Life poems
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On a Fine Morning
© Thomas Hardy
Whence comes Solace?--Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life's conditions,
Nor from heeding Time's monitions;
Mute Opinion
© Thomas Hardy
I I traversed a dominion
Whose spokesmen spake out strong
Their purpose and opinion
Through pulpit, press, and song.
By the Earth's Corpse
© Thomas Hardy
I "O Lord, why grievest Thou? -
Since Life has ceased to be
Upon this globe, now cold
As lunar land and sea,
Heiress And Architect
© Thomas Hardy
SHE sought the Studios, beckoning to her side
An arch-designer, for she planned to build.
He was of wise contrivance, deeply skilled
In every intervolve of high and wide--
Well fit to be her guide.
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 Two Men
© Thomas Hardy
THERE were two youths of equal age,
Wit, station, strength, and parentage;
They studied at the self-same schools,
And shaped their thoughts by common rules.
Doom and She
© Thomas Hardy
There dwells a mighty pair -
Slow, statuesque, intense -
Amid the vague Immense:
None can their chronicle declare,
Nor why they be, nor whence.
To Lizbie Browne
© Thomas Hardy
Dear Lizbie Browne,
Where are you now?
In sun, in rain? -
Or is your brow
Past joy, past pain,
Dear Lizbie Browne?
De Profundis
© Thomas Hardy
Wintertime nighs;
But my bereavement-pain
It cannot bring again:
Twice no one dies.
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.
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.
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.
Rome at the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats
© Thomas Hardy
Who, then, was Cestius,
And what is he to me? -
Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous
One thought alone brings he.
In a Wood
© Thomas Hardy
Pale beech and pine-tree blue,
Set in one clay,
Bough to bough cannot you
Bide out your day?
His Immortality
© Thomas Hardy
I saw a dead man's finer part
Shining within each faithful heart
Of those bereft. Then said I: "This must be
His immortality."
A Wasted Illness
© Thomas Hardy
Through vaults of pain,
Enribbed and wrought with groins of ghastliness,
I passed, and garish spectres moved my brain
To dire distress.
To Life
© Thomas Hardy
O life with the sad seared face,
I weary of seeing thee,
And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace,
And thy too-forced pleasantry!
Revulsion
© Thomas Hardy
THOUGH I waste watches framing words to fetter
Some spirit to mine own in clasp and kiss,
Out of the night there looms a sense 'twere better
To fail obtaining whom one fails to miss.
Her Immortality
© Thomas Hardy
UPON a noon I pilgrimed through
A pasture, mile by mile,
Unto the place where I last saw
My dead Love's living smile.
