Thomas Hardy Selected Poems

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Chronology

Introduction

Hardy’s ‘second’ career

Turning to poetry

Poetry as posthumous vision

Necessity and free will

Typology and the pattern of a life

Sequences and patterns

God and history

Hardy and the dead

The ‘Poems of 1912-13’

Restoration and the past

Wessex

Hardy’s style

The Gothic art-principle

Words

Prosody

Hardy and literary tradition

Selecting Hardy

A note on the annotations

A note on the text

The Poems

From Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

1. The temporary the All
2. Hap
3. Neutral Tones
4. The Peasant’s Confession
5. A Sign-Seeker
6. Friends Beyond
7. Thoughts of Phena
8. Nature’s Questioning
9. In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury
10. ‘I look into my glass’

From Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

1. V.R. 1819-1901
2. Drummer Hodge
3. The Souls of Slain
4. Rome: Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter
5. Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats
6. A Commonplace Day
7. To an Unborn Pauper Child
8. Her Reproach
9. His Immortality
10. Winter in Durnover Field
11. The Darkling Thrush
12. The Respectable Burgher on ‘The Higher Criticism’
13. The Self-Unseeing
14. In Tenebris I
15. In Tenebris II
16. In Tenebris III
17. Tess’s Lament
18. Sapphic Fragment
19. ’AΓΝΩΣΤΩӨЕΩ

From Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909)

1. The Revisitation
2. A Trampwoman’s Tragedy
3. In the Mind’s Eye
4. He Abjures Love
5. Let Me Enjoy
6. Julie-Jane
7. The Dead Quire
8. Night in the Old Home
9. After the Last Breath
10. One We Knew
11. George Meredith, 1828-1909
12. Yell’ham Wood’s Story
13. A Young Man’s Epigram on Existence

From Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914)

1. In Front of Landscape
2. Channel Firing
3. The Convergence of Twain
4. ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’
5. Wessex Heights
6. A Singer Asleep
7. Self-Unconscious
8. Under the Waterfall

‘Poems of 1912-13’

1. The Going
2. Your Last Drive
3. The Walk
4. Rain on a Grave
5. ‘I found her out there’
6. Without Ceremony
7. Lament
8. The Haunt
9. The Voice
10. His Visitor
11. A Circular
12. A Dream or No
13. After a Journey
14. A Death-Day Recalled
15. Beeny Cliff
16. At Castle Boterel
17. Places
18. The Phantom Horsewoman
19. The Spell of Rose
20. St Launce’s Revisited
21. Where the Picnic Was
22. The Obliterate Tomb
23. The Workbox
24. Exeunt Omnes
25. A Poet
26. In the Cemetery

From Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917)

1. Moments of Vision
2. The Voice of Things
3. Apostrophes to an Old Psalm Tune
4. At the Word ‘Farewell’
5. Heredity
6. Near Laniet, 1872
7. Copying Architecture in an Old Minster
8. To Shakespeare
9. Quid Hic Agis?
10. On a Midsummer Eve
11. The Blinded Bird
12. The Statue of Liberty
13. The Change
14. Lines to a Movement in Mozart’s E-Flat Symphony
15. The Pedigree
16. His Heart: A Woman’s Dream
17. The Oxen
18. The Photograph
19. The Last Signal
20. The Figure in the Scene
21. Overlooking the River Stour
22. The Musical Box
23. Old Furniture
24. The Five Students
25. The Wind’s Prophecy
26. During Wind and Rain
27. A Backward Spring
28. He Revisits His First School
29. ‘I thought, my heart’
30. The Shadow on the Stone
31. ‘For Life I had never cared greatly’
32. The Pity of It
33. In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’
34. A New Year’s Eve in War Time
35. ‘I looked up from my writing’
36. Afterwards

From Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)

1. Weathers
2. ‘According to the Might Working’
3. The Contretemps
4. ‘And There Was a Great Calm’
5. The Selfsame Song
6. At Lulworth Cove a Century Back
7. The Collector Cleans His Picture
8. On the Tune Called the Old-Hundred-and-fourth
9. Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard
10. After a Romantic Day
11. In the Small Hours
12. Last Words to a Dumb Friend
13. A Drizzling Easter Morning
14. ‘I was the midmost’
15. The Inscription
16. The Whitewashed Wall
17. After Reading Psalms XXXIX, XL, etc.
18. Surview

From Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925)

1. Waiting Both
2. A Bird-Scene at a Rural Dwelling
3. In a Former Resort after Many Years
4. A Cathedral Façade at Midnight
5. The Monument-Maker
6. The Later Autumn
7. An East-End Curate
8. Sine Prole
9. A Sheep Fair
10. Snow in the Suburbs
11. A Light Snow-Fall after Frost
12. Music in a Snowy Street
13. In Sherborne Abbey
14. The Mock Wife
15. ‘Not only I’
16. Her Haunting-Ground
17. Days to Recollect
18. This Summer and Last
19. ‘Nothing matters much’
20. Before My Friend Arrived
21. The Bird-Cather’s Boy
22. Song to an Old Burden
23. ‘Why do I?’

From Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928)

1. The New Dawn’s Business
2. Proud Songsters
3. The Prophetess
4. A Wish for Unconsciousness
5. The Love-Letters
6. Throwing a Tree
7. Lying Awake
8. Childhood Among the Ferns
9. A Poet’s Though
10. ‘I watched a blackbird’
11. A Nightmare, and the Next Thing
12. So Various
13. An Evening in Galilee
14. We field-women
15. He Never Expected Much
16. Standing by the Mantelpiece
17. Our Old Friend Dualism
18. Drinking Song
19. The Aged Newspaper Soliloquizes
20. Christmas: 1924
21. The Boy’s Dream
22. Family Portrait
23. Christmas in the Elgin Room
24. ‘We are getting to the end’
25. He Resolves to Say No More

From Hardy’s Uncollected Poems

1. Thoughts from Sophocles
2. The Eve of Waterloo
3. Prologue
4. Epilogue
5. On One Who Thought No Other Could Write Such English as Himself

Selections from Hardy’s Autobiography

Appendix I: Two Early Versions of Poems by Hardy

Appendix II