An August Midnight

I A shaded lamp and a waving blind, And the beat of a clock from a distant floor: On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined— A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore; While 'mid my page there idly stands A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands... II Thus meet we five, in this still place, At this point of time, at this point in space. —My guests besmear my new-penned line, Or bang at the lamp and fall supine. "God's humblest, they!" I muse. Yet why? They know Earth-secrets that know not I.

Drummer Hodge

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
     Uncoffined—just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
     That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
     Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—
     Fresh from his Wessex home—
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
     The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
     Strange stars amid the gloam.

III

Thomas Hardy

2017

Snow in the Suburbs

                    Every branch big with it,
                    Bent every twig with it;
            Every fork like a white web-foot;
            Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.

Thomas Hardy

1925

The Shadow on the Stone

      I went by the Druid stone
   That stands in the garden white and lone,
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows
   That at some moments there are thrown
   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,
   And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

Thomas Hardy

1917

Poems

An August Midnight

More by this poet

Drummer Hodge

Snow in the Suburbs

The Shadow on the Stone

Poems

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An August Midnight

More by this poet

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