The Complete Poetical Works. Томас Харди

The Complete Poetical Works - Томас Харди


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names, rough-hewn, of equal size,

       Stood on the panel still;

       Unequal since.—“’Twas theirs to aim,

       Mine was it to fulfil!”

      —“Who saves his life shall lose it, friends!”

       Outspake the preacher then,

       Unweeting he his listener, who

       Looked at the names again.

      That he had come and they’d been stayed,

       ’Twas but the chance of war:

       Another chance, and they’d sat here,

       And he had lain afar.

      Yet saw he something in the lives

       Of those who’d ceased to live

       That sphered them with a majesty

       Which living failed to give.

      Transcendent triumph in return

       No longer lit his brain;

       Transcendence rayed the distant urn

       Where slept the fallen twain.

Sketch of comet

      A Sign-Seeker

       Table of Contents

      I mark the months in liveries dank and dry,

       The noontides many-shaped and hued;

       I see the nightfall shades subtrude,

       And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.

      I view the evening bonfires of the sun

       On hills where morning rains have hissed;

       The eyeless countenance of the mist

       Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done.

      I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star,

       The cauldrons of the sea in storm,

       Have felt the earthquake’s lifting arm,

       And trodden where abysmal fires and snow-cones are.

      I learn to prophesy the hid eclipse,

       The coming of eccentric orbs;

       To mete the dust the sky absorbs,

       To weigh the sun, and fix the hour each planet dips.

      I witness fellow earth-men surge and strive;

       Assemblies meet, and throb, and part;

       Death’s soothing finger, sorrow’s smart;

       —All the vast various moils that mean a world alive.

      But that I fain would wot of shuns my sense—

       Those sights of which old prophets tell,

       Those signs the general word so well,

       Vouchsafed to their unheed, denied my long suspense.

      In graveyard green, behind his monument

       To glimpse a phantom parent, friend,

       Wearing his smile, and “Not the end!”

       Outbreathing softly: that were blest enlightenment;

      Or, if a dead Love’s lips, whom dreams reveal

       When midnight imps of King Decay

       Delve sly to solve me back to clay,

       Should leave some print to prove her spirit-kisses real;

      Or, when Earth’s Frail lie bleeding of her Strong,

       If some Recorder, as in Writ,

       Near to the weary scene should flit

       And drop one plume as pledge that Heaven inscrolls the wrong.

      —There are who, rapt to heights of trancéd trust,

       These tokens claim to feel and see,

       Read radiant hints of times to be—

       Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust.

      Such scope is granted not to lives like mine . . .

       I have lain in dead men’s beds, have walked

       The tombs of those with whom I’d talked,

       Called many a gone and goodly one to shape a sign,

      And panted for response. But none replies;

       No warnings loom, nor whisperings

       To open out my limitings,

       And Nescience mutely muses: When a man falls he lies.

Sketch of person on horseback in wide landscape

      My Cicely

       Table of Contents

      (17–)

      “Alive?”—And I leapt in my wonder,

       Was faint of my joyance,

       And grasses and grove shone in garments

       Of glory to me.

      “She lives, in a plenteous well-being,

       To-day as aforehand;

       The dead bore the name—though a rare one—

       The name that bore she.”

      She lived . . . I, afar in the city

       Of frenzy-led factions,

       Had squandered green years and maturer

       In bowing the knee

      To Baals illusive and specious,

       Till chance had there voiced me

       That one I loved vainly in nonage

       Had ceased her to be.

      The passion the planets had scowled on,

       And change had let dwindle,

       Her death-rumour smartly relifted

       To full apogee.

      I mounted a steed in the dawning

       With acheful remembrance,

       And made for the ancient West Highway

       To far Exonb’ry.

      Passing heaths, and the House of Long Sieging,

       I neared the thin steeple

       That tops the fair fane of Poore’s olden

       Episcopal see;

      And, changing anew my onbearer,

       I traversed the downland

       Whereon the bleak hill-graves of Chieftains

       Bulge barren of tree;

      And still sadly onward I followed

       That Highway the Icen,

       Which trails its pale riband down Wessex

       O’er lynchet and lea.

      Along through the Stour-bordered Forum,

       Where Legions had wayfared,

       And where the slow river upglasses

       Its green canopy,

      And by Weatherbury Castle, and thencefrom

      


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