The Complete Poetical Works. Томас Харди

The Complete Poetical Works - Томас Харди


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Set in one clay,

       Bough to bough cannot you

       Bide out your day?

       When the rains skim and skip,

       Why mar sweet comradeship,

       Blighting with poison-drip

       Neighbourly spray?

      Heart-halt and spirit-lame,

       City-opprest,

       Unto this wood I came

       As to a nest;

       Dreaming that sylvan peace

       Offered the harrowed ease—

       Nature a soft release

       From men’s unrest.

      But, having entered in,

       Great growths and small

       Show them to men akin—

       Combatants all!

       Sycamore shoulders oak,

       Bines the slim sapling yoke,

       Ivy-spun halters choke

       Elms stout and tall.

      Touches from ash, O wych,

       Sting you like scorn!

       You, too, brave hollies, twitch

       Sidelong from thorn.

       Even the rank poplars bear

       Illy a rival’s air,

       Cankering in black despair

       If overborne.

      Since, then, no grace I find

       Taught me of trees,

       Turn I back to my kind,

       Worthy as these.

       There at least smiles abound,

       There discourse trills around,

       There, now and then, are found

       Life-loyalties.

      1887: 1896.

      To a Lady

       Table of Contents

      Offended by a Book of the Writer’s

      Now that my page upcloses, doomed, maybe,

       Never to press thy cosy cushions more,

       Or wake thy ready Yeas as heretofore,

       Or stir thy gentle vows of faith in me:

      Knowing thy natural receptivity,

       I figure that, as flambeaux banish eve,

       My sombre image, warped by insidious heave

       Of those less forthright, must lose place in thee.

      So be it. I have borne such. Let thy dreams

       Of me and mine diminish day by day,

       And yield their space to shine of smugger things;

       Till I shape to thee but in fitful gleams,

       And then in far and feeble visitings,

       And then surcease. Truth will be truth alway.

      To an Orphan Child

       Table of Contents

      A Whimsey

      Ah, child, thou art but half thy darling mother’s;

       Hers couldst thou wholly be,

       My light in thee would outglow all in others;

       She would relive to me.

       But niggard Nature’s trick of birth

       Bars, lest she overjoy,

       Renewal of the loved on earth

       Save with alloy.

      The Dame has no regard, alas, my maiden,

       For love and loss like mine—

       No sympathy with mind-sight memory-laden;

       Only with fickle eyne.

       To her mechanic artistry

       My dreams are all unknown,

       And why I wish that thou couldst be

       But One’s alone!

Sketch of broken key?

      Nature’s Questioning

       Table of Contents

      When I look forth at dawning, pool,

       Field, flock, and lonely tree,

       All seem to gaze at me

       Like chastened children sitting silent in a school;

      Their faces dulled, constrained, and worn,

       As though the master’s ways

       Through the long teaching days

       Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne.

      And on them stirs, in lippings mere

       (As if once clear in call,

       But now scarce breathed at all)—

       “We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here!

      “Has some Vast Imbecility,

       Mighty to build and blend,

       But impotent to tend,

       Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?

      “Or come we of an Automaton

       Unconscious of our pains? . . .

       Or are we live remains

       Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone?

      “Or is it that some high Plan betides,

       As yet not understood,

       Of Evil stormed by Good,

       We the Forlorn Hope over which Achievement strides?”

      Thus things around. No answerer I . . .

       Meanwhile the winds, and rains,

       And Earth’s old glooms and pains

       Are still the same, and gladdest Life Death neighbours nigh.

      The Impercipient

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      (At A Cathedral Service)

      That from this bright believing band

       An outcast I should be,

       That faiths by which my comrades stand

       Seem fantasies to me,

       And mirage-mists their Shining Land,

       Is a drear destiny.

      Why thus my soul should be consigned

       To infelicity,

       Why always I must feel as blind

       To sights my brethren see,

      


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