Chapter I: Front Matter

MOMENTS OF VISION
AND
MISCELLANEOUS VERSES

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BY
THOMAS HARDY

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

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COPYRIGHT

_First Edition_ 1917
_Reprinted_ 1919
_Pocket Edition_ 1919
_Reprinted_ 1923, 1925, 1929
_Wessex Edition_ 1919

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

CONTENTS

PAGE Moments of Vision 1 The Voice of Things 2 “Why be at pains?” 3 “We sat at the window” 4 Afternoon Service at Mellstock 5 At the Wicket-gate 6 In a Museum 7 Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune 8 At the Word “Farewell” 11 First Sight of Her and After 13 The Rival 14 Heredity 15 “You were the sort that men forget” 16 She, I, and They 17 Near Lanivet, 1872 18 Joys of Memory 20 To the Moon 21 Copying Architecture in an Old Minster 22 To Shakespeare 24 Quid hic agis? 27 On a Midsummer Eve 30 Timing Her 31 Before Knowledge 34 The Blinded Bird 35 “The wind blew words” 36 The Faded Face 37 The Riddle 38 The Duel 39 At Mayfair Lodgings 42 To my Father’s Violin 44 The Statue of Liberty 47 The Background and the Figure 50 The Change 51 Sitting on the Bridge 54 The Young Churchwarden 56 “I travel as a phantom now” 57 Lines to a Movement in Mozart’s E-flat Symphony 58 “In the seventies” 60 The Pedigree 62 This Heart. A Woman’s Dream 65 Where they lived 68 The Occultation 69 Life laughs Onward 70 The Peace-offering 71 “Something tapped” 72 The Wound 73 A Merrymaking in Question 74 “I said and sang her excellence” 75 A January Night. 1879 77 A Kiss 78 The Announcement 79 The Oxen 80 The Tresses 81 The Photograph 82 On a Heath 84 An Anniversary 85 “By the Runic Stone” 87 The Pink Frock 88 Transformations 89 In her Precincts 90 The Last Signal 91 The House of Silence 93 Great Things 95 The Chimes 97 The Figure in the Scene 98 “Why did I sketch” 99 Conjecture 100 The Blow 101 Love the Monopolist 103 At Middle-field Gate in February 105 The Youth who carried a Light 106 The Head above the Fog 108 Overlooking the River Stour 109 The Musical Box 111 On Sturminster Foot-bridge 113 Royal Sponsors 114 Old Furniture 116 A Thought in Two Moods 118 The Last Performance 119 “You on the tower” 120 The Interloper 122 Logs on the Hearth 124 The Sunshade 126 The Ageing House 128 The Caged Goldfinch 129 At Madame Tussaud’s in Victorian Years 130 The Ballet 132 The Five Students 133 The Wind’s Prophecy 135 During Wind and Rain 137 He prefers her Earthly 139 The Dolls 140 Molly gone 141 A Backward Spring 143 Looking Across 144 At a Seaside Town in 1869 146 The Glimpse 149 The Pedestrian 151 “Who’s in the next room?” 153 At a Country Fair 155 The Memorial Brass: 186- 156 Her Love-birds 158 Paying Calls 160 The Upper Birch-Leaves 161 “It never looks like summer” 162 Everything comes 163 The Man with a Past 164 He fears his Good Fortune 166 He wonders about Himself 167 Jubilate 168 He revisits his First School 171 “I thought, my heart” 173 Fragment 174 Midnight on the Great Western 176 Honeymoon Time at an Inn 177 The Robin 181 “I rose and went to Rou’tor town” 183 The Nettles 184 In a Waiting-room 185 The Clock-winder 187 Old Excursions 189 The Masked Face 191 In a Whispering Gallery 192 The Something that saved Him 193 The Enemy’s Portrait 195 Imaginings 197 On the Doorstep 198 Signs and Tokens 199 Paths of Former Time 201 The Clock of the Years 203 At the Piano 205 The Shadow on the Stone 206 In the Garden 208 The Tree and the Lady 209 An Upbraiding 211 The Young Glass-stainer 212 Looking at a Picture on an Anniversary 213 The Choirmaster’s Burial 215 The Man who forgot 217 While drawing in a Churchyard 219 “For Life I had never cared greatly” 221 POEMS OF WAR AND PATRIOTISM— “Men who march away” (Song of the 225 Soldiers) His Country 227 England to Germany in 1914 229 On the Belgian Expatriation 230 An Appeal to America on behalf of 231 the Belgian Destitute The Pity of It 232 In Time of Wars and Tumults 233 In Time of “the Breaking of 234 nations” Cry of the Homeless 235 Before Marching and After 237 “Often when warring” 239 Then and Now 240 A Call to National Service 242 The Dead and the Living One 243 A New Year’s Eve in War Time 246 “I met a man” 248 “I looked up from my writing” 250 FINALE— The Coming of the End 255 Afterwards 257

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?

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