Thomas Hardy Poems

I MARK the months in liveries dank and dry,
The day-tides many-shaped and hued;
I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.
...

There trudges one to a merry-making
With sturdy swing,
On whom the rain comes down.
...

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.
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O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free-
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.
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THEY sing their dearest songs--
He, she, all of them--yea,
Treble and tenor and bass.
And one to play;
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I
I saw a slowly-stepping train --
Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar --
Following in files across a twilit plain
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When I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
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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
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In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
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I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
...