Poem
(By Thomas Hardy)
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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 Where I could not follow With wing of swallow To gain one glimpse of you anon! Never to bid good bye, Or lip me the softest call, Or utter a wish for a word, while I Saw morning harden upon the wall. Unmoved, unknowing That your great going Had place that moment, and altered all. Why do you make me leave the house And think for a breath it is you I see At the end of the alley of bending boughs Where so often at dusk you used to be; Till in darkning dankness The yawning blankness Of the perspective sicken me! You were she who abode By those red-veined rocks far West, You were the swan-necked one who rode Along the beetling Beeny Crest, And, reigning nigh me, Would muse and eye me, While Life unrolled us its very best Why, then, latterly did we speak, Did we not think of those days long dead, And ere your vanishing strive to seek That time's renewal? We might have said, 'In this bright sping weather We'll visit together Those places that once we visited.' Well, well! All's past amend, Unchanged. It must go. I seem but a dead man held on end To sink down soon .. O you could not know That soul swift fleeing No soul foreseeing - Not even I - would undo me so! (December 1912) |
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Here by the moorway you returned, And saw the borough lights ahead That lit your face - all undiscerned To be in a week the face of the dead, And you told of the charm of that haloed view That never again would beam on you? And on your left you passed the spot Where eight days later you were to lie And be spoken of as one who was not; beholding it with a heedless eye As alien from you, though under its tree You soon woud halt everlastingly. |
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