The Complete Poetical Works. Томас Харди

The Complete Poetical Works - Томас Харди


Скачать книгу
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.

      A Christmas Ghost-Story

       Table of Contents

      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.”

      Christmas-eve, 1899.

      The Dead Drummer

       Table of Contents

      I

      They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

       Uncoffined—just as found:

       His landmark is a kopje-crest

       That breaks the veldt around;

       And foreign constellations west

       Each night above his mound.

      II

      Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—

       Fresh from his Wessex home—

       The meaning of the broad Karoo,

       The Bush, the dusty loam,

       And why uprose to nightly view

       Strange stars amid the gloam.

      III

      Yet portion of that unknown plain

       Will Hodge for ever be;

       His homely Northern breast and brain

       Grow up a Southern tree.

       And strange-eyed constellations reign

       His stars eternally.

      A Wife in London

       Table of Contents

      (December, 1899)

      I

       THE TRAGEDY

      She sits in the tawny vapour

       That the City lanes have uprolled,

       Behind whose webby fold on fold

       Like a waning taper

       The street-lamp glimmers cold.

      A messenger’s knock cracks smartly,

       Flashed news is in her hand

       Of meaning it dazes to understand

       Though shaped so shortly:

       He—has fallen—in the far South Land . . .

      II

       THE IRONY

      ’Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker,

       The postman nears and goes:

       A letter is brought whose lines disclose

       By the firelight flicker

       His hand, whom the worm now knows:

      Fresh—firm—penned in highest feather—

       Page-full of his hoped return,

       And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn

       In the summer weather,

       And of new love that they would learn.

      The Souls of the Slain

       Table of Contents

      I

      The thick lids of Night closed upon me

       Alone at the Bill

      II

      No wind fanned the flats of the ocean,

       Or promontory sides,

       Or the ooze by the strand,

       Or the bent-bearded slope of the land,

       Whose base took its rest amid everlong motion

       Of criss-crossing tides.

      III

      Soon from out of the Southward seemed nearing

       A whirr, as of wings

       Waved by mighty-vanned flies,

       Or by night-moths of measureless size,

       And in softness and smoothness well-nigh beyond hearing

       Of corporal things.

      IV

      And they bore to the bluff, and alighted—

       A dim-discerned train

       Of sprites without mould,

       Frameless souls none might touch or might hold—

       On the ledge by the turreted lantern, farsighted

       By men of the main.

      V

      And I heard them say “Home!” and I knew them

       For souls of the felled

       On the earth’s nether bord

       Under Capricorn, whither they’d warred,

       And I neared in my awe, and gave heedfulness to them

       With breathings inheld.

      VI

      Then, it seemed, there approached from the northward

       A senior soul-flame

       Of the like filmy hue:

       And he met them and spake: “Is it you,

       O my men?” Said they, “Aye! We bear homeward and hearthward

       To list to our fame!”

      VII

      “I’ve flown there before you,” he said then:

       “Your households are well;

       But—your kin linger less

       On your glory arid war-mightiness

       Than on dearer things.”—“Dearer?” cried these from the dead then,

       “Of what do they tell?”

      VIII

      “Some mothers muse


Скачать книгу