I shall rot here, with those whom in their day
You never knew.
And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay,
Met not my view,
Will in yon distant grave-place ever neighbour you.
No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower,
While earth endures,
Will fall on my mound and within the hour
Steal on to yours;
One robin never haunt our two green covertures.
Mr. Hardy, fortunately, has the genius to express the burden and the
mystery even of a world grey with rain and commonplace in achievement.
There is a beauty of sorrow in these poems in which "life with the sad,
seared face" mirrors itself without disguise. They bring us face to face
with an experience intenser than our own. There is nothing common in the
tragic image of dullness in _A Common-place Day_:--
The day is turning ghost,
And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively,
To join the anonymous host
Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe,
To one of like degree....
Nothing of tiniest worth
Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or praise,
Since the pale corpse-like birth
Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays--
Dullest of dull-hued days!
Wanly upon the panes
The rain slides, as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet
Here, while Day's presence wanes,
And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set,
He wakens my regret.
In the poem which contains these verses the emotion of the poet gives
words often undistinguished an almost Elizabethan rhythm. Mr. Hardy,
indeed, is a poet who often achieves music of verses, though he seldom
achieves music of phrase.
We must, then, be grateful without niggardliness for the gift of his
verse. On the larger canvas of his prose we find a vision more abundant,
more varied, more touched with humour. But his poems are the genuine
confessions of a soul, the meditations of a man of genius, brooding not
without bitterness but with pity on the paths that lead to the grave,
and the figures that flit along them so solitarily and so ineffectually.