Thomas Hardy

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

If all hearts were open and all desires known — as they would be if people showed their souls — how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!

To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.

Since as a child I used to lie Upon the leaze and watch the sky, Never, I own, expected I That life would all be fair.

Well, World, you have kept faith with me, Kept faith with me; Upon the whole you have proved to be Much as you said you were.

'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

A star looks down at me, And says: "Here I and you Stand each in our degree: What do you mean to do,— Mean to do?"

And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go, And so do I.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns, And so do I.

This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly; And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at "The Traveller's Rest",

A radiant stranger, who saw not me. I queried, "Get out to her do I dare?" But I kept my seat in my search for a plea, And the wheels moved on. O could it but be That I had alighted there!

The bower we shrined to Tennyson, Gentlemen, Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust, The spider is sole denizen; Even she who read those rhymes is dust,

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, "He was a man who used to notice such things"?

Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their carved names the raindrop plows.

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.

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.

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same

What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray, To hazards whence no tears can win us; What of the faith and fire within us

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.

Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

It's gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be.

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.

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.

I seem but a dead man held on end To sink down soon.... O you could not know That such swift fleeing No soul foreseeing — Not even I — would undo me so!