Thomas Hardy - Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

A day is drawing to its fall
I had not dreamed to see;
The first of many to enthrall
My spirit, will it be?
Or is this eve the end of all
Such new delight for me?

I journey home: the pattern grows
Of moonshades on the way:
“Soon the first quarter, I suppose,”
Sky-glancing travellers say;
I realize that it, for those,
Has been a common day.

I determined to find out whose it was —
The portrait he looked at so, and sighed;
Bitterly have I rued my meanness
And wept for it since he died!

I searched his desk when he was away,
And there was the likeness – yes, my own!
Taken when I was the season’s fairest,
And time-lines all unknown.

I smiled at my image, and put it back,
And he went on cherishing it, until
I was chafed that he loved not the me then living,
But that past woman still.

Well, such was my jealousy at last,
I destroyed that face of the former me;
Could you ever have dreamed the heart of woman
Would work so foolishly!

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance – that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.

You were the sort that men forget;
Though I – not yet! —
Perhaps not ever. Your slighted weakness
Adds to the strength of my regret!

You’d not the art – you never had
For good or bad —
To make men see how sweet your meaning,
Which, visible, had charmed them glad.

You would, by words inept let fall,
Offend them all,
Even if they saw your warm devotion
Would hold your life’s blood at their call.

You lacked the eye to understand
Those friends offhand
Whose mode was crude, though whose dim purport
Outpriced the courtesies of the bland.

I am now the only being who
Remembers you
It may be. What a waste that Nature
Grudged soul so dear the art its due!

I was sitting,
She was knitting,
And the portraits of our fore-folk hung around;
When there struck on us a sigh;
“Ah – what is that?” said I:
“Was it not you?” said she. “A sigh did sound.”

I had not breathed it,
Nor the night-wind heaved it,
And how it came to us we could not guess;
And we looked up at each face
Framed and glazed there in its place,
Still hearkening; but thenceforth was silentness.

Half in dreaming,
“Then its meaning,”
Said we, “must be surely this; that they repine
That we should be the last
Of stocks once unsurpassed,
And unable to keep up their sturdy line.”

There was a stunted handpost just on the crest,
Only a few feet high:
She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,
At the crossways close thereby.

She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,
And laid her arms on its own,
Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,
Her sad face sideways thrown.

Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day
Made her look as one crucified
In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,
And hurriedly “Don’t,” I cried.

I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said,
As she stepped forth ready to go,
“I am rested now. – Something strange came into my head;
I wish I had not leant so!”

And wordless we moved onward down from the hill
In the west cloud’s murked obscure,
And looking back we could see the handpost still
In the solitude of the moor.

“It struck her too,” I thought, for as if afraid
She heavily breathed as we trailed;
Till she said, “I did not think how ’twould look in the shade,
When I leant there like one nailed.”

I, lightly: “There’s nothing in it. For you , anyhow!”
– “O I know there is not,” said she.
“Yet I wonder.. If no one is bodily crucified now,
In spirit one may be!”

And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see
In the running of Time’s far glass
Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be
Some day. – Alas, alas!

When the spring comes round, and a certain day
Looks out from the brume by the eastern copsetrees
And says, Remember,
I begin again, as if it were new,
A day of like date I once lived through,
Whiling it hour by hour away;
So shall I do till my December,
When spring comes round.

I take my holiday then and my rest
Away from the dun life here about me,
Old hours re-greeting
With the quiet sense that bring they must
Such throbs as at first, till I house with dust,
And in the numbness my heartsome zest
For things that were, be past repeating
When spring comes round.

“What have you looked at, Moon,
In your time,
Now long past your prime?”
“O, I have looked at, often looked at
Sweet, sublime,
Sore things, shudderful, night and noon
In my time.”

“What have you mused on, Moon,
In your day,
So aloof, so far away?”
“O, I have mused on, often mused on
Growth, decay,
Nations alive, dead, mad, aswoon,
In my day!”

“Have you much wondered, Moon,
On your rounds,
Self-wrapt, beyond Earth’s bounds?”
“Yea, I have wondered, often wondered
At the sounds
Reaching me of the human tune
On my rounds.”

“What do you think of it, Moon,
As you go?
Is Life much, or no?”
“O, I think of it, often think of it
As a show
God ought surely to shut up soon,
As I go.”

How smartly the quarters of the hour march by
That the jack-o’-clock never forgets;
Ding-dong; and before I have traced a cusp’s eye,
Or got the true twist of the ogee over,
A double ding-dong ricochetts.

Just so did he clang here before I came,
And so will he clang when I’m gone
Through the Minster’s cavernous hollows – the same
Tale of hours never more to be will he deliver
To the speechless midnight and dawn!

I grow to conceive it a call to ghosts,
Whose mould lies below and around.
Yes; the next “Come, come,” draws them out from their posts,
And they gather, and one shade appears, and another,
As the eve-damps creep from the ground.

See – a Courtenay stands by his quatre-foiled tomb,
And a Duke and his Duchess near;
And one Sir Edmund in columned gloom,
And a Saxon king by the presbytery chamber;
And shapes unknown in the rear.