Between Us Now

BETWEEN us now and here--

Two thrown together

Who are not wont to wear

Life's flushest feather--

Who see the scenes slide past,

The daytimes dimming fast,

Let there be truth at last,

Even if despair.

So thoroughly and long

Have you now known me,

So real in faith and strong

Have I now shown me,

That nothing needs disguise

Further in any wise,

Or asks or justifies

A guarded tongue.

Face unto face, then, say,

Eyes my own meeting,

Is your heart far away,

Or with mine beating?

When false things are brought low,

And swift things have grown slow,

Feigning like froth shall go,

Faith be for aye.

Thomas Hardy

Architectural Masks

      I

THERE is a house with ivied walls,

And mullioned windows worn and old,

And the long dwellers in those halls

Have souls that know but sordid calls,

And dote on gold.

      II

In a blazing brick and plated show

Not far away a 'villa' gleams,

And here a family few may know,

With book and pencil, viol and bow,

Lead inner lives of dreams.

      III

The philosophic passers say,

'See that old mansion mossed and fair,

Poetic souls therein are they:

And O that gaudy box! Away,

You vulgar people there.'

Thomas Hardy

The Farm Woman's Winter

      I

IF seasons all were summers,

And leaves would never fall,

And hopping casement-comers

Were foodless not at all,

And fragile folk might be here

That white winds bid depart;

Then one I used to see here

Would warm my wasted heart!

      II

One frail, who, bravely tilling

Long hours in gripping gusts,

Was mastered by their chilling,

And now his ploughshare rusts.

So savage winter catches

The breath of limber things,

And what I love he snatches,

And what I love not, brings.

Thomas Hardy

The Rambler

I DO not see the hills around,

Nor mark the tints the copses wear;

I do not note the grassy ground

And constellated daisies there.

I hear not the contralto note

Of cuckoos hid on either hand,

The whirr that shakes the nighthawk's throat

When eve's brown awning hoods the land.

Some say each songster, tree and mead--

All eloquent of love divine--

Receives their constant careful heed:

Such keen appraisement is not mine.

The tones around me that I hear,

The aspects, meanings, shapes I see,

Are those far back ones missed when near,

And now perceived too late by me!

Thomas Hardy

Night in the Old Home

WHEN the wasting embers redden the chimney-breast,

And Life's bare pathway looms like a desert track to me,

And from hall and parlour the living have gone to their rest,

My perished people who housed them here come back to me.

They come and seat them around in their mouldy places,

Now and then bending towards me a glance of wistfulness,

A strange upbraiding smile upon all their faces,

And in the bearing of each a passive tristfulness.

'Do you uphold me, lingering and languishing here,

A pale late plant of your once strong stock?' I say to them;

'A thinker of crooked thoughts upon Life in the sere,

An on That which consigns men to night after showing the day to them?'

'--O let be the Wherefore! We fevered our years not thus:

Take of Life what it grants, without question!' they answer me seemingly.

'Enjoy, suffer, wait: spread the table here freely like us,

And, satisfied, placid, unfretting, watch Time away beamingly!'

Thomas Hardy

She Hears the Storm

THERE was a time in former years--

While my roof-tree was his--

When I should have been distressed by fears

At such a night as this!

I should have murmured anxiously,

'The prickling rain strikes cold;

His road is bare of hedge or tree,

And he is getting old.'

But now the fitful chimney-roar,

The drone of Thorncombe trees,

The Froom in flood upon the moor,

The mud of Mellstock Leaze,

The candle slanting sooty-wick'd,

The thuds upon the thatch,

The eaves drops on the window flicked,

The clanking garden-hatch,

And what they mean to wayfarers,

I scarcely heed or mind;

He has won that storm-tight roof of hers

Which Earth grants all her kind.

Thomas Hardy

George Meredith

(1828-1909)

FORTY years back, when much had place

That since has perished out of mind,

I heard that voice and saw that face.

He spoke as one afoot will wind

A morning horn ere men awake;

His note was trenchant, turning kind.

He was one of those whose wit can shake

And riddle to the very core

The counterfiets that Time will break....

Of late, when we two met once more,

The luminous countenance and rare

Shone just as forty years before.

So that, when now all tongues declare

His shape unseen by his green hill,

I scarce believe he sits not there.

No matter. Further and further still

Through the world's vaprous vitiate air

His words wing on--as live words will.

Thomas Hardy

The Sun on the Bookcase

(Student's Love-Song: 1870)

ONCE more the cauldron of the sun

Smears the bookcase with winy red,

And here my page is, and there my bed,

And the apple-tree shadows travel along.

Soon their intangible track will be run,

And dusk grow strong

And they have fled.

Yes: now the boiling ball is gone,

And I have wasted another day....

But wasted--wasted, do I say?

Is it a waste to have imagined one

Beyond the hills there, who, anon,

My great deeds done,

Will be mine alway?

Thomas Hardy

A Thunderstorm in Town

(A Reminiscence, 1893)

SHE wore a new 'terra-cotta' dress,

And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,

Within the hansom's dry recess,

Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless

We sat on, snug and warm.

Then the dounpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,

And the glass that had screened our forms before

Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:

I should have kissed her if the rain

Had lasted a minute more.

Thomas Hardy

Under the Waterfall

'WHENEVER I plunge my arm, like this,

In a basin of water, I never miss

The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day

Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray.

        Hence the only prime

        And real love-rhyme

        That I know by heart,

        And that leaves no smart,

Is the purl of a little valley fall

About three spans wide and two spans tall

Over a table of solid rock,

And into a scoop of the self-same block;

The purl of a runlet that never ceases

In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces;

With a hollow boiling voice it speaks

And has spoken since hills were turfless peaks.'

'And why gives this the only prime

Idea to you of a real love-rhyme?

And why does plunging your arm in a bowl

Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul?'

'Well, under the fall, in a crease of the stone,

Though precisely where none ever has known,

Jammed darkly, nothing to show how prized,

And by now with its smoothness opalized,

        Is a grinking glass:

        For, down that pass

        My lover and I

        Walked under a sky

Of blue with a leaf-wove awning of green,

In the burn of August, to paint the scene,

And we placed our basket of fruit and wine

By the runlet's rim, where we sat to dine;

And when we had drunk from the glass together,

Arched by the oak-copse from the weather,

I held the vessel to rinse in the fall,

Where it slipped, and it sank, and was past recall,

Though we stooped and plumbed the little abyss

With long bared arms. There the glass still is.

And, as said, if I thrust my arm below

Cold water in a basin or bowl, a throe

From the past awakens a sense of that time,

And the glass we used, and the cascade's rhyme.

The basin seems the pool, and its edge

The hard smooth face of the brook-side ledge,

And the leafy pattern of china-ware

The hanging plants that were bathing there.

'By night, by day, when it shines or lours,

There lies intact that chalice of ours,

And its presence adds to the rhyme of love

Persistently sung by the fall above.

No lip has touched it since his and mine

In turns therefrom sipped lovers' wine.'

Thomas Hardy

Moments of Vision

        THAT mirror

    Which makes of men a transparency,

        Who holds that mirror

And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see

    Of you and me?

        That mirror

      Whose magic penetrates like a dart,

        Who lifts that mirror

And throws our mind back on us, and our heart,

        until we start?

        That mirror

      Works well in these night hours of ache;

        Why in that mirror

Are tincts we never see ourselves once take

        When the world is awake?

        That mirror

      Can test each mortal when unaware;

        Yea, that strange mirror

May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair,

        Glassing it--where?

Thomas Hardy

In a Museum

      I

HERE'S the mould of a musical bird long passed from light,

Which over the earth before man came was winging;

There's a contralto voice I heard last night,

That lodges with me still in its sweet singing.

      II

Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird

Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending

Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard,

In the full-fuged song of the universe unending.

Exeter

Thomas Hardy

The Selfsame Song

A BIRD sings the selfsame song,

With never a fault in its flow,

That we listened to here those long

Long years ago.

A pleasing marvel is how

A strain of such rapturous rote

Should have gone on thus till now

unchanged in a note!

--But its not the selfsame bird.--

No: perished to dust is he....

As also are those who heard

That song with me.

Thomas Hardy

At the Railway Station, Upway

'THERE is not much that I can do,

For I've no money that's quite my own!'

Spoke up the pitying child--

A little boy with a violin

At the station before the train came in,--

'But I can play my fiddle to you,

And a nice one 'tis, and good in tone!'

The man in the handcuffs smiled;

The constable looked, and he smiled too,

As the fiddle began to twang;

And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang

With grimful glee:

'This life so free

Is the thing for me!'

And the constable smiled, and said no word,

As if unconscious of what he heard;

And so they went on till the train came in--

The convict, and boy with the violin.

Thomas Hardy

Mismet

      I

HE was leaning by a face,

He was looking into eyes,

And he knew a trysting-place,

And he heard seductive sighs;

      But the face,

      And the eyes,

      And the place,

      And the sighs,

Were not, alas, the right ones--the ones meet for him--

Though fine and sweet the features, and the feelings all abrim.

      II

She was looking at a form,

She was listening for a tread,

She could feel a waft of charm

When a certain name was said;

      But the form,

      And the tread,

      And the charm,

      And name said,

Were the wrong ones for her, and ever would be so,

While the heritor of the right it would have saved her soul to know!

Thomas Hardy

An Autumn Rain-Scene

THERE trudges one to a merry-making

    With sturdy swing,

On whom the rain comes down.

To fetch the saving medicament

    Is another bent,

On whom the rain comes down.

One slowly drives his herd to the stall

    Ere ill befall,

On whom the rain comes down.

This bears his missives of life and death

    With quickening breath,

On whom the rain comes down.

One watches for signals of wreck or war

    From the hill afar,

On whom the rain comes down.

No care if he gain a shelter or none,

    Unhired moves on,

On whom the rain comes down.

And another knows nought of its chilling fall

    Upon him aat all,

On whom the rain comes down.

October 1904

Thomas Hardy