Old Dexterities in Witchery Gone: Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

These are perfect sonnets by the master. His thought is crabbed, his metre a little eccentric at times, so that he reminds me of Emily Dickinson, but also of Sydney and Shakespeare, who contorted themselves to fit the little sonnet, and of Yeats, especially the first of the She, to Him poems, which I hear in Adam’s Curse, and When You Are Old (When you are old and grey and full of sleep…). He is as austere as Herbert, but in an unsavioured dark where even pagan monuments are mouldy and the stones of old cathedrals wiggle free and drop, crushing lovers with a godless, unrequited love.

REVULSION

Though I waste watches framing words to fetter
Some unknown spirit to mine in clasp and kiss,
Out of the night there looms a sense ‘twere better
To fail obtaining whom one fails to miss.

For winning love we win the risk of losing,
And losing love is as one’s life were riven;
It cuts like contumely and keen ill-using
To cede what was superfluously given.

Let me then never feel the fateful thrilling
That devastates the love-worn wooer’s frame,
The hot ado of fevered hopes, the chilling
That agonizes disappointed aim!
So may I live no junctive law fulfilling,
And my heart’s table bear no woman’s name.
1866

SHE, TO HIM

I

When you shall see me in the toils of Time,
My lauded beauties carried off from me,
My eyes no longer stars as in their prime,
My name forgot of Maiden Fair and Free;

When, in your being, heart concedes to mind,
And judgment, though you scarce its process know,
Recalls the excellencies I once enshrined,
And you are irked that they have withered so:

Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame,
That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill,
Knowing me in my soul the very same—
One who would die to spare you touch of ill!—
Will you not grant to old affection’s claim
The hand of friendship down Life’s sunless hill?

II

Perhaps, long hence, when I have passed away,
Some other’s feature, accent, thought like mine,
Will carry you back to what I used to say,
And bring some memory of your love’s decline.

Then you may pause awhile and think, “Poor Jade!”
And yield a sigh to me—as ample do,
Not as the tittle of a debt unpaid
To one who could resign her all to you—

And thus reflecting, you will never see
That your thin thought, in two small words conveyed,
Was no such fleeting phantom-thought to me,
But the Whole Life wherein my part was played;
And you amid its fitful masquerade
A thought, as I in your life seem to be!

III

I will be faithful to thee; aye, I will!
And death shall choose me with a wondering eye
That he did not discern and domicile
One his by right ever since that last Good-bye!

I have no care for friends, or kin, or prime
Of manhood who deal gently with me here;
Amid the happy people of my time
Who work their love’s fulfillment, I appear

Numb as a vane that cankers on its point,
True to the wind that kissed ere that canker came:
Despised by souls of Now, who would disjoint
The mind from memory, making Life all aim,

My old dexterities in witchery gone
And nothing left for love to look upon.

IV

This love puts all humanity to me;
I can but maledict her, pray her dead,
For giving love and getting love of thee—
Feeding a heart that else my own had fed!

How much I love I know not, life not known,
Save as one unit I would add love by;
But this I know, my being is but thine own—
Fused from its separateness by ecstasy.

And thus I grasp my amplitudes, of her
Ungrasped, though helped by nigh-regarding eyes;
Canst thou then hate me as an envier
Who see unrecked what I so dearly prize?
Believe me, Lost One, Love is lovelier
The more it shapes its moan in selfish-wise.
1866