Moments of Vision

MOMENTS OF VISION AND
MISCELLANEOUS VERSES
by Thomas Hardy
Contents:
Moments of Vision
The Voice of Things
"Why be at pains?"
"We
sat at the window"
Afternoon Service at Mellstock
At the
Wicket-gate
In a Museum
Apostrophe to an Old Psalm Tune
At
the Word "Farewell"
First Sight of Her and After
The Rival

Heredity
"You were the sort that men forget"
She, I, and They

Near Lanivet, 1872
Joys of Memory
To the Moon
Copying
Architecture in an Old Minster
To Shakespeare
Quid hic agis?
On
a Midsummer Eve
Timing Her
Before Knowledge
The Blinded
Bird
"The wind blew words"
The Faded Face
The Riddle
The
Duel
At Mayfair Lodgings
To my Father's Violin
The Statue of
Liberty
The Background and the Figure
The Change
Sitting on
the Bridge
The Young Churchwarden
"I travel as a phantom now"

Lines to a Movement in Mozart's E-flat Symphony
"In the
seventies"
The Pedigree
This Heart. A Woman's Dream
Where
they lived
The Occultation
Life laughs Onward
The
Peace-offering

"Something tapped"
The Wound
A Merrymaking
in Question
"I said and sang her excellence"
A January Night. 1879

A Kiss
The Announcement
The Oxen
The Tresses
The
Photograph
On a Heath
An Anniversary
"By the Runic Stone"

The Pink Frock
Transformations
In her Precincts
The Last Signal

The House of Silence
Great Things
The Chimes
The Figure in
the Scene
"Why did I sketch"
Conjecture
The Blow
Love the
Monopolist
At Middle-field Gate in February
The Youth who
carried a Light
The Head above the Fog
Overlooking the River
Stour
The Musical Box
On Sturminster Foot-bridge
Royal

Sponsors
Old Furniture
A Thought in Two Moods
The Last
Performance
"You on the tower"
The Interloper
Logs on the
Hearth
The Sunshade
The Ageing House
The Caged Goldfinch

At Madame Tussaud's in Victorian Years
The Ballet
The Five
Students
The Wind's Prophecy
During Wind and Rain
He prefers
her Earthly
The Dolls
Molly gone
A Backward Spring
Looking
Across
At a Seaside Town in 1869
The Glimpse
The Pedestrian

"Who's in the next room?"
At a Country Fair
The Memorial
Brass: 186-
Her Love-birds
Paying Calls
The Upper Birch-Leaves

"It never looks like summer"
Everything comes
The Man with a
Past
He fears his Good Fortune
He wonders about Himself

Jubilate
He revisits his First School
"I thought, my heart"

Fragment
Midnight on the Great Western
Honeymoon Time at an
Inn
The Robin
"I rose and went to Rou'tor town"
The Nettles
In
a Waiting-room
The Clock-winder
Old Excursions

The Masked
Face
In a Whispering Gallery
The Something that saved Him
The
Enemy's Portrait
Imaginings
On the Doorstep
Signs and Tokens

Paths of Former Time
The Clock of the Years
At the Piano
The
Shadow on the Stone
In the Garden
The Tree and the Lady
An
Upbraiding
The Young Glass-stainer
Looking at a Picture on an
Anniversary
The Choirmaster's Burial
The Man who forgot
While
drawing in a Churchyard
"For Life I had never cared greatly"
POEMS OF WAR AND PATRIOTISM:
"Men who march away"
(Song of the Soldiers)
His Country
England to Germany in 1914

On the Belgian Expatriation
An Appeal to America on behalf of the
Belgian Destitute
The Pity of It
In Time of Wars and Tumults
In
Time of "the Breaking of nations"
Cry of the Homeless
Before
Marching and After
"Often when warring"
Then and Now
A Call
to National Service
The Dead and the Living One
A New Year's
Eve in War Time
"I met a man"
"I looked up from my writing"
FINALE:
The Coming of the End
Afterwards

MOMENTS OF VISION
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?
THE VOICE OF THINGS
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?"
(Wooer's Song)
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"
(Bournemouth, 1875)
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