Thomas Hardy - Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses

“They were – I think ’twas told me —
Queer in their works and ways;
The teller would often hold me
With weird tales of those days.
Some folk can not abide here,
But we – we do not care
Who loved, laughed, wept, or died here,
Knew joy, or despair.”

As ’twere to-night, in the brief space
Of a far eventime,
My spirit rang achime
At vision of a girl of grace;
As ’twere to-night, in the brief space
Of a far eventime.

As ’twere at noontide of to-morrow
I airily walked and talked,
And wondered as I walked
What it could mean, this soar from sorrow;
As ’twere at noontide of to-morrow
I airily walked and talked.

As ’twere at waning of this week
Broke a new life on me;
Trancings of bliss to be
In some dim dear land soon to seek;
As ’twere at waning of this week
Broke a new life on me!

A forward rush by the lamp in the gloom,
And we clasped, and almost kissed;
But she was not the woman whom
I had promised to meet in the thawing brume
On that harbour-bridge; nor was I he of her tryst.

So loosening from me swift she said:
“O why, why feign to be
The one I had meant! – to whom I have sped
To fly with, being so sorrily wed!”
– ’Twas thus and thus that she upbraided me.

My assignation had struck upon
Some others’ like it, I found.
And her lover rose on the night anon;
And then her husband entered on
The lamplit, snowflaked, sloppiness around.

“Take her and welcome, man!” he cried:
“I wash my hands of her.
I’ll find me twice as good a bride!”
– All this to me, whom he had eyed,
Plainly, as his wife’s planned deliverer.

And next the lover: “Little I knew,
Madam, you had a third!
Kissing here in my very view!”
– Husband and lover then withdrew.
I let them; and I told them not they erred.

Why not? Well, there faced she and I —
Two strangers who’d kissed, or near,
Chancewise. To see stand weeping by
A woman once embraced, will try
The tension of a man the most austere.

So it began; and I was young,
She pretty, by the lamp,
As flakes came waltzing down among
The waves of her clinging hair, that hung
Heavily on her temples, dark and damp.

And there alone still stood we two;
She one cast off for me,
Or so it seemed: while night ondrew,
Forcing a parley what should do
We twain hearts caught in one catastrophe.

In stranded souls a common strait
Wakes latencies unknown,
Whose impulse may precipitate
A life-long leap. The hour was late,
And there was the Jersey boat with its funnel agroan.

“Is wary walking worth much pother?”
It grunted, as still it stayed.
“One pairing is as good as another
Where all is venture! Take each other,
And scrap the oaths that you have aforetime made.”.

– Of the four involved there walks but one
On earth at this late day.
And what of the chapter so begun?
In that odd complex what was done?
Well; happiness comes in full to none:
Let peace lie on lulled lips: I will not say.

I dwelt in the shade of a city,
She far by the sea,
With folk perhaps good, gracious, witty;
But never with me.

Her form on the ballroom’s smooth flooring
I never once met,
To guide her with accents adoring
Through Weippert’s “First Set.” 1 1 Quadrilles danced early in the nineteenth century.

I spent my life’s seasons with pale ones
In Vanity Fair,
And she enjoyed hers among hale ones
In salt-smelling air.

Maybe she had eyes of deep colour,
Maybe they were blue,
Maybe as she aged they got duller;
That never I knew.

She may have had lips like the coral,
But I never kissed them,
Saw pouting, nor curling in quarrel,
Nor sought for, nor missed them.

Not a word passed of love all our lifetime,
Between us, nor thrill;
We’d never a husband-and-wife time,
For good or for ill.

Yet as one dust, through bleak days and vernal,
Lie I and lies she,
This never-known lady, eternal
Companion to me!

I have seen her in gowns the brightest,
Of azure, green, and red,
And in the simplest, whitest,
Muslined from heel to head;
I have watched her walking, riding,
Shade-flecked by a leafy tree,
Or in fixed thought abiding
By the foam-fingered sea.

In woodlands I have known her,
When boughs were mourning loud,
In the rain-reek she has shown her
Wild-haired and watery-browed.
And once or twice she has cast me
As she pomped along the street
Court-clad, ere quite she had passed me,
A glance from her chariot-seat.

But in my memoried passion
For evermore stands she
In the gown of fading fashion
She wore that night when we,
Doomed long to part, assembled
In the snug small room; yea, when
She sang with lips that trembled,
“Shall I see his face again?”

I marked when the weather changed,
And the panes began to quake,
And the winds rose up and ranged,
That night, lying half-awake.

Dead leaves blew into my room,
And alighted upon my bed,
And a tree declared to the gloom
Its sorrow that they were shed.

One leaf of them touched my hand,
And I thought that it was you
There stood as you used to stand,
And saying at last you knew!

Since every sound moves memories,
How can I play you
Just as I might if you raised no scene,
By your ivory rows, of a form between
My vision and your time-worn sheen,
As when each day you
Answered our fingers with ecstasy?
So it’s hushed, hushed, hushed, you are for me!

And as I am doomed to counterchord
Her notes no more
In those old things I used to know,
In a fashion, when we practised so,
“Good-night! – Good-bye!” to your pleated show
Of silk, now hoar,
Each nodding hammer, and pedal and key,
For dead, dead, dead, you are to me!

I fain would second her, strike to her stroke,
As when she was by,
Aye, even from the ancient clamorous “Fall
Of Paris,” or “Battle of Prague” withal,
To the “Roving Minstrels,” or “Elfin Call”
Sung soft as a sigh:
But upping ghosts press achefully,
And mute, mute, mute, you are for me!

Should I fling your polyphones, plaints, and quavers
Afresh on the air,
Too quick would the small white shapes be here
Of the fellow twain of hands so dear;
And a black-tressed profile, and pale smooth ear;
– Then how shall I bear
Such heavily-haunted harmony?
Nay: hushed, hushed, hushed you are for me!