Your troubles shrink not, though I feel them less
Here, far away, than when I tarried near;
I even smile old smiles-with listlessness-
Yet smiles they are, not ghastly mockeries mere.

A thought too strange to house within my brain
Haunting its outer precincts I discern:
-That I will not show zeal again to learn
Your griefs, and, sharing them, renew my pain. . . .

It goes, like murky bird or buccaneer
That shapes its lawless figure on the main,
And each new impulse tends to make outflee
The unseemingly instinct that had lodgment here;
Yet, comrade old, can bitterer knowledge be
Than that, though banned, such instinct was in me!


About this poem
"A Confession to a Friend in Trouble" was published in "Wessex Poems and Other Verses" (Harper, 1898).

About Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset, England, on June 2, 1840. A fiction writer as well as a poet, he published eight collections of poetry, including "Poems of the Past and the Present" (Harper & Bros., 1902) and "Satires of Circumstance" (Macmillan, 1914). He died in 1928.

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This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate