sweet enough to be
A prize for me!
THE WEST-OF-WESSEX GIRL
A VERY West-of-Wessex girl,
As blithe as blithe could be,
Was once well-known to me,
And she would laud her native town,
And hope and hope that we
Might sometime study up and down
Its charms in company.
But never I squired my Wessex girl
In jaunts to Hoe or street
When hearts were high in beat,
Nor saw her in the marbled ways
Where market-people meet
That in her bounding early days
Were friendly with her feet.
Yet now my West-of-Wessex girl,
When midnight hammers slow
From Andrew’s, blow by blow,
As phantom draws me by the hand
To the place—Plymouth Hoe—
Where side by side in life, as planned,
We never were to go!
Begun in Plymouth, _March_ 1913.
WELCOME HOME
TO my native place
Bent upon returning,
Bosom all day burning
To be where my race
Well were known, ’twas much with me
There to dwell in amity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses — John Shaqi
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