Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces

LYRICS AND REVERIES

IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE

Plunging and labouring on in a tide of visions,

Dolorous and dear,

Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters

Stretching around,

Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape

Yonder and near,

Blotted to feeble mist.В  And the coomb and the upland

Foliage-crowned,

Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flat

Stroked by the light,

Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial

Meadow or mound.

What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost

Under my sight,

Hindering me to discern my paced advancement

Lengthening to miles;

What were the re-creations killing the daytime

As by the night?

O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,

Some as with smiles,

Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled

Over the wrecked

Cheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish,

Harrowed by wiles.

Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them —

Halo-bedecked —

And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,

Rigid in hate,

Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,

Dreaded, suspect.

Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons

Further in date;

Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion

Vibrant, beside

Lamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth’s crust

Now corporate.

Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect

Gnawed by the tide,

Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there

Guilelessly glad —

Wherefore they knew not – touched by the fringe of an ecstasy

Scantly descried.

Later images too did the day unfurl me,

Shadowed and sad,

Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,

Laid now at ease,

Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow

Sepulture-clad.

So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,

Over the leaze,

Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;

– Yea, as the rhyme

Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness

Captured me these.

For, their lost revisiting manifestations

In their own time

Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,

Seeing behind

Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling

Sweet, sad, sublime.

Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser

Stare of the mind

As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast

Body-borne eyes,

Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them

As living kind.

Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying

In their surmise,

“Ah – whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought

Round him that looms

Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,

Save a few tombs?”

CHANNEL FIRING

That night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright.В  While drearisome

Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled.  Till God called, “No;

It’s gunnery practice out at sea

Just as before you went below;

The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make

Red war yet redder.В  Mad as hatters

They do no more for ChristГ©s sake

Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgment-hour

For some of them’s a blessed thing,

For if it were they’d have to scour

Hell’s floor for so much threatening.

“Ha, ha.  It will be warmer when

I blow the trumpet (if indeed

I ever do; for you are men,

And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again.  “I wonder,

Will the world ever saner be,”

Said one, “than when He sent us under

In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook h