Thomas Hardy - Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

With your bucket of water, and mop, and brush,
Bringing her out of the grime
That has smeared her during the smokes of winter
With such glumness
In her dumbness,
And aged her before her time.

You have washed her down with motherly care —
Head, shoulders, arm, and foot,
To the very hem of the robes that drape her —
All expertly
And alertly,
Till a long stream, black with soot,

Flows over the pavement to the road,
And her shape looms pure as snow:
I read you are hired by the City guardians —
May be yearly,
Or once merely —
To treat the statues so?

“Oh, I’m not hired by the Councilmen
To cleanse the statues here.
I do this one as a self-willed duty,
Not as paid to,
Or at all made to,
But because the doing is dear.”

Ah, then I hail you brother and friend!
Liberty’s knight divine.
What you have done would have been my doing,
Yea, most verily,
Well, and thoroughly,
Had but your courage been mine!

“Oh I care not for Liberty’s mould,
Liberty charms not me;
What’s Freedom but an idler’s vision,
Vain, pernicious,
Often vicious,
Of things that cannot be!

“Memory it is that brings me to this —
Of a daughter – my one sweet own.
She grew a famous carver’s model,
One of the fairest
And of the rarest: —
She sat for the figure as shown.

“But alas, she died in this distant place
Before I was warned to betake
Myself to her side!.. And in love of my darling,
In love of the fame of her,
And the good name of her,
I do this for her sake.”

Answer I gave not. Of that form
The carver was I at his side;
His child, my model, held so saintly,
Grand in feature,
Gross in nature,
In the dens of vice had died.

I think of the slope where the rabbits fed,
Of the periwinks’ rockwork lair,
Of the fuchsias ringing their bells of red —
And the something else seen there.

Between the blooms where the sod basked bright,
By the bobbing fuchsia trees,
Was another and yet more eyesome sight —
The sight that richened these.

I shall seek those beauties in the spring,
When the days are fit and fair,
But only as foils to the one more thing
That also will flower there!

Out of the past there rises a week —
Who shall read the years O! —
Out of the past there rises a week
Enringed with a purple zone.
Out of the past there rises a week
When thoughts were strung too thick to speak,
And the magic of its lineaments remains with me alone.

In that week there was heard a singing —
Who shall spell the years, the years! —
In that week there was heard a singing,
And the white owl wondered why.
In that week, yea, a voice was ringing,
And forth from the casement were candles flinging
Radiance that fell on the deodar and lit up the path thereby.

Could that song have a mocking note? —
Who shall unroll the years O! —
Could that song have a mocking note
To the white owl’s sense as it fell?
Could that song have a mocking note
As it trilled out warm from the singer’s throat,
And who was the mocker and who the mocked when two felt all was well?

In a tedious trampling crowd yet later —
Who shall bare the years, the years! —
In a tedious trampling crowd yet later,
When silvery singings were dumb;
In a crowd uncaring what time might fate her,
Mid murks of night I stood to await her,
And the twanging of iron wheels gave out the signal that she was come.

She said with a travel-tired smile —
Who shall lift the years O! —
She said with a travel-tired smile,
Half scared by scene so strange;
She said, outworn by mile on mile,
The blurred lamps wanning her face the while,
“O Love, I am here; I am with you!”.. Ah, that there should have come a change!

O the doom by someone spoken —
Who shall unseal the years, the years! —
O the doom that gave no token,
When nothing of bale saw we:
O the doom by someone spoken,
O the heart by someone broken,
The heart whose sweet reverberances are all time leaves to me.

Sitting on the bridge
Past the barracks, town and ridge,
At once the spirit seized us
To sing a song that pleased us —
As “The Fifth” were much in rumour;
It was “Whilst I’m in the humour,
Take me, Paddy, will you now?”
And a lancer soon drew nigh,
And his Royal Irish eye
Said, “Willing, faith, am I,
O, to take you anyhow, dears,
To take you anyhow.”

But, lo! – dad walking by,
Cried, “What, you lightheels! Fie!
Is this the way you roam
And mock the sunset gleam?”
And he marched us straightway home,
Though we said, “We are only, daddy,
Singing, ‘Will you take me, Paddy?’”
– Well, we never saw from then
If we sang there anywhen,
The soldier dear again,
Except at night in dream-time,
Except at night in dream.

Perhaps that soldier’s fighting
In a land that’s far away,
Or he may be idly plighting
Some foreign hussy gay;
Or perhaps his bones are whiting
In the wind to their decay!.
Ah! – does he mind him how
The girls he saw that day
On the bridge, were sitting singing
At the time of curfew-ringing,
“Take me, Paddy; will you now, dear?
Paddy, will you now?”

When he lit the candles there,
And the light fell on his hand,
And it trembled as he scanned
Her and me, his vanquished air
Hinted that his dream was done,
And I saw he had begun
To understand.

When Love’s viol was unstrung,
Sore I wished the hand that shook
Had been mine that shared her book
While that evening hymn was sung,
His the victor’s, as he lit
Candles where he had bidden us sit
With vanquished look.

Now her dust lies listless there,
His afar from tending hand,
What avails the victory scanned?
Does he smile from upper air:
“Ah, my friend, your dream is done;
And ’tis you who have begun
To understand!

I travel as a phantom now,
For people do not wish to see
In flesh and blood so bare a bough
As Nature makes of me.

And thus I visit bodiless
Strange gloomy households often at odds,
And wonder if Man’s consciousness
Was a mistake of God’s.

And next I meet you, and I pause,
And think that if mistake it were,
As some have said, O then it was
One that I well can bear!

Show me again the time
When in the Junetide’s prime
We flew by meads and mountains northerly! —
Yea, to such freshness, fairness, fulness, fineness, freeness,
Love lures life on.