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    Selected Poems
    Selected Poems
    Selected Poems
    Ebook416 pages3 hours

    Selected Poems

    By Thomas Hardy

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In the sphere of poets like Swift, Meredith and Kipling, Thomas Hardy is today becoming recognized as one of the greatest English poets of this century. As a young man with interests in journalism, art, and architecture, Hardy achieved greatness in the fiction genre early on, writing novels for a living until his mid-fifties. He then abandoned fiction entirely in order to devote himself to his true passion—poetry. This ample selection of poems demonstrates Hardy's experimentation with intricate stanza forms and rhyme schemes, as well as his genius for rhetorical ambiguity. Set in his native, rural Dorset, his "Selected Poems" include such well-known pieces as "During Wind and Rain," "Afterwards," "The Darkling Thrush," and "The Oxen." Although most of the acclaim for his poetry was received posthumously, Hardy's poetry evokes themes and ideas that transcend time. Readers today still enjoy these poems of love, nature, and life's little ironies.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2010
    ISBN9781420937473
    Selected Poems
    Author

    Thomas Hardy

    Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Dorchester, Dorset. He enrolled as a student in King’s College, London, but never felt at ease there, seeing himself as socially inferior. This preoccupation with society, particularly the declining rural society, featured heavily in Hardy’s novels, with many of his stories set in the fictional county of Wessex. Since his death in 1928, Hardy has been recognised as a significant poet, influencing The Movement poets in the 1950s and 1960s.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      The novel reflects common Hardy themes: a rustic, evocative setting, poorly chosen marriage partners, unrequited love, social class mobility, and an unhappy, or at best equivocal, ending. As with most his other works, opportunities for fulfillment and happiness are forsaken or delayed. The plot was very credible and the characters were well developed. It had a very sad ending but very fitting for the circumstances. I would recommend this book if you have enjoyed some of this other writings.
    • 3/5
      This slim volume contains 70 of Thomas Hardy's poems dating from 1898-1917, which turned out to be a sufficient amount of his poetry for me. Back when I was in college, I read Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles and liked it enough to want to read more of his work. I picked up this book at one point because it was ridiculously cheap, so why not? Turns out I liked Hardy more as a novelist than a poet. Of the poems featured here, there were less than a dozen that I found notable:1) "The Ruined Maid" is a tongue-in-cheek, amusing look at a kept woman who simultaneously laments her spoiled reputation while showing off the riches she's gained in the process. 2) "Tess's Lament" seems to be a continuation of themes/events from Hardy's novel and thus is interesting to readers of that work.3) "The Man He Killed" is a brief meditation on the insanity of war ("Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down/You'd treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown.")4) "Channel Firing" is a darker look at WWI ("All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christes sake Than you who are helpless in such matters. That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them's a blessed thing, For if it were they'd have to scour Hell's floor for so much threatening ... ")5) "The Convergence of the Twain" remarks on the sinking of the Titanic, presumably when this was still a relatively recent event. ("Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls - grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.")6) "Beyond the Last Lamp" talks about one of those moments we've all had - where a strange scene (in this case, a downcast looking pair of passersby) plagues us with wonder regarding what on earth was going on.7) "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?" was a darkly humorous piece that lightened all the other depressing poems contemplating death. (Spoiler: it ends with the ghostly narrator finding that it is not her lover nor her family that digs on her grave to plant flowers, but her dog burying a bone because he/she "quite forgot It was your resting-place.")8) "The Haunter" is a touching poem that reminds us to express ourselves fully in relationships while we still have them ("I hover and hover a few feet from him Just as I used to do, But cannot answer the words he lifts me - Only listen thereto! When I could answer he did not say them")9) "An Upbraiding" muses on a similar theme as the above but with a more harsh apparition as narrator.10) "Afterwards" contemplates on what will be remembered of the narrator's life and personality after his death.The other poems included were fine but nothing worth writing home about in my book. They were largely trite and unremarkable, but it was not necessarily an unpleasant experience to sit down and read them, especially given that this was such a short collection. If you really, really enjoy Hardy's writing or care for so-so poems about predictable themes such as love, nature, and death, then this might be the book for you (or perhaps you'd go for the larger collections of Hardy's some 900 poems). Otherwise, you might want to pass on this particular book.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful. Hardy considered himself a poet before a novelist, which I found hard to believe considering I'm a big proponent of his novels. Never-the-less, his poetry shows the depth of character that created so much great literature.
    • 4/5
      One of my top dozen pre-WWII poets in the English language, alongside Shakespeare, Dryden, Wordsworth, Keats, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. (Although perhaps, admittedly, clocking in at a distant #12.)

    Book preview

    Selected Poems - Thomas Hardy

    SELECTED POEMS

    BY THOMAS HARDY

    A Digireads.com Book

    Digireads.com Publishing

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-3481-6

    Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-3747-3

    This edition copyright © 2011

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    CONTENTS

    from WESSEX POEMS

    Hap

    Neutral Tones

    The Ivy-Wife

    A Meeting with Despair

    Friends Beyond

    Thoughts of Phena

    Nature's Questioning

    The Impercipient

    In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury

    The Bride-Night Fire

    I look into my glass

    She, to Him—II

    from POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

    WAR POEMS

    A Christmas Ghost-Story

    Drummer Hodge

    POEMS OF PILGRIMAGE

    Shelley's Skylark

    Lausanne

    The Mother Mourns

    A Commonplace Day

    Doom and She

    The Subalterns

    The Sleep-Worker

    God-Forgotten

    To an Unborn Pauper Child

    To Lizbie Browne

    A Broken Appointment

    Between us now

    A Spot

    An August Midnight

    Birds at Winter Nightfall

    The Puzzled Game-Birds

    Winter in Durnover Field

    The Darkling Thrush

    The Levelled Churchyard

    The Ruined Maid

    The Self-Unseeing

    In Tenebris

    In Tenebris

    In Tenebris

    Tess's Lament

    Άγνώστω Θεω

    Embarcation

    The Souls of the Slain

    Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelley and Keats (1887)

    Zermatt: To the Matterhorn

    I Need Not Go

    At a Hasty Wedding

    His Immortality

    Wives in the Sere

    The Last Chrysanthemum

    Mad Judy

    The Respectable Burgher on the Higher Criticism

    From TIME'S LAUGHINGSTOCKS

    A Trampwoman's Tragedy

    A Sunday Morning Tragedy

    The Curate's Kindness

    The Farm-Woman's Winter

    Bereft

    She Hears the Storm

    Autumn in King's Hintock Park

    Reminiscences of a Dancing Man

    The Dead Man Walking

    The Division

    The End of the Episode

    The Night of the Dance

    At Casterbridge Fair

    The Fiddler

    A Church Romance

    The Roman Road

    The Reminder

    Night in the Old Home

    The Pine Planters

    One We Knew

    A Wet Night

    New Year's Eve

    God's Education

    The Man He Killed

    Yell'ham-Wood's Story

    The House of Hospitalities

    The Rejected Member's Wife

    Shut Out That Moon

    I Say I'll Seek Her

    In The Night She Came

    To Carrey Clavel

    The Orphaned Old Maid

    Rose-Ann

    The Homecoming

    After The Last Breath

    One Ralph Blossom Soliloquizes

    from SATIRE OF CIRCUMSTANCE

    Channel Firing

    The Convergence of the Twain

    When I set out for Lyonnesse

    A Thunderstorm In Town

    Wessex Heights

    Ah, are you digging on my grave?

    Before and After Summer

    At Day-Close in November

    The Year's Awakening

    POEMS OF 1912–13

    The Going

    Your Last Drive

    The Walk

    Rain on a Grave

    I found her out there

    Without Ceremony

    Lament

    The Haunter

    The Voice

    His Visitor

    A Circular

    A Dream or No

    After a Journey

    A Death-Day Recalled

    Beeny Cliff

    At Castle Boterel

    Places

    The Phantom Horsewoman

    The Spell of the Rose

    St. Launce's Revisited

    Where the Picnic Was

    Bereft, She Thinks She Dreams

    In The Servants' Quarters

    The Moth-Signal

    Exeunt Omnes

    SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCES

    At Tea

    In Church

    By Her Aunt's Grave

    In The Room of the Bride-Elect

    At a Watering-Place

    In the Cemetery

    Outside the Window

    In the Study

    At the Altar-Rail

    In the Nuptial Chamber

    In the Restaurant

    At the Draper's

    On the Death-Bed

    Over the Coffin

    In the Moonlight

    My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound

    The Schreckhorn

    She Charged Me

    The Moon Looks In

    In the Days of Crinoline

    The Workbox

    from MOMENTS OF VISION

    At the Word Farewell

    First Sight of Her and After

    Near Lanivet, 1872

    Quid Hic Agis?

    I travel as a phantom now

    A Merrymaking in Question

    A January Night

    The Oxen

    Transformations

    Great Things

    At Middle-Field Gate in February

    The Last Performance

    The Interloper

    Logs on the Hearth

    The Five Students

    During Wind and Rain

    A Backward Spring

    He Fears His Good Fortune

    He Revisits His First School

    Midnight on the Great Western

    Signs and Tokens

    The Shadow on the Stone

    An Upbraiding

    While Drawing in a Church-Yard

    For Life I had never cared greatly

    POEMS OF WAR AND PATRIOTISM

    Men who march away

    The Pity of it

    In Time of the Breaking of Nations

    Before Marching and After

    A New Year's Eve in War Time

    Afterwards

    more from MOMENTS OF VISION

    We Sat at the Window

    Afternoon Service at Mellstock

    Heredity

    To the Moon

    Timing Her

    The Blinded Bird

    The Wind Blew Words

    To My Father's Violin

    The Pedigree

    Where They Lived

    Something Tapped

    The Photograph

    An Anniversary

    The Last Signal

    On Sturminster Foot-Bridge

    Old Furniture

    A Thought in Two Moods

    The Caged Goldfinch

    The Ballet

    He Prefers Her Earthly

    Who's in the Next Room?

    At a Country Fair

    Jubilate

    In the Garden

    The Choirmaster's Burial

    From LATE LYRICS AND EARLIER

    Weathers

    Summer Schemes

    Faintheart in a Railway Train

    The Garden Seat

    The curtains now are drawn

    According to the Mighty Working

    Going and Staying

    At a House in Hampstead

    A Wet August

    A Night in November

    And there was a Great Calm

    Haunting Fingers

    If it's ever spring again

    The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House

    The Selfsame Song

    The Wedding Morning

    At the Railway Station, Upway

    An Autumn Rain-Scene

    An Experience

    Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard

    On the Way

    Growth in May

    By Henstridge Cross at the Year's End

    Penance

    I look in her face

    At the Entering of the New Year

    After a Romantic Day

    A Procession of Dead Days

    O I won't lead a homely life

    In the Small Hours

    The Little Old Table

    Vagg Hollow

    The Country Wedding

    Last Words to a Dumb Friend

    A Drizzling Easter Morning

    On One Who Lived and Died Where He Was Born

    Best Times

    Just the Same

    The Last Time

    The Sun's Last Look on the Country Girl

    Drawing Details in an Old Church

    Epitaph

    An Ancient to Ancients

    Surview

    The Contretemps

    On the Tune Called the Old-Hundred-and-Fourth

    A Two-Years' Idyll

    Fetching Her

    The Dream Is—Which?

    Lonely Days

    The Marble Tablet

    The Master and the Leaves

    UNCOLLECTED POEMS

    Domicilium

    from THE DYNASTS

    The Night Of Trafalgar

    Albuera

    Hussar's Song

    'My Love's gone a-fighting'

    The Eve of Waterloo

    Chorus of the Pities

    Last Chorus

    from WESSEX POEMS

    Hap

    If but some vengeful god would call to me

    From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,

    Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

    That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

    Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,

    Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;

    Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I

    Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

    But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,

    And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?

    —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,

    And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan...

    These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown

    Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

    1866.

    Neutral Tones

    We stood by a pond that winter day,

    And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,

    And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,

    —They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

    Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove

    Over tedious riddles solved years ago;

    And some words played between us to and fro—

    On which lost the more by our love.

    The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing

    Alive enough to have strength to die;

    And a grin of bitterness swept thereby

    Like an ominous bird a-wing...

    Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,

    And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me

    Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,

    And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

    1867.

    The Ivy-Wife

    I longed to love a full-boughed beech

    And be as high as he:

    I stretched an arm within his reach,

    And signaled unity.

    But with his drip he forced a breach,

    And tried to poison me.

    I gave the grasp of partnership

    To one of other race—

    A plane: he barked him strip by strip

    From upper bough to base;

    And me therewith; for gone my grip,

    My arms could not enlace.

    In new affection next I strove

    To coll an ash I saw,

    And he in trust received my love;

    Till with my soft green claw

    I cramped and bound him as I wove...

    Such was my love: ha-ha!

    By this I gained his strength and height

    Without his rivalry.

    But in my triumph I lost sight

    Of afterhaps. Soon he,

    Being bark-bound, flagged, snapped, fell outright,

    And in his fall felled me!

    A Meeting with Despair

    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.

    This scene, like my own life, I said, "is one

    Where many glooms abide;

    Toned by its fortune to a deadly dun—

    Lightless on every side.

    I glanced aloft and halted, pleasure-caught

    To see the contrast there:

    The ray-lit clouds gleamed glory; and I thought,

    There's solace everywhere!

    Then bitter self-reproaches as I stood

    I dealt me silently

    As one perverse—misrepresenting Good

    In graceless mutiny.

    Against the horizon's dim-discerned wheel

    A form rose, strange of mould:

    That he was hideous, hopeless, I could feel

    Rather than could behold.

    "'Tis a dead spot, where even the light lies spent

    To darkness!" croaked the Thing.

    Not if you look aloft! said I, intent

    On my new reasoning.

    Yea—but await awhile! he cried. "Ho-ho!—

    Look now aloft and see!"

    I looked. There, too, sat night: Heaven's radiant show

    Had gone that heartened me.

    Friends Beyond

    William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,

    Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's,

    And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now!

    Gone, I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads;

    Yet at mothy curfew-tide,

    And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads,

    They've a way of whispering to me—fellow-wight who yet abide—

    In the muted, measured note

    Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave's stillicide:

    "We have triumphed: this achievement turns the bane to antidote,

    Unsuccesses to success,

    —Many thought-worn eves and morrows to a morrow free of thought.

    "No more need we corn and clothing, feel of old terrestrial stress;

    Chill detraction stirs no sigh;

    Fear of death has even bygone us: death gave all that we possess."

    W. D.—Ye mid burn the old bass-viol that I set such value by.

    Squire.—"You may hold the manse in fee,

    You may wed my spouse, my children's memory of me may decry."

    Lady.—"You may have my rich brocades, my laces; take each household key;

    Ransack coffer, desk, bureau;

    Quiz the few poor treasures hid there, con the letters kept by me."

    Far.—"Ye mid zell my favourite heifer, ye mid let the charlock grow,

    Foul the grinterns, give up thrift."

    Far. Wife.—If ye break my best blue china, children, I shan't care or ho.

    All.—"We've no wish to hear the tidings, how the people's fortunes shift;

    What your daily doings are;

    Who are wedded, born, divided; if your lives beat slow or swift.

    "Curious not the least are we if our intents you make or mar,

    If you quire to our old tune,

    If the City stage still passes, if the weirs still roar afar."

    —Thus, with very gods' composure, freed those crosses late and soon

    Which, in life, the Trine allow

    (Why, none witteth), and ignoring all that haps beneath the moon,

    William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,

    Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's,

    And the Squire, and Lady Susan, murmur mildly to me now.

    Thoughts of Phena

    At News of Her Death

    Not a line of her writing have I,

    Not a thread of her hair,

    No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby

    I may picture her there;

    And in vain do I urge my unsight

    To conceive my lost prize

    At her close, whom I knew when her dreams were

    upbrimming with light,

    and with laughter her eyes.

    What scenes spread around her last days,

    Sad, shining, or dim?

    Did her gifts and compassions enray and enarch her sweet ways

    With an aureate nimb?

    Or did life-light decline from her years,

    And mischances control

    Her full day-star; unease, or regret, or forebodings, or fears

    Disennoble her soul?

    Thus I do but the phantom retain

    Of the maiden of yore

    As my relic; yet haply the best of her—fined in my brain

    It maybe the more

    That no line of her writing have I,

    Nor a thread of her hair,

    No mark of her late time as dame in her dwelling, whereby

    I may picture her there.

    March 1890.

    Nature's Questioning

    When I look forth at dawning, pool,

    Field, flock, and lonely tree,

    All seem to gaze at me

    Like chastened children sitting silent in a school;

    Their faces dulled, constrained, and worn,

    As though the master's ways

    Through the long teaching days

    Their first terrestrial zest had chilled and overborne.

    And on them stirs, in lippings mere

    (As if once clear in call,

    But now scarce breathed at all)—

    "We wonder, ever wonder, why we find us here!

    "Has some Vast Imbecility,

    Mighty to build and blend,

    But impotent to tend,

    Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?

    "Or come we of an Automaton

    Unconscious of our pains?...

    Or are we live remains

    Of Godhead dying downwards, brain and eye now gone?

    "Or is it that some high Plan betides,

    As yet not understood,

    Of Evil stormed by

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