WESSEX POEMS AND
OTHER VERSES

BY
THOMAS HARDY

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1919

COPYRIGHT

“Wessex Poems”: First Edition, Crown 8vo, 1898.  New Edition 1903.
First Pocket Edition June 1907.  Reprinted January 1909, 1913

“Poems, Past and Present”: First edition 1901 (dated 1902)
Second Edition 1903.  First Pocket Edition June 1907
Reprinted January 1908, 1913, 1918, 1919

PREFACE TO WESSEX POEMS

Of the miscellaneous collection of verse that follows, only four pieces have been published, though many were written long ago, and other partly written.  In some few cases the verses were turned into prose and printed as such, it having been unanticipated at that time that they might see the light.

Whenever an ancient and legitimate word of the district, for which there was no equivalent in received English, suggested itself as the most natural, nearest, and often only expression of a thought, it has been made use of, on what seemed good grounds.

The pieces are in a large degree dramatic or personative in conception; and this even where they are not obviously so.

The dates attached to some of the poems do not apply to the rough sketches given in illustration, which have been recently made, and, as may be surmised, are inserted for personal and local reasons rather than for their intrinsic qualities.

T. H.

September 1898.

CONTENTS