Collected poems of Thomas Hardy :: :: University of Virginia Library

“Alive?”—And I leapt in my wonder,
Was faint of my joyance,
And grasses and grove shone in garments
Of glory to me.

“She lives, in a plenteous well-being,
To-day as aforehand;
The dead bore the name—though a rare one—
The name that bore she.”

She lived . . . I, afar in the city
Of frenzy-led factions,
Had squandered green years and maturer
In bowing the knee

To Baals illusive and specious,
Till chance had there voiced me
That one I loved vainly in nonage
Had ceased her to be.

The passion the planets had scowled on,
And change had let dwindle,
Her death-rumour smartly relifted
To full apogee.

I mounted a steed in the dawning
With acheful remembrance,
And made for the ancient West Highway
To far Exonb'ry.

Passing heaths, and the House of Long Sieging,
I neared the thin steeple
That tops the fair fane of Poore's olden
Episcopal see;

And, changing anew my blown bearer,
I traversed the downland
Whereon the bleak hill-graves of Chieftains
Bulge barren of tree;

And still sadly onward I followed
That Highway the Icen,
Which trails its pale riband down Wessex
By lynchet and lea.

Along through the Stour-bordered Forum,
Where Legions had wayfared,
And where the slow river-face glasses
Its green canopy,

And by Weatherbury Castle, and thencefrom
Through Casterbridge held I
Still on, to entomb her my mindsight
Saw stretched pallidly.

No highwayman's trot blew the night-wind
To me so life-weary,
But only the creak of a gibbet
Or waggoner's jee.

Triple-ramparted Maidon gloomed grayly
Above me from southward,
And north the hill-fortress of Eggar,
And square Pummerie.

The Nine-Pillared Cromlech, the Bride-streams,
The Axe, and the Otter
I passed, to the gate of the city
Where Exe scents the sea;

Till, spent, in the graveacre pausing,
I learnt 'twas not my Love
To whom Mother Church had just murmured
A last lullaby.

—“Then, where dwells the Canon's kinswoman,
My friend of aforetime?”
I asked, to disguise my heart-heavings
And new ecstasy.

“She wedded.”—“Ah!”—“Wedded beneath her—
She keeps the stage-hostel
Ten miles hence, beside the great Highway—
The famed Lions-Three.

“Her spouse was her lackey—no option
'Twixt wedlock and worse things;
A lapse over-sad for a lady
Of her pedigree!”

I shuddered, said nothing, and wandered
To shades of green laurel:
More ghastly than death were these tidings
Of life's irony!

For, on my ride down I had halted
Awhile at the Lions,
And her—her whose name had once opened
My heart as a key—

I'd looked on, unknowing, and witnessed
Her jests with the tapsters,
Her liquor-fired face, her thick accents
In naming her fee.

“O God, why this seeming derision!”
I cried in my anguish:
“O once Loved, O fair Unforgotten—
That Thing—meant it thee!

“Inurned and at peace, lost but sainted,
Were grief I could compass;
Depraved—'tis for Christ's poor dependent
A cruel decree!”

I backed on the Highway; but passed not
The hostel. Within there
Too mocking to Love's re-expression
Was Time's repartee!

Uptracking where Legions had wayfared
By cromlechs unstoried,
And lynchets, and sepultured Chieftains,
In self-colloquy,

A feeling stirred in me and strengthened
That she was not my Love,
But she of the garth, who lay rapt in
Her long reverie.

And thence till to-day I persuade me
That this was the true one;
That Death stole intact her young dearness
And innocency.

Frail-witted, illuded they call me;
I may be. Far better
To dream than to own the debasement
Of sweet Cicely.

Moreover I rate it unseemly
To hold that kind Heaven
Could work such device—to her ruin
And my misery.

So, lest I disturb my choice vision,
I shun the West Highway,
Even now, when the knaps ring with rhythms
From blackbird and bee;

And feel that with slumber half-conscious
She rests in the church-hay,
Her spirit unsoiled as in youth-time
When lovers were we.