Thomas Hardy - Poems of the Past and the Present

Moments the mightiest pass uncalendared,
And when the Absolute
In backward Time outgave the deedful word
Whereby all life is stirred:
“Let one be born and throned whose mould shall constitute
The norm of every royal-reckoned attribute,”
No mortal knew or heard.
But in due days the purposed Life outshone —
Serene, sagacious, free;
– Her waxing seasons bloomed with deeds well done,
And the world’s heart was won.
Yet may the deed of hers most bright in eyes to be
Lie hid from ours – as in the All-One’s thought lay she —
Till ripening years have run.

Here, where Vespasian’s legions struck the sands,
And Cerdic with his Saxons entered in,
And Henry’s army leapt afloat to win
Convincing triumphs over neighbour lands,

Vaster battalions press for further strands,
To argue in the self-same bloody mode
Which this late age of thought, and pact, and code,
Still fails to mend. – Now deckward tramp the bands,
Yellow as autumn leaves, alive as spring;
And as each host draws out upon the sea
Beyond which lies the tragical To-be,
None dubious of the cause, none murmuring,

Wives, sisters, parents, wave white hands and smile,
As if they knew not that they weep the while.

While the far farewell music thins and fails,
And the broad bottoms rip the bearing brine —
All smalling slowly to the gray sea line —
And each significant red smoke-shaft pales,

Keen sense of severance everywhere prevails,
Which shapes the late long tramp of mounting men
To seeming words that ask and ask again:
“How long, O striving Teutons, Slavs, and Gaels
Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these,
That are as puppets in a playing hand? —
When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land,
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?”

“The quay recedes. Hurrah! Ahead we go!.
It’s true I’ve been accustomed now to home,
And joints get rusty, and one’s limbs may grow
More fit to rest than roam.

“But I can stand as yet fair stress and strain;
There’s not a little steel beneath the rust;
My years mount somewhat, but here’s to’t again!
And if I fall, I must.

“God knows that for myself I’ve scanty care;
Past scrimmages have proved as much to all;
In Eastern lands and South I’ve had my share
Both of the blade and ball.

“And where those villains ripped me in the flitch
With their old iron in my early time,
I’m apt at change of wind to feel a twitch,
Or at a change of clime.

“And what my mirror shows me in the morning
Has more of blotch and wrinkle than of bloom;
My eyes, too, heretofore all glasses scorning,
Have just a touch of rheum.

“Now sounds ‘The Girl I’ve left behind me,’ – Ah,
The years, the ardours, wakened by that tune!
Time was when, with the crowd’s farewell ‘Hurrah!’
’Twould lift me to the moon.

“But now it’s late to leave behind me one
Who if, poor soul, her man goes underground,
Will not recover as she might have done
In days when hopes abound.

“She’s waving from the wharfside, palely grieving,
As down we draw.. Her tears make little show,
Yet now she suffers more than at my leaving
Some twenty years ago.

“I pray those left at home will care for her!
I shall come back; I have before; though when
The Girl you leave behind you is a grandmother,
Things may not be as then.”

O it was sad enough, weak enough, mad enough —
Light in their loving as soldiers can be —
First to risk choosing them, leave alone losing them
Now, in far battle, beyond the South Sea!.

– Rain came down drenchingly; but we unblenchingly
Trudged on beside them through mirk and through mire,
They stepping steadily – only too readily! —
Scarce as if stepping brought parting-time nigher.

Great guns were gleaming there, living things seeming there,
Cloaked in their tar-cloths, upmouthed to the night;
Wheels wet and yellow from axle to felloe,
Throats blank of sound, but prophetic to sight.

Gas-glimmers drearily, blearily, eerily
Lit our pale faces outstretched for one kiss,
While we stood prest to them, with a last quest to them
Not to court perils that honour could miss.

Sharp were those sighs of ours, blinded these eyes of ours,
When at last moved away under the arch
All we loved. Aid for them each woman prayed for them,
Treading back slowly the track of their march.

Someone said: “Nevermore will they come: evermore
Are they now lost to us.” O it was wrong!
Though may be hard their ways, some Hand will guard their ways,
Bear them through safely, in brief time or long.

– Yet, voices haunting us, daunting us, taunting us,
Hint in the night-time when life beats are low
Other and graver things.. Hold we to braver things,
Wait we, in trust, what Time’s fulness shall show.

Last year I called this world of gain-givings
The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly
If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly,
So charged it seemed with circumstance whence springs
The tragedy of things.

Yet at that censured time no heart was rent
Or feature blanched of parent, wife, or daughter
By hourly blazoned sheets of listed slaughter;
Death waited Nature’s wont; Peace smiled unshent
From Ind to Occident.

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,
A mouldering soldier lies – your countryman.
Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans
Nightly to clear Canopus: “I would know
By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law
Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,
Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?
And what of logic or of truth appears
In tacking ‘Anno Domini’ to the years?
Near twenty-hundred livened thus have hied,
But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.”