Thomas Hardy Poems

I said to Love,
"It is not now as in old days
When men adored thee and thy ways
   All else above;
...

You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
...

Between us now and here -
   Two thrown together
Who are not wont to wear
   Life's flushest feather -
...

I need not go
Through sleet and snow
To where I know
She waits for me;
...

How great my grief, my joys how few,
Since first it was my fate to know thee!
- Have the slow years not brought to view
How great my grief, my joys how few,
...

I leant upon a coppice gate,
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
...

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined -- just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around:
...

AS evening shaped I found me on a moor
Which sight could scarce sustain:
The black lean land, of featureless contour,
Was like a tract in pain.
...

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
...

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,
A mouldering soldier lies- your countryman.
Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans
...