Time's Laughingstocks, and Other Verses

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Time's Laughingstocks, and Other Verses

PREFACE

In collecting the following poems I have to thank the editors and proprietors of the periodicals in which certain of them have appeared for permission to reclaim them.

Now that the miscellany is brought together, some lack of concord in pieces written at widely severed dates, and in contrasting moods and circumstances, will be obvious enough. This I cannot help, but the sense of disconnection, particularly in respect of those lyrics penned in the first person, will be immaterial when it is borne in mind that they are to be regarded, in the main, as dramatic monologues by different characters.

As a whole they will, I hope, take the reader forward, even if not far, rather than backward. I should add that some lines in the early-dated poems have been rewritten, though they have been left substantially unchanged.

В В В В T. H.

September 1909.

TIME’S LAUGHINGSTOCKS

THE REVISITATION

As I lay awake at night-time

In an ancient country barrack known to ancient cannoneers,

And recalled the hopes that heralded each seeming brave and bright time

Of my primal purple years,

Much it haunted me that, nigh there,

I had borne my bitterest loss – when One who went, came not again;

In a joyless hour of discord, in a joyless-hued July there —

A July just such as then.

And as thus I brooded longer,

With my faint eyes on the feeble square of wan-lit window frame,

A quick conviction sprung within me, grew, and grew yet stronger,

That the month-night was the same,

Too, as that which saw her leave me

On the rugged ridge of Waterstone, the peewits plaining round;

And a lapsing twenty years had ruled that – as it were to grieve me —

I should near the once-loved ground.

Though but now a war-worn stranger

Chance had quartered here, I rose up and descended to the yard.

All was soundless, save the troopers’ horses tossing at the manger,

And the sentry keeping guard.

Through the gateway I betook me

Down the High Street and beyond the lamps, across the battered bridge,

Till the country darkness clasped me and the friendly shine forsook me,

And I bore towards the Ridge,

With a dim unowned emotion

Saying softly: “Small my reason, now at midnight, to be here.

Yet a sleepless swain of fifty with a brief romantic notion

May retrace a track so dear.”

Thus I walked with thoughts half-uttered

Up the lane I knew so well, the grey, gaunt, lonely Lane of Slyre;

And at whiles behind me, far at sea, a sullen thunder muttered

As I mounted high and higher.

Till, the upper roadway quitting,

I adventured on the open drouthy downland thinly grassed,

While the spry white scuts of conies flashed before me, earthward flitting,

And an arid wind went past.

Round about me bulged the barrows

As before, in antique silence – immemorial funeral piles —

Where the sleek herds trampled daily the remains of flint-tipt arrows

Mid the thyme and chamomiles;

And the Sarsen stone there, dateless,

On whose breast we had sat and told the zephyrs many a tender vow,

Held the heat of yester sun, as sank thereon one fated mateless

From those far fond hours till now.

Maybe flustered by my presence

Rose the peewits, just as all those years back, wailing soft and loud,

And revealing their pale pinions like a fitful phosphorescence

Up against the cope of cloud,

Where their dolesome exclamations

Seemed the voicings of the self-same throats I had heard when life was green,

Though since that day uncounted frail forgotten generations

Of their kind had flecked the scene. —

And so, living long and longer

In a past that lived no more, my eyes discerned there, suddenly,

That a figure broke the skyline – first in vague contour, then stronger,

And was crossing near to me.

Some long-missed familiar gesture,

Something wonted, struck me in the figure’s pause to list and heed,

Till I fancied from its handling of its loose