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SELECTED CAPE POEMS FOR THOMAS HARDY 2017Helpful slideshow hereHapIF but some vengeful god would call to meFrom up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than IHad willed and meted me the tears I shed.But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan....These purblind Doomsters had as readily strownBlisses about my pilgrimage as pain. Thomas HardyShelley's Skylark.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. Thomas HardyTo an Unborn Pauper ChildBreathe not, hid Heart: cease silently,And though thy birth-hour beckons thee,Sleep the long sleep:The Doomsters heapTravails and teens around us here,And Time-Wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.Hark, how the peoples surge and sigh,And laughters fail, and greetings die;Hopes dwindle; yea,Faiths waste away,Affections and enthusiasms numb:Thou canst not mend these things if thou dost come.Had I the ear of wombed soulsEre their terrestrial chart unrolls,And thou wert freeTo cease, or be,Then would I tell thee all I know,And put it to thee: Wilt thou take Life so?Vain vow! No hint of mine may henceTo theeward fly: to thy locked senseExplain none canLife's pending plan:Thou wilt thy ignorant entry makeThough skies spout fire and blood and nations quake.Fain would I, dear, find some shut plotOf earth's wide wold for thee, where notOne tear, one qualm,Should break the calm.But I am weak as thou and bare;No man can change the common lot to rare.Must come and bide. And such are we --Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary --That I can hopeHealth, love, friends, scopeIn full for thee; can dream thou'lt findJoys seldom yet attained by humankind! Thomas HardyThe Moth-Signal (On Egdon Heath)'What are you still, still thinking,He asked in vague surmise,'That you stare at the wick unblinkingWith those great lost luminous eyes?''O, I see a poor moth burningIn the candle-flame,' said she,'Its wings and legs are turningTo a cinder rapidly.''Moths fly in from the heather,'He said, 'now the days decline.''I know,' said she. 'The weather,I hope, will at last be fine.'I think,' she added lightly,'I'll look out at the door.The ring the moon wears nightly,May be visible now no more.She rose, and, little heeding,Her husband then went onWith his attentive readingIn the annals of ages gone.Outside the house a figureCame from the tumulus near,And speedily waxed bigger,And clasped and called her Dear.'I saw the pale-winged tokenYou sent through the crack,' sighed she.'That moth is burnt and brokenWith which you lured out me.'And were I as the moth isIt might be better farFor one whose marriage troth isShattered as potsherds are!'Then grinned the Ancient BritonFrom the tumulus treed with pine:'So, hearts are thwartly smittenIn these days as in mine!' Thomas HardyThe Darkling ThrushThe Darkling ThrushThe Phantom Horsewoman.Queer are the ways of a man I know:He comes and standsIn a careworn craze,And looks at the sandsAnd in the seaward hazeWith moveless handsAnd face and gaze,Then turns to go...And what does he see when he gazes so?They say he sees as an instant thingMore clear than today,A sweet soft sceneThat once was in playBy that briny green;Yes, notes alwayWarm, real, and keen,What his back years bring-A phantom of his own figuring.Of this vision of his they might say more:Not only thereDoes he see this sight,But everywhereIn his brain-day, night,As if on the airIt were drawn rose bright-Yea, far from that shoreDoes he carry this vision of heretofore:A ghost-girl-rider. And though, toil-tried,He withers daily,Time touches her not,But she still rides gailyIn his rapt thoughtOn that shagged and shalyAtlantic spot,And as when first eyedDraws rein and sings to the swing of the tide. Thomas HardyA Broken AppointmentYou did not come,And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.Yet less for loss of your dear presence thereThan that I thus found lacking in your makeThat high compassion which can overbearReluctance for pure lovingkindness' sakeGrieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,You did not come. You love not me,And love alone can lend you loyalty;-I know and knew it. But, unto the storeOf human deeds divine in all but name,Was it not worth a little hour or moreTo add yet this: Once you, a woman, cameTo soothe a time-torn man; even though it beYou love not me. Thomas HardyI leant upon a coppice gate ??????When Frost was spectre-grey, And Winter's dregs made desolate ??????The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky ??????Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh ??????Had sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be ??????The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, ??????The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth ??????Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth ??????Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among ??????The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong ??????Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, ??????In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul ??????Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings ??????Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things ??????Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through ??????His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew ??????And I was unaware. One of the most renowned poets and novelists in English literary history, Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in the English village of Higher Bockhampton in the county of Dorset. He died in 1928 at Max Gate, a house he built for himself and his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, in Dorchester, a few miles from his birthplace. Hardy’s youth was influenced by the musicality of his father, a stonemason and fiddler, and his mother, Jemima Hand Hardy, often described as the real guiding star of Hardy’s early life. Though he was an architectural apprentice in London, and spent time there each year until his late 70s, Dorset provided Hardy with material for his fiction and poetry. One of the poorest and most backward of the counties, rural life in Dorset had changed little in hundreds of years, which Hardy explored through the rustic characters in many of his novels. Strongly identifying himself and his work with Dorset, Hardy saw himself as a successor to the Dorset dialect poet William Barnes, who had been a friend and mentor. Moreover, Hardy called his novels the Wessex Novels, after one of the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Britain. He provided a map of the area, with the names of the villages and towns he coined to represent actual places. But other features of southern England also influenced Hardy, especially as a poet. Stonehenge was only the most famous of the many remains of the past scattered throughout the English south. There Hardy could explore and contemplate Druid and Roman, ancient and medieval ruins, a fascination which also found expression in later poems like “The Shadow on the Stone.” Hardy’s interest in history also extended to the Napoleonic Wars, which he considered one of the great events of the historical past; Dorset tradition told of the fear of Bonaparte’s invasion of England. Hardy’s epic, poetical drama The Dynasts (1908) reflects a lifetime of involvement with this historical material, including interviews he conducted with elderly soldiers who had fought in the Napoleonic campaigns. Hardy also visited the field of the battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon’s forces were defeated. Alive to the past, as a writer Hardy was also sensitive to the future; scores of younger authors, including William Butler Yeats, Siegfried Sassoon, and Virginia Woolf, visited him, and he discussed poetry with Ezra Pound. Furthermore, Hardy’s well-known war poems spoke eloquently against some of the horrors of his present, notably the Boer War and World War I. In such works as “Drummer Hodge” and “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations,” Hardy addressed the conflicts in visceral imagery, often using colloquial speech and the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers. His work had a profound influence on other war poets such as Rupert Brooke and Sassoon.Hardy’s long career spanned the Victorian and the modern eras. He described himself in “In Ten Ebris II” as a poet “who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst” and during his nearly eighty-eight years he lived through too many upheavals—including World War I—to have become optimistic with age. Nor did he seem by nature to be cheerful: much of the criticism around his work concerns its existentially bleak outlook, and, especially during Hardy’s own time, sexual themes. Incredibly prolific, Hardy wrote fourteen novels, three volumes of short stories, and several poems between the years 1871 and 1897. Hardy’s great novels, including Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), were all published during this period. They both received negative reviews, which may have led Hardy to abandoning fiction to write poetry. From 1898 until his death in 1928 Hardy published eight volumes of poetry; about one thousand poems were published in his lifetime. Moreover, between 1903 and 1908 Hardy published The Dynasts—a huge poetic drama in 3 parts, 19 acts, and 130 scenes. Using the Napoleonic wars to dramatize his evolving philosophy, Hardy also pioneered a new kind of verse. According to John Wain’s introduction to the 1965 St. Martin’s Press edition of the dramatic poem, in composing The Dynasts Hardy took “one of those sudden jumps which characterize the man of genius.... He wrote his huge work in accordance with conventions of an art that had not yet been invented: the art of cinema.” The Dynasts, following this view, is “neither a poem, nor a play, nor a story. It is a shooting-script.” Though little read today, The Dynasts presents Hardy’s idea of “evolutionary meliorism,” the hope that human action could make life better. The length and scope of The Dynasts, which was published in three parts over five years, engendered varied, and sometimes bewildered, responses. But by 1908, with the publication of the third part, most reviewers were enthusiastic. However, Hardy’s lyric poetry is by far his best known, and most widely read. Incredibly influential for poets such as W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and Robert Frost, Hardy forged a modern style that nonetheless hewed closely to poetic convention and tradition. Innovative in his use of stanza and voice, Hardy’s poetry, like his fiction, is characterized by a pervasive fatalism. In the words of biographer Claire Tomalin, the poems illuminate “the contradictions always present in Hardy, between the vulnerable, doomstruck man and the serene inhabitant of the natural world.” Hardy’s lyrics are intimately and directly connected to his life: the great poems of 1912 to 1913 were written after the death of Emma on November 27, 1912. Some of these works are dated as early as December, 1912, a month after her death, and others were composed in March of the following year, after Hardy had visited St. Juliot, Cornwall, where he first met Emma. Tomalin described Emma’s death as “the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet,” a view shared by other recent critics. Hardy’s Emma poems, Tomalin goes on to point out, are some the “finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry.” Hardy was notorious for his relationships with younger women throughout his life, and he married Florence Dugdale, a woman almost forty years his junior, shortly after Emma’s death. Hardy’s Emma poems, then, according to Thomas Mallon in the New York Time, are “racked with guilt and wonder.” They are poems in which he attempts to come to terms with the loss of both his wife and his love for her, many years earlier.Though frequently described as gloomy and bitter, Hardy’s poems pay attention to the transcendent possibilities of sound, line, and breath—the musical aspects of language. As Irving Howe noted in Thomas Hardy, any “critic can, and often does, see all that is wrong with Hardy’s poetry but whatever it was that makes for his strange greatness is hard to describe.” Hardy’s poetry, perhaps even more so than his novels, has found new audiences and appreciation as contemporary scholars and critics attempt to understand his work in the context of Modernism. But Hardy has always presented scholars and critics with a contradictory body of work; as Jean Brooks suggests in Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure, because Hardy’s “place in literature has always been controversial, constant reassessment is essential to keep the balance between modern and historical perspective.” Virginia Woolf, a visitor to Max Gate, noted some of Hardy’s enduring power as a writer: ““Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.” When Hardy died in 1928, his ashes were deposited in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey and his heart, having been removed before cremation, was interred in the graveyard at Stinsford Church where his parents, grandparents, and his first wife were buried. One of the most renowned poets and novelists in English literary history, Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in the English village of Higher Bockhampton in the county of Dorset. He died in 1928 at Max Gate, a house he built for himself and his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, in Dorchester, a few miles from his birthplace. Hardy’s youth was influenced by the musicality of his father, a stonemason and fiddler, and his mother, Jemima Hand Hardy, often described as the real guiding star of Hardy’s early life. Though he was an architectural apprentice in London, and spent time there each year until his late 70s, Dorset provided Hardy with material for his fiction and poetry. One of the poorest and most backward of the counties, rural life in Dorset had changed little in hundreds of years, which Hardy explored through the rustic characters in many of his novels. Strongly identifying himself and his work with Dorset, Hardy saw himself as a successor to the Dorset dialect poet William Barnes, who had been a friend and mentor. Moreover, Hardy called his novels the Wessex Novels, after one of the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Britain. He provided a map of the area, with the names of the villages and towns he coined to represent actual places. But other features of southern England also influenced Hardy, especially as a poet. Stonehenge was only the most famous of the many remains of the past scattered throughout the English south. There Hardy could explore and contemplate Druid and Roman, ancient and medieval ruins, a fascination which also found expression in later poems like “The Shadow on the Stone.” Hardy’s interest in history also extended to the Napoleonic Wars, which he considered one of the great events of the historical past; Dorset tradition told of the fear of Bonaparte’s invasion of England. Hardy’s epic, poetical drama The Dynasts (1908) reflects a lifetime of involvement with this historical material, including interviews he conducted with elderly soldiers who had fought in the Napoleonic campaigns. Hardy also visited the field of the battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon’s forces were defeated. Alive to the past, as a writer Hardy was also sensitive to the future; scores of younger authors, including William Butler Yeats, Siegfried Sassoon, and Virginia Woolf, visited him, and he discussed poetry with Ezra Pound. Furthermore, Hardy’s well-known war poems spoke eloquently against some of the horrors of his present, notably the Boer War and World War I. In such works as “Drummer Hodge” and “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations,” Hardy addressed the conflicts in visceral imagery, often using colloquial speech and the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers. His work had a profound influence on other war poets such as Rupert Brooke and Sassoon.Hardy’s long career spanned the Victorian and the modern eras. He described himself in “In Ten Ebris II” as a poet “who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst” and during his nearly eighty-eight years he lived through too many upheavals—including World War I—to have become optimistic with age. Nor did he seem by nature to be cheerful: much of the criticism around his work concerns its existentially bleak outlook, and, especially during Hardy’s own time, sexual themes. Incredibly prolific, Hardy wrote fourteen novels, three volumes of short stories, and several poems between the years 1871 and 1897. Hardy’s great novels, including Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), were all published during this period. They both received negative reviews, which may have led Hardy to abandoning fiction to write poetry. From 1898 until his death in 1928 Hardy published eight volumes of poetry; about one thousand poems were published in his lifetime. Moreover, between 1903 and 1908 Hardy published The Dynasts—a huge poetic drama in 3 parts, 19 acts, and 130 scenes. Using the Napoleonic wars to dramatize his evolving philosophy, Hardy also pioneered a new kind of verse. According to John Wain’s introduction to the 1965 St. Martin’s Press edition of the dramatic poem, in composing The Dynasts Hardy took “one of those sudden jumps which characterize the man of genius.... He wrote his huge work in accordance with conventions of an art that had not yet been invented: the art of cinema.” The Dynasts, following this view, is “neither a poem, nor a play, nor a story. It is a shooting-script.” Though little read today, The Dynasts presents Hardy’s idea of “evolutionary meliorism,” the hope that human action could make life better. The length and scope of The Dynasts, which was published in three parts over five years, engendered varied, and sometimes bewildered, responses. But by 1908, with the publication of the third part, most reviewers were enthusiastic. However, Hardy’s lyric poetry is by far his best known, and most widely read. Incredibly influential for poets such as W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and Robert Frost, Hardy forged a modern style that nonetheless hewed closely to poetic convention and tradition. Innovative in his use of stanza and voice, Hardy’s poetry, like his fiction, is characterized by a pervasive fatalism. In the words of biographer Claire Tomalin, the poems illuminate “the contradictions always present in Hardy, between the vulnerable, doomstruck man and the serene inhabitant of the natural world.” Hardy’s lyrics are intimately and directly connected to his life: the great poems of 1912 to 1913 were written after the death of Emma on November 27, 1912. Some of these works are dated as early as December, 1912, a month after her death, and others were composed in March of the following year, after Hardy had visited St. Juliot, Cornwall, where he first met Emma. Tomalin described Emma’s death as “the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet,” a view shared by other recent critics. Hardy’s Emma poems, Tomalin goes on to point out, are some the “finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry.” Hardy was notorious for his relationships with younger women throughout his life, and he married Florence Dugdale, a woman almost forty years his junior, shortly after Emma’s death. Hardy’s Emma poems, then, according to Thomas Mallon in the New York Time, are “racked with guilt and wonder.” They are poems in which he attempts to come to terms with the loss of both his wife and his love for her, many years earlier.Though frequently described as gloomy and bitter, Hardy’s poems pay attention to the transcendent possibilities of sound, line, and breath—the musical aspects of language. As Irving Howe noted in Thomas Hardy, any “critic can, and often does, see all that is wrong with Hardy’s poetry but whatever it was that makes for his strange greatness is hard to describe.” Hardy’s poetry, perhaps even more so than his novels, has found new audiences and appreciation as contemporary scholars and critics attempt to understand his work in the context of Modernism. But Hardy has always presented scholars and critics with a contradictory body of work; as Jean Brooks suggests in Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure, because Hardy’s “place in literature has always been controversial, constant reassessment is essential to keep the balance between modern and historical perspective.” Virginia Woolf, a visitor to Max Gate, noted some of Hardy’s enduring power as a writer: ““Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.” When Hardy died in 1928, his ashes were deposited in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey and his heart, having been removed before cremation, was interred in the graveyard at Stinsford Church where his parents, grandparents, and his first wife were buried. AfterwardsThomas Hardy,?1840?-?1928When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, “He was a man who used to notice such things”? If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink, The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alightUpon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think, “To him this must have been a familiar sight.”If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,One may say, “He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.”If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door, Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more, “He was one who had an eye for such mysteries”?And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom, And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom, “He hears it not now, but used to notice such things?”A Backward SpringA poem by?Thomas HardyThe trees are afraid to put forth buds,And there is timidity in the grass;The plots lie gray where gouged by spuds,And whether next week will passFree of sly sour winds is the fret of each bushOf barberry waiting to bloom.Yet the snowdrop's face betrays no gloom,And the primrose pants in its heedless push,Though the myrtle asks if it's worth the fightThis year with frost and rimeTo venture one more timeOn delicate leaves and buttons of whiteFrom the selfsame bough as at last year's prime,And never to ruminate on or rememberWhat happened to it in mid-December.A RURAL tableau encompassing both Thomas Hardy’s graphic eye for the landscape and his sharp ear for its human inhabitants and their conversations.LIFE AND DEATH AT SUNRISE(Near Dogbury Gate, 1867)The hills uncap their topsOf woodland, pasture, copse,And look on the layers of mistAt their foot that still persist:They are like awakened sleepers on one elbow lifted,Who gaze around to learn if things during night have shifted.A wagon creaks up from the fogWith a laboured leisurely jog;Then a horseman from off the hill-tipComes clapping down into the dip;While woodlarks, finches, sparrows, try to entune at one time,And cocks and hens and cows and bulls take up the chime.With a shouldered basket and flagonA man meets the one with the waggon,And both the men halt of long use.‘Well,’ the waggoner says, ‘what’s the news?’‘ - Tis a boy this time. You’ve just met the doctor trotting back.She’s doing very well. And we think we shall call him “Jack”.‘And what have you covered there?’He nods to the waggon and mare.‘Oh, a coffin for old John Thinn:We are just going to put him in.’‘ - So he’s gone at last. He always had a good constitution.’‘ - He was ninety-odd. He could call up the French Revolution.’Neutral TonesBY?THOMAS HARDYWe stood by a pond that winter day,?And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,?And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;?– They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.?Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove?Over tedious riddles of years ago;?And some words played between us to and fro?On which lost the more by our love.?The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing?Alive enough to have strength to die;?And a grin of bitterness swept thereby?Like an ominous bird a-wing….?Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,?And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me?Your face, and the God curst sun, and a tree,?And a pond edged with grayish leaves.?The VoiceBY?THOMAS HARDYWoman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,?Saying that now you are not as you were?When you had changed from the one who was all to me,?But as at first, when our day was fair.?Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,?Standing as when I drew near to the town?Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,?Even to the original air-blue gown!?Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness?Travelling across the wet mead to me here,?You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,?Heard no more again far or near??Thus I; faltering forward,?Leaves around me falling,?Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,?And the woman calling.The Darkling ThrushBY?THOMAS HARDYI leant upon a coppice gate???????When Frost was spectre-grey,?And Winter's dregs made desolate???????The weakening eye of day.?The tangled bine-stems scored the sky???????Like strings of broken lyres,?And all mankind that haunted nigh???????Had sought their household fires.?The land's sharp features seemed to be???????The Century's corpse outleant,?His crypt the cloudy canopy,???????The wind his death-lament.?The ancient pulse of germ and birth???????Was shrunken hard and dry,?And every spirit upon earth???????Seemed fervourless as I.?At once a voice arose among???????The bleak twigs overhead?In a full-hearted evensong???????Of joy illimited;?An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,???????In blast-beruffled plume,?Had chosen thus to fling his soul???????Upon the growing gloom.?So little cause for carolings???????Of such ecstatic sound?Was written on terrestrial things???????Afar or nigh around,?That I could think there trembled through???????His happy good-night air?Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew???????And I was unaware.?The Man He KilledBY?THOMAS HARDY"Had he and I but met?????????????By some old ancient inn,?We should have sat us down to wet?????????????Right many a nipperkin!?????????????"But ranged as infantry,?????????????And staring face to face,?I shot at him as he at me,?????????????And killed him in his place.?????????????"I shot him dead because —?????????????Because he was my foe,?Just so: my foe of course he was;?????????????That's clear enough; although?????????????"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,?????????????Off-hand like — just as I —?Was out of work — had sold his traps —?????????????No other reason why.?????????????"Yes; quaint and curious war is!?????????????You shoot a fellow down?You'd treat if met where any bar is,?????????????Or help to half-a-crown."?During Wind and RainBY?THOMAS HARDYThey sing their dearest songs—??????? He, she, all of them—yea,??????? Treble and tenor and bass,?????????????And one to play;???????With the candles mooning each face. . . .?????????????Ah, no; the years O!?How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!??????? They clear the creeping moss—??????? Elders and juniors—aye,??????? Making the pathways neat?????????????And the garden gay;??????? And they build a shady seat. . . .?????????????Ah, no; the years, the years,?See, the white storm-birds wing across.??????? They are blithely breakfasting all—??????? Men and maidens—yea,??????? Under the summer tree,?????????????With a glimpse of the bay,??????? While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .?????????????Ah, no; the years O!?And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.??????? They change to a high new house,??????? He, she, all of them—aye,??????? Clocks and carpets and chairs?????????? On the lawn all day,??????? And brightest things that are theirs. . . .?????????? Ah, no; the years, the years;?Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.Source:?The Longman Anthology of Poetry?(Pearson, 2006) ................
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