Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

Name: Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses
Author: Thomas Hardy

by Thomas Hardy

Pages: about 84
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 1.5 h at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 51 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

FORTY Augusts—aye, and several more—ago, When I paced the headlands loosed from dull employ, The waves huzza’d like a multitude below In the sway of an all-including joy Without cloy.
Blankly I walked there a double decade after, When thwarts had flung their toils in front of me, And I heard the waters wagging in a long ironic laughter At the lot of men, and all the vapoury Things that be.
Wheeling change has set me again standing where Once I heard the waves huzza at Lammas-tide; But they supplicate now—like a congregation there Who murmur the Confession—I outside, Prayer denied.
WHY be at pains that I should know You sought not me? Do breezes, then, make features glow So rosily? Come, the lit port is at our back, And the tumbling sea; Elsewhere the lampless uphill track To uncertainty!
O should not we two waifs join hands? I am alone, You would enrich me more than lands By being my own. Yet, though this facile moment flies, Close is your tone, And ere to-morrow’s dewfall dries I plough the unknown.
WE sat at the window looking out, And the rain came down like silken strings That Swithin’s day. Each gutter and spout Babbled unchecked in the busy way Of witless things: Nothing to read, nothing to see Seemed in that room for her and me On Swithin’s day.
We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes, For I did not know, nor did she infer How much there was to read and guess By her in me, and to see and crown By me in her. Wasted were two souls in their prime, And great was the waste, that July time When the rain came down.
ON afternoons of drowsy calm We stood in the panelled pew, Singing one-voiced a Tate-and-Brady psalm To the tune of “Cambridge New.”

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Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

From the opening

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