Thomas Hardy: Verses about Night

When the wasting embers redden the chimney-breast,
And Life's bare pathway looms like a desert track to me,
And from hall and parlour the living have gone to their rest,
My perished people who housed them here come back to me.

They come and seat them around in their mouldy places,
Now and then bending towards me a glance of wistfulness,
A strange upbraiding smile upon all their faces,
And in the bearing of each a passive tristfulness.

'Do you uphold me, lingering and languishing here,
A pale late plant of your once strong stock?' I say to them;
'A thinker of crooked thoughts upon Life in the sere,
An on That which consigns men to night after showing the day to them?'

'--O let be the Wherefore! We fevered our years not thus:
Take of Life what it grants, without question!' they answer me seemingly.
'Enjoy, suffer, wait: spread the table here freely like us,
And, satisfied, placid, unfretting, watch Time away beamingly!'

In the wild October night-time, when the wind raved round the
land,
And the Back-sea met the front-sea, and our doors were blocked
with sand,
And we heard the drub of dead-man's bay, where the bones of
thousands are,
We knew not what the day had done for us at Trafalgar.
Had done,
Had done,
For us at Trafalgar!

'Pull hard, and make the nothe, or down we go!' One says,
says he.
We pulled; and bedtime brought the storm; but snug at home
slept we.
Yet all the while our gallants after fighting through the day,
Were beating up and down the dark, sou'west of Cadiz Bay.
The dark,
The dark,
Sou'west of Cadiz Bay!

The victors and the vanquished then the storm it tossed and tore,
As hard they strove, those worn-out men, upon that surly shore;
Dead Nelson and his half dead crew, his foes from near and far,
Were rolled together on the deep that night at Trafalgar!
The deep,
The deep,
That night at Trafalgar!

From the slow march and muffled drum,
And crowds distrest,
And book and bell, at length I have come
To my full rest.


A ten years' rule beneath the sun
Is wound up here,
And what I have done, what left undone,
Figures out clear.


Yet in the estimate of such
It grieves me more
That I by some was loved so much
Than that I bore,


From others, judgment of that hue
Which over-hope
Breeds from a theoretic view
Of regal scope.


For kingly opportunities
Right many have sighed;
How best to bear its devilries
Those learn who have tried!


I have eaten the fat and drunk the sweet,
Lived the life out
From the first greeting glad drum-beat
To the last shout.


What pleasure earth affords to kings
I have enjoyed
Through its long vivid pulse-stirrings
Even till it cloyed.


What days of strain, what nights of stress
Can cark a throne,
Even one maintained in peacefulness,
I too have known.


And so, I think, could I step back
To life again,
I should prefer the average track
Of average men,


Since, as with them, what kingship would
It cannot do,
Nor to first thoughts however good
Hold itself true.


Something binds hard the royal hand,
As all that be,
And it is That has shaped, has planned
My acts and me.