Great poems
/ page 529 of 549 /
Additions
© Thomas Hardy
She cried, "O pray pity me!" Nought would he hear;
Then with wild rainy eyes she obeyed,
She chid when her Love was for clinking off wi' her.
The pa'son was told, as the season drew near
To throw over pu'pit the names of the pe?ir
As fitting one flesh to be made.
The Mother Mourns
© Thomas Hardy
When mid-autumn's moan shook the night-time,
And sedges were horny,
And summer's green wonderwork faltered
On leaze and in lane,
The Alarm
© Thomas Hardy
In a ferny byway
Near the great South-Wessex Highway,
A homestead raised its breakfast-smoke aloft;
The dew-damps still lay steamless, for the sun had made no sky-way,
And twilight cloaked the croft.
At A Bridal
© Thomas Hardy
WHEN you paced forth, to wait maternity,
A dream of other offspring held my mind,
Compounded of us twain as Love designed;
Rare forms, that corporate now will never be!
The Peasant's Confession
© Thomas Hardy
Good Father!
Twas an eve in middle June,
And war was waged anew
By great Napoleon, who for years had strewn
Mens bones all Europe through.
The Sun On The Bookcase
© Thomas Hardy
Once more the cauldron of the sun
Smears the bookcase with winy red,
And here my page is, and there my bed,
And the apple-tree shadows travel along.
The Fire At Tranter Sweatley's
© Thomas Hardy
She cried, "O pray pity me!" Nought would he hear;
Then with wild rainy eyes she obeyed,
She chid when her Love was for clinking off wi' her.
The pa'son was told, as the season drew near
To throw over pu'pit the names of the peäir
As fitting one flesh to be made.
In a Wood
© Thomas Hardy
Pale beech and pine-tree blue,
Set in one clay,
Bough to bough cannot you
Bide out your day?
The Last Chrysanthemum
© Thomas Hardy
Why should this flower delay so long
To show its tremulous plumes?
Now is the time of plaintive robin-song,
When flowers are in their tombs.
My Cicely
© Thomas Hardy
"ALIVE?"--And I leapt in my wonder,
Was faint of my joyance,
And grasses and grove shone in garments
Of glory to me.
The Caged Thrush Freed and Home Again (Villanelle)
© Thomas Hardy
"Men know but little more than we,
Who count us least of things terrene,
How happy days are made to be!
Midnight On The Great Western
© Thomas Hardy
In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy,
And the roof-lamp's oily flame
Played down on his listless form and face,
Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,
Or whence he came.
In The Moonlight
© Thomas Hardy
"O lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave, as no other grave where there?"
The Masked Face
© Thomas Hardy
I found me in a great surging space,
At either end a door,
And I said: "What is this giddying place,
With no firm-fixéd floor,
That I knew not of before?"
"It is Life," said a mask-clad face.
"How Great My Grief" (Triolet)
© Thomas Hardy
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee!
- Have the slow years not brought to view
How great my grief, my joys how few,
Lines On The Loss Of The "Titanic"
© Thomas Hardy
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
The Going
© Thomas Hardy
Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow's dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
Channel Firing
© Thomas Hardy
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgement-day
The Going of the Battery Wives. (Lament)
© Thomas Hardy
O it was sad enough, weak enough, mad enough -
Light in their loving as soldiers can be -
First to risk choosing them, leave alone losing them
Now, in far battle, beyond the South Sea! . . .
The Convergence Of The Twain
© Thomas Hardy
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
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