Moments of Vision
Thomas Hardy
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MOMENTS OF VISION AND MISCELLANEOUS VERSES
by Thomas Hardy
Contents:
Moments of Vision
The Voice of Things
"Why be at pains?"
"We sat at the window"
Afternoon Service at Mellstock
At the Wicket-gate
In a Museum
Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune
At the Word "Farewell"
First Sight of Her and After
The Rival
Heredity
"You were the sort that men forget"
She, I, and They
Near Lanivet, 1872
Joys of Memory
To the Moon
Copying Architecture in an Old Minster
To Shakespeare
Quid hic agis?
On a Midsummer Eve
Timing Her
Before Knowledge
The Blinded Bird
"The wind blew words"
The Faded Face
The Riddle
The Duel
At Mayfair Lodgings
To my Father's Violin
The Statue of Liberty
The Background and the Figure
The Change
Sitting on the Bridge
The Young Churchwarden
"I travel as a phantom now"
Lines to a Movement in Mozart's E-flat Symphony
"In the seventies"
The Pedigree
This Heart. A Woman's Dream
Where they lived
The Occultation
Life laughs Onward
The Peace-offering
"Something tapped"
The Wound
A Merrymaking in Question
"I said and sang her excellence"
A January Night. 1879
A Kiss
The Announcement
The Oxen
The Tresses
The Photograph
On a Heath
An Anniversary
"By the Runic Stone"
The Pink Frock
Transformations
In her Precincts
The Last Signal
The House of Silence
Great Things
The Chimes
The Figure in the Scene
"Why did I sketch"
Conjecture
The Blow
Love the Monopolist
At Middle-field Gate in February
The Youth who carried a Light
The Head above the Fog
Overlooking the River Stour
The Musical Box
On Sturminster Foot-bridge
Royal Sponsors
Old Furniture
A Thought in Two Moods
The Last Performance
"You on the tower"
The Interloper
Logs on the Hearth
The Sunshade
The Ageing House
The Caged Goldfinch
At Madame Tussaud's in Victorian Years
The Ballet
The Five Students
The Wind's Prophecy
During Wind and Rain
He prefers her Earthly
The Dolls
Molly gone
A Backward Spring
Looking Across
At a Seaside Town in 1869
The Glimpse
The Pedestrian
"Who's in the next room?"
At a Country Fair
The Memorial Brass: 186-
Her Love-birds
Paying Calls
The Upper Birch-Leaves
"It never looks like summer"
Everything comes
The Man with a Past
He fears his Good Fortune
He wonders about Himself
Jubilate
He revisits his First School
"I thought, my heart"
Fragment
Midnight on the Great Western
Honeymoon Time at an Inn
The Robin
"I rose and went to Rou'tor town"
The Nettles
In a Waiting-room
The Clock-winder
Old Excursions
The Masked Face
In a Whispering Gallery
The Something that saved Him
The Enemy's Portrait
Imaginings
On the Doorstep
Signs and Tokens
Paths of Former Time
The Clock of the Years
At the Piano
The Shadow on the Stone
In the Garden
The Tree and the Lady
An Upbraiding
The Young Glass-stainer
Looking at a Picture on an Anniversary
The Choirmaster's Burial
The Man who forgot
While drawing in a Churchyard
"For Life I had never cared greatly"
POEMS OF WAR AND PATRIOTISM:
"Men who march away" (Song of the Soldiers)
His Country
England to Germany in 1914
On the Belgian Expatriation
An Appeal to America on behalf of the Belgian Destitute
The Pity of It
In Time of Wars and Tumults
In Time of "the Breaking of nations"
Cry of the Homeless
Before Marching and After
"Often when warring"
Then and Now
A Call to National Service
The Dead and the Living One
A New Year's Eve in War Time
"I met a man"
"I looked up from my writing"
FINALE:
The Coming of the End
Afterwards
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?
THE VOICE OF THINGS
Forty Augusts--aye, and several more--ago,
When I paced the headlands loosed from dull employ,
The waves huzza'd like a multitude below
In the sway of an all-including joy
Without cloy.
Blankly I walked there a double decade after,
When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me,
And I heard the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter
At the lot of men, and all the vapoury
Things that be.
Wheeling change has set me again standing where
Once I heard the waves huzza at Lammas-tide;
But they supplicate now--like a congregation there
Who murmur the Confession--I outside,
Prayer denied.
"WHY BE AT PAINS?"
(Wooer's Song)
Why be at pains that I should know
You sought not me?
Do breezes, then, make features glow
So rosily?
Come, the lit port is at our back,
And the tumbling sea;
Elsewhere the lampless uphill track
To uncertainty!
O should not we two waifs join hands?
I am alone,
You would enrich me more than lands
By being my own.
Yet, though this facile moment flies,
Close is your tone,
And ere to-morrow's dewfall dries
I plough the unknown.
"WE SAT AT THE WINDOW"
(Bournemouth, 1875)
We sat at the window looking out,
And the rain came down like silken strings
That Swithin's day. Each gutter and spout
Babbled unchecked in the busy way
Of witless things:
Nothing to read, nothing to see
Seemed in that room for her and me
On Swithin's day.
We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes,
For I did not know, nor did she infer
How much there was to read and guess
By her in me, and to see and crown
By me in her.
Wasted were two souls in their prime,
And great was the waste, that July time
When the rain came down.
AFTERNOON SERVICE AT MELLSTOCK
(Circa 1850)
On afternoons of drowsy calm
We stood in the panelled pew,
Singing one-voiced a Tate-and-Brady psalm
To the tune of "Cambridge New."
We watched the elms, we watched the rooks,
The clouds upon the breeze,
Between the whiles of glancing at our books,
And swaying like the trees.
So mindless were those outpourings! -
Though I am not aware
That I have gained by subtle thought on things
Since we stood psalming there.
AT THE WICKET-GATE
There floated the sounds of church-chiming,
But no one was nigh,
Till there came, as a break in the loneness,
Her father, she, I.
And we slowly moved on to the wicket,
And downlooking stood,
Till anon people passed, and amid them
We parted for good.
Greater, wiser, may part there than we three
Who parted there then,
But never will Fates colder-featured
Hold sway there again.
Of the churchgoers through the still meadows
No single one knew
What a play was played under their eyes there
As thence we withdrew.
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 in me still with 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-fugued song of the universe unending.
EXETER.
APOSTROPHE TO AN OLD PSALM TUNE
I met you first--ah, when did I first meet you?
When I was full of wonder, and innocent,
Standing meek-eyed with those of choric bent,
While dimming day grew dimmer
In the pulpit-glimmer.
Much riper in years I met you--in a temple
Where summer sunset streamed upon our shapes,
And you spread over me like a gauze that drapes,
And flapped from floor to rafters,
Sweet as angels' laughters.
But you had been stripped of some of your old vesture
By Monk, or another. Now you wore no frill,
And at first you startled me. But I knew you still,
Though I missed the minim's waver,
And the dotted quaver.
I grew accustomed to you thus. And you hailed me
Through one who evoked you often. Then at last
Your raiser was borne off, and I mourned you had passed
From my life with your late outsetter;
Till I said, "'Tis better!"
But you waylaid me. I rose and went as a ghost goes,
And said, eyes-full "I'll never hear it again!
It is overmuch for scathed and memoried men
When sitting among strange people
Under their steeple."
Now, a new stirrer of tones calls you up before me
And wakes your speech, as she of Endor did
(When sought by Saul who, in disguises hid,
Fell down on the earth to hear it)
Samuel's spirit.
So, your quired oracles beat till they make me tremble
As I discern your mien in the old attire,
Here in these turmoiled years of belligerent fire
Living still on--and onward, maybe,
Till Doom's great day be!
Sunday, August 13, 1916.
AT THE WORD "FAREWELL"
She looked like a bird from a cloud
On the clammy lawn,
Moving alone, bare-browed
In the dim of dawn.
The candles alight in the room
For my parting meal
Made all things withoutdoors loom
Strange, ghostly, unreal.
The hour itself was a ghost,
And it seemed to me then
As of chances the chance furthermost
I should see her again.
I beheld not where all was so fleet
That a Plan of the past
Which had ruled us from birthtime to meet
Was in working at last:
No prelude did I there perceive
To a drama at all,
Or foreshadow what fortune might weave
From beginnings so small;
But I rose as if quicked by a spur
I was bound to obey,
And stepped through the casement to her
Still alone in the gray.
"I am leaving you . . . Farewell!" I said,
As I followed her on
By an alley bare boughs overspread;
"I soon must be gone!"
Even then the scale might have been turned
Against love by a feather,
- But crimson one cheek of hers burned
When we came in together.
FIRST SIGHT OF HER AND AFTER
A day is drawing to its fall
I had not dreamed to see;
The first of many to enthrall
My spirit, will it be?
Or is this eve the end of all
Such new delight for me?
I journey home: the pattern grows
Of moonshades on the way:
"Soon the first quarter, I suppose,"
Sky-glancing travellers say;
I realize that it, for those,
Has been a common day.
THE RIVAL
I determined to find out whose it was -
The portrait he looked at so, and sighed;
Bitterly have I rued my meanness
And wept for it since he died!
I searched his desk when he was away,
And there was the likeness--yes, my own!
Taken when I was the season's fairest,
And time-lines all unknown.
I smiled at my image, and put it back,
And he went on cherishing it, until
I was chafed that he loved not the me then living,
But that past woman still.
Well, such was my jealousy at last,
I destroyed that face of the former me;
Could you ever have dreamed the heart of woman
Would work so foolishly!
HEREDITY
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance--that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.
"YOU WERE THE SORT THAT MEN FORGET"
You were the sort that men forget;
Though I--not yet! -
Perhaps not ever. Your slighted weakness
Adds to the strength of my regret!
You'd not the art--you never had
For good or bad -
To make men see how sweet your meaning,
Which, visible, had charmed them glad.
You would, by words inept let fall,
Offend them all,
Even if they saw your warm devotion
Would hold your life's blood at their call.
You lacked the eye to understand
Those friends offhand
Whose mode was crude, though whose dim purport
Outpriced the courtesies of the bland.
I am now the only being who
Remembers you
It may be. What a waste that Nature
Grudged soul so dear the art its due!
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