The Complete Poetical Works. Томас Харди

The Complete Poetical Works - Томас Харди


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Did much to mire his crimson cloak.

      VII

      Yea, seeds of crescive sympathy

       Were sown by those more excellent than he,

       Long known, though long contemned till then—

       The gods of men in amity.

      VIII

      Souls have grown seers, and thought out-brings

       The mournful many-sidedness of things

       With foes as friends, enfeebling ires

       And fury-fires by gaingivings!

      IX

      He scarce impassions champions now;

       They do and dare, but tensely—pale of brow;

       And would they fain uplift the arm

       Of that faint form they know not how.

      X

      Yet wars arise, though zest grows cold;

       Wherefore, at whiles, as ’twere in ancient mould

       He looms, bepatched with paint and lath;

       But never hath he seemed the old!

      XI

      Let men rejoice, let men deplore.

       The lurid Deity of heretofore

       Succumbs to one of saner nod;

       The Battle-god is god no more.

      Poems of Pilgrimage

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      (March, 1887)

      O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea,

       Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee

       When from Torino’s track I saw thy face first flash on me.

      And multimarbled Genova the Proud,

       Gleam all unconscious how, wide-lipped, up-browed,

       I first beheld thee clad—not as the Beauty but the Dowd.

      Out from a deep-delved way my vision lit

       On housebacks pink, green, ochreous—where a slit

       Shoreward ’twixt row and row revealed the classic blue through it.

      And thereacross waved fishwives’ high-hung smocks,

       Chrome kerchiefs, scarlet hose, darned underfrocks;

       Since when too oft my dreams of thee, O Queen, that frippery mocks:

      Whereat I grieve, Superba! . . . Afterhours

       Within Palazzo Doria’s orange bowers

       Went far to mend these marrings of thy soul-subliming powers.

      But, Queen, such squalid undress none should see,

       Those dream-endangering eyewounds no more be

       Where lovers first behold thy form in pilgrimage to thee.

      Shelley’s Skylark

       Table of Contents

      (The neighbourhood of Leghorn: March, 1887)

      Somewhere afield here something lies

       In Earth’s oblivious eyeless trust

       That moved a poet to prophecies—

       A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust

      The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,

       And made immortal through times to be;—

       Though it only lived like another bird,

       And knew not its immortality.

      Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell—

       A little ball of feather and bone;

       And how it perished, when piped farewell,

       And where it wastes, are alike unknown.

      Maybe it rests in the loam I view,

       Maybe it throbs in a myrtle’s green,

       Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue

       Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.

      Go find it, faeries, go and find

       That tiny pinch of priceless dust,

       And bring a casket silver-lined,

       And framed of gold that gems encrust;

      And we will lay it safe therein,

       And consecrate it to endless time;

       For it inspired a bard to win

       Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.

      In the Old Theatre, Fiesole

       Table of Contents

      (April, 1887)

      I traced the Circus whose gray stones incline

       Where Rome and dim Etruria interjoin,

       Till came a child who showed an ancient coin

       That bore the image of a Constantine.

      She lightly passed; nor did she once opine

       How, better than all books, she had raised for me

       In swift perspective Europe’s history

       Through the vast years of Cæsar’s sceptred line.

      For in my distant plot of English loam

       ’Twas but to delve, and straightway there to find

       Coins of like impress. As with one half blind

       Whom common simples cure, her act flashed home

       In that mute moment to my opened mind

       The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome.

      Rome: On the Palatine

       Table of Contents

      (April, 1887)

      We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile,

       And passed to Livia’s rich red mural show,

       Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico,

       We gained Caligula’s dissolving pile.

      And each ranked ruin tended to beguile

       The outer sense, and shape itself as though

       It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow

       Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle.

      When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh over-head,

       Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss:

      


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