PAGE 32

WHO'S IN THE NEXT ROOM?

"Who's in the next room? - who?

I seem to see

Somebody in the dawning passing through,

Unknown to me."

"Nay: you saw nought. He passed invisibly."

"Who's in the next room? - who?

I seem to hear

Somebody muttering firm in a language new

That chills my ear."

"No: you catch not his tongue who has entered there."

"Who's in the next room? - who?

I seem to feel

His breath like a clammy draught, as if it drew

From the Polar Wheel."

"No: none who breathes at all does the door conceal."

"Who's in the next room? - who?

A figure wan

With a message to one in there of something due?

Shall I know him anon?"

"Yea he; and he brought such; and you'll know him anon."

-o0o-

I SOMETIMES THINK

(For F. E. H)

I sometimes think as here I sit

Of things I have done,

Which seemed in doing not unfit

To face the sun;

Yet never a soul has paused a whit

On such - not one.

There was that eager strenuous press

To sow good seed;

There was that saving from distress

In the nick of need;

There were those words in the wilderness

Who cared to heed?

Yet can this be full true, or no?

For one did care,

And, spiriting into my house, to, fro,

Like wind on the stair,

Cares still, heeds all, and will, even though

I may despair.

-o0o-

THE FARM-WOMAN'S WINTER

If seasons all were summers,

And leaves would never fall,

And hopping casement-comers

Were foodless not at all,

And fragile folk might be here

That white winds bid depart;

Then one I used to see here

Would warm my wasted heart!

One frail, who, bravely tilling
Long hours in gripping gusts,
Was mastered by their chilling,
And now his ploughshare rusts,
So savage winter catches
The breath of limber things,
And what I love he snatches,
And what I love not, brings.

-o0o-

PAGE 31

THE INTERLOPER

There are three folk driving in a quaint old chaise,
And the cliff-side track looks green and fair;
I view them talking in quiet glee
As they drop down towards the puffins' lair
    By the roughest of ways;
But another with the three rides on, I see,
    Whom I like not to be there!

No: it's not anybody you think of. Next
A dwelling appears by a slow sweet stream
Where two sit happily and half in the dark:
They read, helped out by a frail-wick'd gleam,
    Some rhythmic text;
But one sits with them whom they don't mark,
    One I'm wishing could not be there.

No: not whom you knew and name. And now
I discern gay diners in a mansion-place,
And the guests dropping wit - pert, prim, or choice,
And the hostess's tender and laughing face,
    And the host's bland brow;
But I cannot help hearing a hollow voice,
    And I'd fain not hear it there.

No: it's not from the stranger you once met. Ah,
Yet a goodlier scene than that succeeds;
People on a lawn - quite a crowd of them. Yes,
And they chatter and ramble as fancy leads;
    And they say, "Hurrah!"

To a blithe speech made; save one, mirthless,
    Who ought not to be there.

Nay: it's not the pale Form your imagings raise,
That waits on us all at a destined time,
It is not the Fourth Figure the Furnace showed;
O that it were such a shape sublime
    In these latter days!
It is that under which best lives corrode;
    Would, would it could not be there!

-o0o-

LOGS ON THE HEARTH
In Memory of a Sister

 The fire advances along the log
Of the tree we felled,
Which bloomed and bore striped apples by the peck
Till its last hour of bearing knelled.

The fork that first my hand would reach
And then my foot
In climbings upward inch by inch, lies now
Sawn, sapless, darkening with soot.

Where the bark chars is where, one year,
It was pruned, and bled -
Then overgrew the wound. But now, at last,
Its growings all have stagnated.

My fellow-climber rises dim
From her chilly grave -
Just as she was, her foot near mine on the bending limb,
Laughing, her young brown hand awave.

-o0o-

A JANUARY NIGHT
(1879)

The rain smites more and more,
The east wind snarls and sneezes;
Through the joints of the quivering door
   The water wheezes.

The tip of each ivy-shoot
Writhes on its neighbour's face;
There is some hid dread afoot
   That we cannot trace.

Is it the spirit astray
Of the man at the house below
Whose coffin they took in today?
   We do not know.

-o0o-

THE DARK-EYED GENTLEMAN

I pitched my day’s leazings in Crimmercrock Lane,   
To tie up my garter and jog on again,   
When a dear dark-eyed gentleman passed there and said,   
In a way that made all o’ me colour rose-red,   
                “What do I see -          
                O pretty knee!”   
And he came and he tied up my garter for me.   

’Twixt sunset and moonrise it was, I can mind:   
Ah, ’tis easy to lose what we nevermore find! -   
Of the dear stranger’s home, of his name, I knew nought,           
But I soon knew his nature and all that it brought.   
                Then bitterly   
                Sobbed I that he   
Should ever have tied up my garter for me!   

Yet now I’ve beside me a fine lissom lad,           
And my slip’s nigh forgot, and my days are not sad;   
My own dearest joy is he, comrade, and friend,   
He it is who safe-guards me, on him I depend;   
                No sorrow brings he,   
                And thankful I be           
That his daddy once tied up my garter for me!   

-o0o-

MORE POETRY BY THOMAS HARDY NEXT THURSDAY

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

PAGE 30

THE OLD WORKMAN

"Why are you so bent down before your time,
Old mason? Many have not left their prime
So far behind at your age, and can still
Stand full upright at will."

He pointed to the mansion-front hard by,
And to the stones of the quoin against the sky;
"Those upper blocks," he said, "that there you see,
It was that ruined me."

There stood in the air up to the parapet
Crowning the corner height, the stones as set
By him - ashlar whereon the gales might drum
For centuries to come.

"I carried them up," he said, "by a ladder there;
The last was as big a load as I could bear;
But on I heaved; and something in my back
Moved, as 'twere with a crack.

"So I got crookt. I never lost that sprain;
And those who live there, walled from wind and rain
By freestone that I lifted, do not know
That my life's ache came so.

"They don't know me, or even know my name,
But good I think it, somehow, all the same
To have kept 'em safe from harm, and right and tight,
Though it has broke me quite.

"Yes; that I fixed it firm up there I am proud,
Facing the hail and snow and sun and cloud,
And to stand storms for ages, beating round
When I lie underground."

-o0o-

THE SUPERCEDED

As newer comers crowd the fore,
   We drop behind.
- We who have laboured long and sore
   Times out of mind,
And keen are yet, must not regret
   To drop behind.

Yet there are of us some who grieve
   To go behind;
Staunch, strenuous souls who scarce believe
   Their fires declined,
And know none cares, remembers, spares
   Who go behind.

 'Tis not that we have unforetold
   The drop behind;
We feel the new must oust the old
   In every kind;
But yet we think, must we, must WE,
   Too, drop behind?

-o0o-

AT THE RAILWAY STATION, UPWAY

"There is not much that I can do,
For I've no money that's quite my own!"
Spoke up the pitying child -
A little boy with a violin
At the station before the train came in, -
"But I can play my fiddle to you,
And a nice one 'tis, and good in tone!"

The man in the handcuffs smiled;
The constable looked, and he smiled, too,
As the fiddle began to twang;
And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang
Uproariously:
"This life so free
Is the thing for me!"
And the constable smiled, and said no word,
As if unconscious of what he heard;
And so they went on till the train came in -
The convict, and boy with the violin.

-o0o-

THE WALK

You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.

-o0o-

More poetry next Thursday

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

PAGE 29

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 Judgement-day

And sat upright,  While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worm drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God cried,
"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 Christés 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 (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need)."

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.

-o0o-

HER FATHER 

I met her, as we had privily planned,
Where passing feet beat busily:
She whispered: "Father is at hand!
       He wished to walk with me."

His presence as he joined us there
Banished our words of warmth away;
We felt, with cloudings of despair,
       What Love must lose that day.

Her crimson lips remained unkissed,
Our fingers kept no tender hold,
His lack of feeling made the tryst
       Embarrassed, stiff, and cold.

A cynic ghost then rose and said,
"But is his love for her so small
That, nigh to yours, it may be read
       As of no worth at all?

"You love her for her pink and white;
But what when their fresh splendours close?
His love will last her in despite
       Of Time, and wrack, and foes."

-o0o-

I FOUND HER OUT THERE

I found her out there
On a slope few see,
That falls westwardly
To the salt-edged air,
Where the ocean breaks
On the purple strand,
And the hurricane shakes
The solid land.

I brought her here,
And have laid her to rest
In a noiseless nest
No sea beats near.
She will never be stirred
In her loamy cell
By the waves long heard
And loved so well.

So she does not sleep
By those haunted heights
The Atlantic smites
And the blind gales sweep,
Whence she often would gaze
At Dundagel's famed head,
While the dipping blaze
Dyed her face fire-red;

And would sigh at the tale
Of sunk Lyonesse,
As a wind-tugged tress
Flapped her cheek like a flail
Or listen at whiles
With a thought-bound brow
To the murmuring miles
She is far from now.

Yet her shade, maybe,
Will creep underground
Till it catch the sound
Of that western sea
As it swells and sobs
Where she once domiciled,
And joy in its throbs
With the heart of a child

-o0o-

 THE FROZEN GREENHOUSE

"There was a frost
Last night!" she said,
"And the stove was forgot
When we went to bed,
And the greenhouse plants
are frozen dead!"

By the breakfast blaze
Blank-faced spoke she,
Her scared young look
Seeming to be
The very symbol
Of tragedy.

The frost is fiercer
Than then today,
As I pass the place
Of her once dismay,
But the greenhouse stands
Warm, tight, and gay,

While she who grieved
At the sad lot
Of her pretty plants -
Cold, iced, forgot -
Herself is colder,
And knows it not.

-o0o-

My blog JOHN'S QUIET CORNER ran from My 2009 until May 2011.A new series begins tomorrow.

http://john-quietcorner.blogspot.com