POEMS OF 1912–13

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 give 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 fleeing No soul foreseeing— Not even I—would undo me so!

Here by the moorway you returned, And saw the borough lights ahead That lit your face—all undiscerned To be in a week the face of the dead, And you told of the charm of that haloed view That never again would beam on you.

And on your left you passed the spot Where eight days later you were to lie, And be spoken of as one who was not; Beholding it with a cursory eye As alien from you, though under its tree You soon would halt everlastingly.

I drove not with you . . . Yet had I sat At your side that eve I should not have seen That the countenance I was glancing at Had a last-time look in the flickering sheen, Nor have read the writing upon your face, “I go hence soon to my resting-place;

“You may miss me then. But I shall not know How many times you visit me there, Or what your thoughts are, or if you go There never at all. And I shall not care. Should you censure me I shall take no heed And even your praises I shall not need.”

True: never you’ll know. And you will not mind. But shall I then slight you because of such? Dear ghost, in the past did you ever find The thought “What profit?” move me much Yet the fact indeed remains the same, You are past love, praise, indifference, blame.

You did not walk with me Of late to the hill-top tree By the gated ways, As in earlier days; You were weak and lame, So you never came, And I went alone, and I did not mind, Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day Just in the former way: Surveyed around The familiar ground By myself again: What difference, then? Only that underlying sense Of the look of a room on returning thence.

Clouds spout upon her Their waters amain In ruthless disdain,— Her who but lately Had shivered with pain As at touch of dishonour If there had lit on her So coldly, so straightly Such arrows of rain.

She who to shelter Her delicate head Would quicken and quicken Each tentative tread If drops chanced to pelt her That summertime spills In dust-paven rills When thunder-clouds thicken And birds close their bills.

Would that I lay there And she were housed here! Or better, together Were folded away there Exposed to one weather We both,—who would stray there When sunny the day there, Or evening was clear At the prime of the year.

Soon will be growing Green blades from her mound, And daises be showing Like stars on the ground, Till she form part of them— Ay—the sweet heart of them, Loved beyond measure With a child’s pleasure All her life’s round.

I found her out there On a slope few see, That falls westwardly To the salt-edged air, Where the ocean breaks On the purple strand, And the hurricane shakes The solid land.

I brought her here, And have laid her to rest In a noiseless nest No sea beats near. She will never be stirred In her loamy cell By the waves long heard And loved so well.

So she does not sleep By those haunted heights The Atlantic smites And the blind gales sweep, Whence she often would gaze At Dundagel’s far head, While the dipping blaze Dyed her face fire-red;

And would sigh at the tale Of sunk Lyonnesse, As a wind-tugged tress Flapped her cheek like a flail; Or listen at whiles With a thought-bound brow To the murmuring miles She is far from now.

Yet her shade, maybe, Will creep underground Till it catch the sound Of that western sea As it swells and sobs Where she once domiciled, And joy in its throbs With the heart of a child.

It was your way, my dear, To be gone 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!”

How she would have loved A party to-day!— Bright-hatted and gloved, With table and tray And chairs on the lawn Her smiles would have shone With welcomings . . . But She is shut, she is shut From friendship’s spell In the jailing shell Of her tiny cell.

Or she would have reigned At a dinner to-night With ardours unfeigned, And a generous delight; All in her abode She’d have freely bestowed On her guests . . . But alas, She is shut under grass Where no cups flow, Powerless to know That it might be so.

And she would have sought With a child’s eager glance The shy snowdrops brought By the new year’s advance, And peered in the rime Of Candlemas-time For crocuses . . . chanced It that she were not tranced From sights she loved best; Wholly possessed By an infinite rest!

And we are here staying Amid these stale things Who care not for gaying, And those junketings That used so to joy her, And never to cloy her As us they cloy! . . . But She is shut, she is shut From the cheer of them, dead To all done and said In a yew-arched bed.

He does not think that I haunt here nightly: How shall I let him know 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 listen thereto!

When I could answer he did not say them: When I could let him know How I would like to join in his journeys Seldom he wished to go. Now that he goes and wants me with him More than he used to do, Never he sees my faithful phantom Though he speaks thereto.

Yes, I accompany him to places Only dreamers know, Where the shy hares limp long paces, Where the night rooks go; Into old aisles where the past is all to him, Close as his shade can do, Always lacking the power to call to him, Near as I reach thereto!

What a good haunter I am, O tell him, Quickly make him know If he but sigh since my loss befell him Straight to his side I go. Tell him a faithful one is doing All that love can do Still that his path may be worth pursuing, And to bring peace thereto.

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness Travelling across the wet mead to me here, You being ever consigned to existlessness, Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward, Leaves around me falling, Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward And the woman calling.

I come across from Mellstock while the moon wastes weaker To behold where I lived with you for twenty years and more: I shall go in the gray, at the passing of the mail-train, And need no setting open of the long familiar door As before.

The change I notice in my once own quarters! A brilliant budded border where the daisies used to be, The rooms new painted, and the pictures altered, And other cups and saucers, and no cozy nook for tea As with me.

I discern the dim faces of the sleep-wrapt servants; They are not those who tended me through feeble hours and strong, But strangers quite, who never knew my rule here, Who never saw me painting, never heard my softling song Float along.

So I don’t want to linger in this re-decked dwelling, I feel too uneasy at the contrasts I behold, And I make again for Mellstock to return here never, And rejoin the roomy silence, and the mute and manifold Souls of old.

As “legal representative” I read a missive not my own, On new designs the senders give For clothes, in tints as shown.

Here figure blouses, gowns for tea, And presentation-trains of state, Charming ball-dresses, millinery, Warranted up to date.

And this gay-pictured, spring-time shout Of Fashion, hails what lady proud? Her who before last year was out Was costumed in a shroud.

Why go to Saint-Juliot? What’s Juliot to me? I was but made fancy By some necromancy That much of my life claims the spot as its key.

Yes. I have had dreams of that place in the West, And a maiden abiding Thereat as in hiding; Fair-eyed and white-shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed.

And of how, coastward bound on a night long ago, There lonely I found her, The sea-birds around her, And other than nigh things uncaring to know.

So sweet her life there (in my thought has it seemed) That quickly she drew me To take her unto me, And lodge her long years with me. Such have I dreamed.

But nought of that maid from Saint-Juliot I see; Can she ever have been here, And shed her life’s sheen here, The woman I thought a long housemate with me?

Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist? Or a Vallency Valley With stream and leafed alley, Or Beeny, or Bos with its flounce flinging mist?

Hereto I come to interview a 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— Viewed 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.

Beeny did not quiver, Juliot grew not gray, Thin Valency’s river Held its wonted way. Bos seemed not to utter Dimmest note of dirge, Targan mouth a mutter To its creamy surge.

Yet though these, unheeding, Listless, passed the hour Of her spirit’s speeding, She had, in her flower, Sought and loved the places— Much and often pined For their lonely faces When in towns confined.

Why did not Valency In his purl deplore One whose haunts were whence he Drew his limpid store? Why did Bos not thunder, Targan apprehend Body and breath were sunder Of their former friend?

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.

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say, As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain, And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain, And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.

—Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky, And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh, And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore, The woman now is—elsewhere—whom the ambling pony bore, And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will see it nevermore.

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway, And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette, I look behind at the fading byway, And see on its slope, now glistening wet, Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted In dry March weather. We climb the road Beside a chaise. We had just alighted To ease the sturdy pony’s load When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of Matters not much, nor to what it led,— Something that life will not be balked of Without rude reason till hope is dead, And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever A time of such quality, since or before, In that hill’s story? To one mind never, Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore, By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border, And much have they faced there, first and last, Of the transitory in Earth’s long order; But what they record in colour and cast Is—that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour, In mindless rote, has ruled from sight The substance now, one phantom figure Remains on the slope, as when that night Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking, I look back at it amid the rain For the very last time; for my sand is sinking, And I shall traverse old love’s domain Never again.

Nobody says: Ah, that is the place Where chanced, in the hollow of years ago, What none of the Three Towns cared to know— The birth of a little girl of grace— The sweetest the house saw, first or last; Yet it was so On that day long past.

Nobody thinks: There, there she lay In a room by the Hoe, like the bud of a flower, And listened, just after the bedtime hour, To the stammering chimes that used to play The quaint Old Hundred-and-Thirteenth tune In Saint Andrew’s tower Night, morn, and noon.

Nobody calls to mind that here Upon Boterel Hill, where the carters skid, With cheeks whose airy flush outbid Fresh fruit in bloom, and free of fear, She cantered down, as if she must fall (Though she never did), To the charm of all.

Nay: one there is to whom these things, That nobody else’s mind calls back, Have a savour that scenes in being lack, And a presence more than the actual brings; To whom to-day is beneaped and stale, And its urgent clack But a vapid tale.

Queer are the ways of a man I know: He comes and stands In a careworn craze, And looks at the sands And the seaward haze, With moveless hands And face and gaze, Then turns to go . . . And what does he see when he gazes so?

They say he sees as an instant thing More clear than to-day, A sweet soft scene That once was in play By that briny green; Yes, notes alway Warm, real, and keen, What his back years bring— A phantom of his own figuring.

Of this vision of his they might say more: Not only there Does he see this sight, But everywhere In his brain—day, night, As if on the air It were drawn rose bright— Yea, far from that shore Does he carry this vision of heretofore:

A ghost-girl-rider. And though, toil-tried, He withers daily, Time touches her not, But she still rides gaily In his rapt thought On that shagged and shaly Atlantic spot, And as when first eyed Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide.