Some more poems by Thomas Hardy

The following poems were written after the death in 1912 of Hardy's first wife, Emma Gifford. 

Without Ceremony

It was your way, my dear,

To vanish without a word

When callers, friends, or kin

Had left, and I hastened in

To rejoin you, as I inferred.

And when you'd a mind to career

Off anywhere—say to town

You were all on a sudden gone

Before I had thought thereon,

Or noticed your trunks were down.

So, now that you disappear

For ever in that swift style,

Your meaning seems to me

Just as it used to be:

"Good-bye is not worth while.

The Going

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 ever 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 darkening dankness

       The yawning blankness

Of the perspective sickens 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, reining nigh me,

       Would muse and eye me,

While Life unrolled us its very best.

Why, then, latterly, did we not 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 spring weather

       We'll visit together

Those places that once we visited."

       Well, well! All's past amend,

       Unchangeable. It must go.

I seem but a dead man held on end

To sink down soon. . . . O you could not know

       That such swift fleeting

       No soul foreseeing—

Not even I—would undo me so!

[These last lines are not strictly true; Emma had been unwell for some time and he must have known it; he just hadn't been paying attention, that's all.]

After A Journey

Hereto I come to view a voiceless ghost;

  Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?

Up the cliff, down, till I'm lonely, lost,

 And the unseen waters ejaculations awe me.

Where you will next be there's no knowing,

  Facing round about me everywhere,

           With your nut-coloured hair,

And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;

   Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;

What have you now found to say of our past—

   Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?

Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?

   Things were not lastly as firstly well

           With us twain, you tell?

But all's closed now, despite Time's derision.

I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

   To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,

The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone

   At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,

And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow

   That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,

           When you were all aglow,

And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,

   The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily;

Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,

   For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.

Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,

   The bringing me here; nay bring me here again!

           I am just the same as when

Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.