Thomas Hardy

When I set out for Lyonnesse, A hundred miles away, The rime was on the spray, And starlight lit my lonesomeness When I set out for Lyonnesse A hundred miles away
What would bechance at Lyonnesse While I should sojourn there No prophet durst ...

'It is a foolish thing,' said I,'To bear with such, and pass it by;
Yet so I do,
I know not why
'And at each clash I would

I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their househol...

I
OK into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, "Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin
" For then,
I, undistrest By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity...

By Rome's dim relics there walks a man,
Eyes bent; and he carries a basket and spade;
I guess what impels him to scrape and scan;
Yea, his dreams of that Empire long decayed

In our heart of hearts
Victory crown the just,
And that braggarts
Surely bite the dust,

EY bear him to his resting-place— In slow procession sweeping by; I follow at a stranger's space; His kindred they, his sweetheart I
Unchanged my gown of garish dye, Though sable-sad is their attire; But they stand round with griefless eye, W...

EN I look forth at dawning, pool, Field, flock, and lonely tree, All seem to look 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...

'Whenever I plunge my arm, like this,
In a basin of water,
I never miss The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray
Hence the only prime And real love-rhyme That I know by heart, And that ...

I In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she
II Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres
II Over the ...

TO Jenny came a gentle youth From inland leazes lone; His love was fresh as apple-blooth By Parrett,
Yeo, or Tone
And duly he entreated her To be his tender minister, And call him aye her own
Fair Jenny's life had hardly been A life...

He does not think that I haunt here nightly: How shall I let him
That whither his fancy sets him wandering I, too, alertly go
—Hover and hover a few feet from him Just as I used to do,
But cannot answer his words addressed me — Only...

Queer are the ways of a man I know:
He comes and
In a careworn craze,
And looks at the

Through snowy woods and shady  We went to play a
To the lonely manor-lady  By the light of the Christmas moon
We violed till, upward glancing  To where a mirror leaned,
We saw her airily dancing,  Deeming her movements screened;

UR troubles shrink not, though I feel them less Here, far away, than when I tarried near; I even smile old smiles—with listlessness— Yet smiles they are, not ghastly mockeries mere
A thought too strange to house within my brain Haunting its o...

Here we broached the Christmas barrel,
Pushed up the charred log-ends;
Here we sang the Christmas carol,
And called in friends