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Read Ebook: Satires of Circumstance Lyrics and Reveries with Miscellaneous Pieces by Hardy Thomas
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Ebook has 890 lines and 48049 words, and 18 pages
LYRICS AND REVERIES
IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE
PLUNGING and labouring on in a tide of visions, Dolorous and dear, Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters Stretching around, Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape Yonder and near,
Blotted to feeble mist. And the coomb and the upland Foliage-crowned, Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flat Stroked by the light, Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial Meadow or mound.
What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost Under my sight, Hindering me to discern my paced advancement Lengthening to miles; What were the re-creations killing the daytime As by the night?
O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent, Some as with smiles, Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled Over the wrecked Cheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish, Harrowed by wiles.
Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them-- Halo-bedecked-- And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason, Rigid in hate, Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision, Dreaded, suspect.
Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons Further in date; Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion Vibrant, beside Lamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth's crust Now corporate.
Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect Gnawed by the tide, Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there Guilelessly glad-- Wherefore they knew not--touched by the fringe of an ecstasy Scantly descried.
Later images too did the day unfurl me, Shadowed and sad, Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas, Laid now at ease, Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow Sepulture-clad.
So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone, Over the leaze, Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones; --Yea, as the rhyme Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness Captured me these.
For, their lost revisiting manifestations In their own time Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport, Seeing behind Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling Sweet, sad, sublime.
Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser Stare of the mind As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast Body-borne eyes, Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them As living kind.
Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying In their surmise, "Ah--whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought Round him that looms Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings, Save a few tombs?"
CHANNEL FIRING
THAT night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day
And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds,
The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, "No; It's gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be:
"All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christ?s sake Than you who are helpless in such matters.
"That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them's a blessed thing, For if it were they'd have to scour Hell's floor for so much threatening . . .
"Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet ."
So down we lay again. "I wonder, Will the world ever saner be," Said one, "than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!"
And many a skeleton shook his head. "Instead of preaching forty year," My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, "I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."
Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN
IN a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" . . .
Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate For her--so gaily great-- A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history,
Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
THE GHOST OF THE PAST
WE two kept house, the Past and I, The Past and I; I tended while it hovered nigh, Leaving me never alone. It was a spectral housekeeping Where fell no jarring tone, As strange, as still a housekeeping As ever has been known.
As daily I went up the stair And down the stair, I did not mind the Bygone there-- The Present once to me; Its moving meek companionship I wished might ever be, There was in that companionship Something of ecstasy.
It dwelt with me just as it was, Just as it was When first its prospects gave me pause In wayward wanderings, Before the years had torn old troths As they tear all sweet things, Before gaunt griefs had torn old troths And dulled old rapturings.
And then its form began to fade, Began to fade, Its gentle echoes faintlier played At eves upon my ear Than when the autumn's look embrowned The lonely chambers here, The autumn's settling shades embrowned Nooks that it haunted near.
And so with time my vision less, Yea, less and less Makes of that Past my housemistress, It dwindles in my eye; It looms a far-off skeleton And not a comrade nigh, A fitful far-off skeleton Dimming as days draw by.
AFTER THE VISIT
COME again to the place Where your presence was as a leaf that skims Down a drouthy way whose ascent bedims The bloom on the farer's face.
Come again, with the feet That were light on the green as a thistledown ball, And those mute ministrations to one and to all Beyond a man's saying sweet.
Until then the faint scent Of the bordering flowers swam unheeded away, And I marked not the charm in the changes of day As the cloud-colours came and went.
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