Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses. Thomas Hardy

            That mirror

         Which makes of men a transparency,

            Who holds that mirror

      And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see

            Of you and me?

            That mirror

         Whose magic penetrates like a dart,

            Who lifts that mirror

      And throws our mind back on us, and our heart,

            Until we start?

            That mirror

         Works well in these night hours of ache;

            Why in that mirror

      Are tincts we never see ourselves once take

            When the world is awake?

            That mirror

         Can test each mortal when unaware;

            Yea, that strange mirror

      May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair,

            Glassing it – where?

      Forty Augusts – aye, and several more – ago,

         When I paced the headlands loosed from dull employ,

      The waves huzza’d like a multitude below

         In the sway of an all-including joy

            Without cloy.

      Blankly I walked there a double decade after,

         When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me,

      And I heard the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter

         At the lot of men, and all the vapoury

            Things that be.

      Wheeling change has set me again standing where

         Once I heard the waves huzza at Lammas-tide;

      But they supplicate now – like a congregation there

         Who murmur the Confession – I outside,

            Prayer denied.

      Why be at pains that I should know

         You sought not me?

      Do breezes, then, make features glow

         So rosily?

      Come, the lit port is at our back,

         And the tumbling sea;

      Elsewhere the lampless uphill track

         To uncertainty!

      O should not we two waifs join hands?

         I am alone,

      You would enrich me more than lands

         By being my own.

      Yet, though this facile moment flies,

         Close is your tone,

      And ere to-morrow’s dewfall dries

         I plough the unknown.

      We sat at the window looking out,

      And the rain came down like silken strings

      That Swithin’s day.  Each gutter and spout

      Babbled unchecked in the busy way

         Of witless things:

      Nothing to read, nothing to see

      Seemed in that room for her and me

         On Swithin’s day.

      We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes,

      For I did not know, nor did she infer

      How much there was to read and guess

      By her in me, and to see and crown

         By me in her.

      Wasted were two souls in their prime,

      And great was the waste, that July time

         When the rain came down.

         On afternoons of drowsy calm

            We stood in the panelled pew,

      Singing one-voiced a Tate-and-Brady psalm

            To the tune of “Cambridge New.”

         We watched the elms, we watched the rooks,

            The clouds upon the breeze,

      Between the whiles of glancing at our books,

            And swaying like the trees.

         So mindless were those outpourings! —

            Though I am not aware

      That I have gained by subtle thought on things

            Since we stood psalming there.

      There floated the sounds of church-chiming,

         But no one was nigh,

      Till there came, as a break in the loneness,

         Her father, she, I.

      And we slowly moved on to the wicket,

         And downlooking stood,

      Till anon people passed, and amid them

         We parted for good.

      Greater, wiser, may part there than we three

         Who parted there then,

      But never will Fates colder-featured

         Hold sway there again.

      Of the churchgoers through the still meadows

         No single one knew

      What a play was played under their eyes there

         As thence we withdrew.

      Here’s the mould of a musical bird long passed from light,

      Which over the earth before man came was winging;

      There’s a contralto voice I heard last night,

      That lodges in me still with its sweet singing.

      Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird

      Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending

      Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard,

      In the full-fugued song of the universe unending.