Near to the weary scene should flitAnd drop one plume as pledge that Heaven inscrolls the wrong.
—There are who, rapt to heights of trancéd trust,
These tokens claim to feel and see,
Read radiant hints of times to be—
Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust.
Such scope is granted not to lives like mine . . .
I have lain in dead men’s beds, have walked
The tombs of those with whom I’d talked,
Called many a gone and goodly one to shape a sign,
And panted for response. But none replies;
No warnings loom, nor whisperings
To open out my limitings,
And Nescience mutely muses: When a man falls he lies.
My Cicely
(17–)
“Alive?”—And I leapt in my wonder,
Was faint of my joyance,
And grasses and grove shone in garments
Of glory to me.
“She lives, in a plenteous well-being,
To-day as aforehand;
The dead bore the name—though a rare one—
The name that bore she.”
She lived . . . I, afar in the city
Of frenzy-led factions,
Had squandered green years and maturer
In bowing the knee
To Baals illusive and specious,
Till chance had there voiced me
That one I loved vainly in nonage
Had ceased her to be.
The passion the planets had scowled on,
And change had let dwindle,
Her death-rumour smartly relifted
To full apogee.
I mounted a steed in the dawning
With acheful remembrance,
And made for the ancient West Highway
To far Exonb’ry.
Passing heaths, and the House of Long Sieging,
I neared the thin steeple
That tops the fair fane of Poore’s olden
Episcopal see;
And, changing anew my onbearer,
I traversed the downland
Whereon the bleak hill-graves of Chieftains
Bulge barren of tree;
And still sadly onward I followed
That Highway the Icen,
Which trails its pale riband down Wessex
O’er lynchet and lea.
Along through the Stour-bordered Forum,
Where Legions had wayfared,
And where the slow river upglasses
Its green canopy,
And by Weatherbury Castle, and thencefrom
Through Casterbridge held I
Still on, to entomb her my vision
Saw stretched pallidly.
No highwayman’s trot blew the night-wind
To me so life-weary,
But only the creak of the gibbets
Or waggoners’ jee.
Triple-ramparted Maidon gloomed grayly
Above me from southward,
And north the hill-fortress of Eggar,
And square Pummerie.
The Nine-Pillared Cromlech, the Bride-streams,
The Axe, and the Otter
I passed, to the gate of the city
Where Exe scents the sea;
Till, spent, in the graveacre pausing,
I learnt ’twas not my Love
To whom Mother Church had just murmured
A last lullaby.
—“Then, where dwells the Canon’s kinswoman,
My friend of aforetime?”—
(’Twas hard to repress my heart-heavings
And new ecstasy.)
“She wedded.”—“Ah!”—“Wedded beneath her—
She keeps the stage-hostel
Ten miles hence, beside the great Highway—
The famed Lions-Three.
“Her spouse was her lackey—no option
’Twixt wedlock and worse things;
A lapse over-sad for a lady
Of her pedigree!”
I shuddered, said nothing, and wandered
To shades of green laurel:
Too ghastly had grown those first tidings
So brightsome of blee!
For,
