Thomas Hardy: Verses about Dream

A dream of mine flew over the mead
   To the halls where my old Love reigns;
And it drew me on to follow its lead:
   And I stood at her window-panes;

And I saw but a thing of flesh and bone
   Speeding on to its cleft in the clay;
And my dream was scared, and expired on a moan,
   And I whitely hastened away.

Why go to Saint-Juliot? What's Juliot to me?
I've been but made fancy
By some necromancy
That much of my life claims the spot as its key.


Yes. I have had dreams of that place in the West,
And a maiden abiding
Thereat as in hiding;
Fair-eyed and white-shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed.


And of how, coastward bound on a night long ago,
There lonely I found her,
The sea-birds around her,
And other than nigh things uncaring to know.


So sweet her life there (in my thought has it seemed)
That quickly she drew me
To take her unto me,
And lodge her long years with me. Such have I dreamed.


But nought of that maid from Saint-Juliot I see;
Can she ever have been here,
And shed her life's sheen here,
The woman I thought a long housemate with me?


Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist?
Or a Vallency Valley
With stream and leafed alley,
Or Beeny, or Bos with its flounce flinging mist?

'Ah Madam; you've indeed come back here?
'Twas sad-your husband's so swift death,
And you away! You shouldn't have left him:
It hastened his last breath.'

'Dame, I am not the lady you think me;
I know not her, nor know her name;
I've come to lodge here-a friendless woman;
My health my only aim.'

She came; she lodged. Wherever she rambled
They held her as no other than
The lady named; and told how her husband
Had died a forsaken man.

So often did they call her thuswise
Mistakenly, by that man's name,
So much did they declare about him,
That his past form and fame

Grew on her, till she pitied his sorrow
As if she truly had been the cause-
Yea, his deserter; and came to wonder
What mould of man he was.

'Tell me my history!' would exclaim she;
'OUR history,' she said mournfully.
'But YOU know, surely, Ma'am?' they would answer,
Much in perplexity.

Curious, she crept to his grave one evening,
And a second time in the dusk of the morrow;
Then a third time, with crescent emotion
Like a bereaved wife's sorrow.

No gravestone rose by the rounded hillock;
-'I marvel why this is?' she said.
- 'He had no kindred, Ma'am, but you near.'
-She set a stone at his head.

She learnt to dream of him, and told them:
'In slumber often uprises he,
And says: 'I am joyed that, after all, Dear,
You've not deserted me!'

At length died too this kinless woman,
As he had died she had grown to crave;
And at her dying she besought them
To bury her in his grave.

Such said, she had paused; until she added:
'Call me by his name on the stone,
As I were, first to last, his dearest,
Not she who left him lone!'

And this they did. And so it became there
That, by the strength of a tender whim,
The stranger was she who bore his name there,
Not she who wedded him.

Some say the spot is banned; that the pillar Cross-and-Hand
   Attests to a deed of hell;
But of else than of bale is the mystic tale
   That ancient Vale-folk tell.

Ere Cernel's Abbey ceased hereabout there dwelt a priest,
   (In later life sub-prior
Of the brotherhood there, whose bones are now bare
   In the field that was Cernel choir).

One night in his cell at the foot of yon dell
   The priest heard a frequent cry:
"Go, father, in haste to the cot on the waste,
   And shrive a man waiting to die."

Said the priest in a shout to the caller without,
   "The night howls, the tree-trunks bow;
One may barely by day track so rugged a way,
   And can I then do so now?"

No further word from the dark was heard,
   And the priest moved never a limb;
And he slept and dreamed; till a Visage seemed
   To frown from Heaven at him.

In a sweat he arose; and the storm shrieked shrill,
   And smote as in savage joy;
While High-Stoy trees twanged to Bubb-Down Hill,
   And Bubb-Down to High-Stoy.

There seemed not a holy thing in hail,
   Nor shape of light or love,
From the Abbey north of Blackmore Vale
   To the Abbey south thereof.

Yet he plodded thence through the dark immense,
   And with many a stumbling stride
Through copse and briar climbed nigh and nigher
   To the cot and the sick man's side.

When he would have unslung the Vessels uphung
   To his arm in the steep ascent,
He made loud moan: the Pyx was gone
   Of the Blessed Sacrament.

Then in dolorous dread he beat his head:
   "No earthly prize or pelf
Is the thing I've lost in tempest tossed,
   But the Body of Christ Himself!"

He thought of the Visage his dream revealed,
   And turned towards whence he came,
Hands groping the ground along foot-track and field,
   And head in a heat of shame.

Till here on the hill, betwixt vill and vill,
   He noted a clear straight ray
Stretching down from the sky to a spot hard by,
   Which shone with the light of day.

And gathered around the illumined ground
   Were common beasts and rare,
All kneeling at gaze, and in pause profound
   Attent on an object there.

'Twas the Pyx, unharmed 'mid the circling rows
   Of Blackmore's hairy throng,
Whereof were oxen, sheep, and does,
   And hares from the brakes among;

And badgers grey, and conies keen,
   And squirrels of the tree,
And many a member seldom seen
   Of Nature's family.

The ireful winds that scoured and swept
   Through coppice, clump, and dell,
Within that holy circle slept
   Calm as in hermit's cell.

Then the priest bent likewise to the sod
   And thanked the Lord of Love,
And Blessed Mary, Mother of God,
   And all the saints above.

And turning straight with his priceless freight,
   He reached the dying one,
Whose passing sprite had been stayed for the rite
   Without which bliss hath none.

And when by grace the priest won place,
   And served the Abbey well,
He reared this stone to mark where shone
   That midnight miracle.