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MOMENTS OF VISION
AND
MISCELLANEOUS VERSES

BY
THOMAS HARDY

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1929

COPYRIGHT

First Edition 1917
Reprinted 1919
Pocket Edition 1919
Reprinted 1923, 1925, 1929
Wessex Edition 1919

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH

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?

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class="poetry">      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

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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!

SHE, I, AND THEY

      I was sitting,
      She was knitting,
And the portraits of our fore-folk hung around;
   When there struck on us a sigh;
   “Ah—what is that?” said I:
“Was it not you?” said she. “A sigh did sound.”

      I had not breathed it,
      Nor the night-wind heaved it,
And how it came to us we could not guess;
   And we looked up at each face
   Framed and glazed there in its place,
Still hearkening; but thenceforth was silentness.

      Half in dreaming,
      “Then its meaning,”
Said we, “must be surely this; that they repine
   That we should be the last
   Of stocks once unsurpassed,
And unable to keep up their sturdy line.”

1916.

NEAR LANIVET, 1872

There was a stunted handpost just on the crest,
Only a few feet high:
She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,
At the crossways close thereby.

She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,
And laid her arms on its own,
Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,
Her sad face sideways thrown.

Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day
Made her look as one crucified
In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,
And hurriedly “Don’t,” I cried.

I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said,
As she stepped forth ready to go,
“I am rested now.—Something strange came into my head;
I wish I had not leant so!”

And wordless we moved onward down from the hill
In the west cloud’s murked obscure,
And looking back we could see the handpost still
In the solitude of the moor.

“It struck her too,” I thought, for as if afraid
She heavily breathed as we trailed;
Till she said, “I did not think how ’twould look in the shade,
When I leant there like one nailed.”

I, lightly: “There’s nothing in it. For you, anyhow!”
—“O I know there is not,” said she . . .
“Yet I wonder . . . If no one is bodily crucified now,
In spirit one may be!”

And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see
In the running of Time’s far glass
Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be
Some day.—Alas, alas!

Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

MOMENTS OF VISION
AND
MISCELLANEOUS VERSES

CONTENTS

MOMENTS OF VISION

THE VOICE OF THINGS

“WHY BE AT PAINS?”
(Wooer’s Song)

“WE SAT AT THE WINDOW”
(Bournemouth, 1875)

AFTERNOON SERVICE AT MELLSTOCK
(Circa 1850)

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

MOMENTS OF VISION AND MISCELLANEOUS VERSES

CONTENTS

MOMENTS OF VISION

THE VOICE OF THINGS

“WHY BE AT PAINS?” (Wooer’s Song)

“WE SAT AT THE WINDOW” (Bournemouth, 1875)

AFTERNOON SERVICE AT MELLSTOCK (Circa 1850)

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

MOMENTS OF VISION
AND
MISCELLANEOUS VERSES

“WHY BE AT PAINS?”
(Wooer’s Song)

“WE SAT AT THE WINDOW”
(Bournemouth, 1875)

AFTERNOON SERVICE AT MELLSTOCK
(Circa 1850)