All Poems

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A Commonplace Day

© Thomas Hardy

The day is turning ghost,
And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively,
To join the anonymous host
Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe,
To one of like degree.

Her Initals

© Thomas Hardy

UPON a poet's page I wrote
Of old two letters of her name;
Part seemed she of the effulgent thought
Whence that high singer's rapture came.

The thick lids of Night closed upon me
Alone at the Bill
Of the Isle by the Race {1} -
Many-caverned, bald, wrinkled of face -
And with darkness and silence the spirit was on me
To brood and be still.

After Schiller

© Thomas Hardy

Knight, a true sister-love
This heart retains;
Ask me no other love,
That way lie pains!

Cardinal Bembo's Epitaph on Raphael

© Thomas Hardy

Here's one in whom Nature feared--faint at such vying -
Eclipse while he lived, and decease at his dying.

Catullus: XXXI

© Thomas Hardy

(After passing Sirmione, April 1887.) Sirmio, thou dearest dear of strands
That Neptune strokes in lake and sea,
With what high joy from stranger lands
Doth thy old friend set foot on thee!

Long Plighted

© Thomas Hardy

Is it worth while, dear, now,
To call for bells, and sally forth arrayed
For marriage-rites -- discussed, decried, delayed
So many years?

Wives in the Sere

© Thomas Hardy

I Never a careworn wife but shows,
If a joy suffuse her,
Something beautiful to those
Patient to peruse her,

At the War Office, London

© Thomas Hardy

Last year I called this world of gain-givings
The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly
If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly,
So charged it seemed with circumstance whence springs
The tragedy of things.

The Phantom Horsewoman.

© Thomas Hardy

Queer are the ways of a man I know:
He comes and stands
In a careworn craze,
And looks at the sands

The Puzzled Game-Birds

© Thomas Hardy

They are not those who used to feed us
When we were young--they cannot be -
These shapes that now bereave and bleed us?
They are not those who used to feed us, -

A Man (In Memory of H. of M.)

© Thomas Hardy

In Casterbridge there stood a noble pile,
Wrought with pilaster, bay, and balustrade
In tactful times when shrewd Eliza swayed. -
On burgher, squire, and clown
It smiled the long street down for near a mile

Night In The Old Home

© Thomas Hardy

When the wasting embers redden the chimney-breast,
And Life's bare pathway looms like a desert track to me,
And from hall and parlour the living have gone to their rest,
My perished people who housed them here come back to me.

Winter in Durnover Field

© Thomas Hardy

Scene.--A wide stretch of fallow ground recently sown with wheat, and
frozen to iron hardness. Three large birds walking about thereon,
and wistfully eyeing the surface. Wind keen from north-east: sky a
dull grey.

A Meeting With Despair

© Thomas Hardy

AS evening shaped I found me on a moor
Which sight could scarce sustain:
The black lean land, of featureless contour,
Was like a tract in pain.

Embarcation

© Thomas Hardy

Here, where Vespasian's legions struck the sands,
And Cendric with the Saxons entered in,
And Henry's army lept afloat to win
Convincing triumphs over neighboring lands,

Mad Judy

© Thomas Hardy

When the hamlet hailed a birth
Judy used to cry:
When she heard our christening mirth
She would kneel and sigh.
She was crazed, we knew, and we
Humoured her infirmity.

Genoa and the Mediterranean.

© Thomas Hardy

O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea,
Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee
When from Torino's track I saw thy face first flash on me.

The Contretemps

© Thomas Hardy

A forward rush by the lamp in the gloom,
And we clasped, and almost kissed;
But she was not the woman whom
I had promised to meet in the thawing brume
On that harbour-bridge; nor was I he of her tryst.

In A Eweleaze Near Weatherbury

© Thomas Hardy

THE years have gathered grayly
Since I danced upon this leaze
With one who kindled gayly
Love's fitful ecstasies!