Thomas Hardy Wessex Poems & Other Verses
If but some vengeful god would call to me / From
up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing, /
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, / That thy
love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Thomas
Hardy
Wessex Poems & Other Verses
Thomas Hardy
Hardy had always written poetry and regarded the
novel as an inferior genre. His verse is spare,
unadorned, and unromantic, and its pervasive
theme is man's futile struggle against cosmic
forces. Like many of Hardy's novels, the
fifty-one poems of The Wessex Poems and Other
Verses are all set against the bleak and
forbidding Dorset landscape, whose physical
harshness echoes that of an indifferent, if not
malevolent, universe. Hardy's vision reflects a
world in which Victorian complacencies were
dying but its moralism was not, and in which
science had eliminated the comforting
certainties of religion.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Wessex Poems & Other Verses. 1898.
1. The Temporary the All
CHANGE and chancefulness in my flowering youthtime,
Set me sun by sun near to one unchosen;
Wrought us fellowly, and despite divergence,
Friends interblent us.
"Cherish him can I while the true one forthcome- 5
Come the rich fulfiller of my prevision;
Life is roomy yet, and the odds unbounded."
So self-communed I.
Thwart my wistful way did a damsel saunter,
Fair not fairest, good not best of her feather; 10
"Maiden meet," held I, "till arise my forefelt
Wonder of women."
Long a visioned hermitage deep desiring,
Tenements uncouth I was fain to house in;
"Let such lodging be for a breath-while," thought I, 15
"Soon a more seemly.
"Then, high handiwork will I make my life-deed,
Truth and Light outshow; but the ripe time pending,
Intermissive aim at the thing sufficeth."
Thus I ... But lo, me! 20
Mistress, ...
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