Poems of Thomas Hardy

On a Fine Morning.

Whence comes Solace?
--Not from seeing
What is doing,
suffering, being,
Not from noting Life's conditions,
Nor from heeding Time's monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.
IIThus do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its irised embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man.
……………………………………………………….
She hears the Storm

There was a time in former years
--While my roof-tree was his
--When I should have been distressed by fears
At such a night as this!
I should have murmured anxiously,
'The prickling rain strikes cold;
His road is bare of hedge or tree,
And he is getting old.'
But now the fitful chimney-roar,
The drone of Thorncombe trees,
The Froom in flood upon the moor,
The mud of Mellstock Leaze,
The candle slanting sooty-wick'd,
The thuds upon the thatch,
The eaves drops on the window flicked,
The clanking garden-hatch,
And what they mean to wayfarers,
I scarcely heed or mind;
He has won that storm-tight roof of hers
Which Earth grants all her kind.
……………………………………………….
Shelley's Lark.
Somewhere afield here something lies
In Earth's oblivious eyeless trust
That moved a poet to prophecies
-A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust
The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,
And made immortal through times to be;
-Though it only lived like another bird,
And knew not its immortality.
Lived its meek life;
then, one day,
fell -A little ball of feather and bone;
And how it perished,
when piped farewell,
And where it wastes,
are alike unknown.
Maybe it rests in the loam I view,
Maybe it throbs in a myrtle's green,
Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue
Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.
Go find it, faeries, go and find
That tiny pinch of priceless dust,
And bring a casket silver-lined,
And framed of gold that gems encrust;
And we will lay it safe therein,
And consecrate it to endless time;
For it inspired a bard to win
Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.
……………………………………………………
The Bullfinches
Bother Bulleys,
let us sing
From the dawn till evening!
-For we know not that we go not
When the day's pale pinions fold
Unto those who sang of old.
When I flew to Blackmoor Vale,
Whence the green-gowned faeries hail,
Roosting near them I could hear them
Speak of queenly Nature's ways,
Means, and moods,
--well known to fays.
All we creatures, nigh and far(Said they there),
the Mother's are:
Yet she never shows endeavour
To protect from warrings wild
Bird or beast she calls her child.
Busy in her handsome house
Known as Space,
she falls a-drowse;
Yet, in seeming, works on dreaming,
While beneath her groping hands
Fiends make havoc in her bands.
How her hussif'ry succeeds
She unknows or she unheeds,
All things making for Death's taking!
--So the green-gowned faeries say
Living over Blackmoor way.
Come then, brethren, let us sing,
From the dawn till evening!
-For we know not that we go not
When the day's pale pinions fold
Unto those who sang of old.………………………………………..

The darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate,
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to me
The Century's corpse outleant,
Its crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind its death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervorless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead,
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited.An aged thrush, frail,
gaunt and small,
With blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night airSome blessed Hope,
whereof he knew,
And I was unaware.