Thomas Hardy - Poems of the Past and the Present

My ardours for emprize nigh lost
Since Life has bared its bones to me,
I shrink to seek a modern coast
Whose riper times have yet to be;
Where the new regions claim them free
From that long drip of human tears
Which peoples old in tragedy
Have left upon the centuried years.

For, wonning in these ancient lands,
Enchased and lettered as a tomb,
And scored with prints of perished hands,
And chronicled with dates of doom,
Though my own Being bear no bloom
I trace the lives such scenes enshrine,
Give past exemplars present room,
And their experience count as mine.

When mid-autumn’s moan shook the night-time,
And sedges were horny,
And summer’s green wonderwork faltered
On leaze and in lane,

I fared Yell’ham-Firs way, where dimly
Came wheeling around me
Those phantoms obscure and insistent
That shadows unchain.

Till airs from the needle-thicks brought me
A low lamentation,
As ’twere of a tree-god disheartened,
Perplexed, or in pain.

And, heeding, it awed me to gather
That Nature herself there
Was breathing in aërie accents,
With dirgeful refrain,

Weary plaint that Mankind, in these late days,
Had grieved her by holding
Her ancient high fame of perfection
In doubt and disdain.

– “I had not proposed me a Creature
(She soughed) so excelling
All else of my kingdom in compass
And brightness of brain

“As to read my defects with a god-glance,
Uncover each vestige
Of old inadvertence, annunciate
Each flaw and each stain!

“My purpose went not to develop
Such insight in Earthland;
Such potent appraisements affront me,
And sadden my reign!

“Why loosened I olden control here
To mechanize skywards,
Undeeming great scope could outshape in
A globe of such grain?