Going and Staying
I.
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.
II.
Seasons of blankness as of snow,
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.
III.
Then we looked closelier at Time,
And saw his ghostly arms revolving
To sweep off woeful things with prime,
Things sinister with things sublime
Alike dissolving.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on September 27, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Going and Staying” was included in Thomas Hardy’s Late Lyrics and Earlier (Macmillan, 1922). About the poem, Phillip K. Jason, a professor emeritus of English at the United States Naval Academy, writes in his essay, “A Possible Allusion in Thomas Hardy’s ‘Going and Staying,’ published in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn 1976), “Thomas Hardy’s notion of cosmic indifference to human striving and values receives characteristic expression in his short poem ‘Going and Staying.’ In the first two stanzas, the poet catalogues in turn those phenomena which men find pleasurable and painful, reminding us of the grim irony that the pleasurable experiences we would wish to last are always ‘going’ while the painful ones stubbornly stay with us. In the closing stanza, Hardy pulls us back from what comes to be understood as the subjective human perspective to insist that Time has no preference, that it eventually sweeps away, with a sort of even-handedness.”
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, whose books include Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, was one of the most influential novelists and poets of England’s Victorian era. He died on January 11, 1928.