Wessex Poems and Other Verses

The Dance at the Phoenix

To Jenny came a gentle youth

From inland leazes lone,

His love was fresh as apple-blooth

By Parrett, Yeo, or Tone.

And duly he entreated her

To be his tender minister,

And take him for her own.

Now Jenny's life had hardly been

A life of modesty;

And few in Casterbridge had seen

More loves of sorts than she

From scarcely sixteen years above;

Among them sundry troopers of

The King's-Own Cavalry.

But each with charger, sword, and gun,

Had bluffed the Biscay wave;

And Jenny prized her rural one

For all the love he gave.

She vowed to be, if they were wed,

His honest wife in heart and head

From bride-ale hour to grave.

Wedded they were. Her husband's trust

In Jenny knew no bound,

And Jenny kept her pure and just,

Till even malice found

No sin or sign of ill to be

In one who walked so decently

The duteous helpmate's round.

Two sons were born, and bloomed to men,

And roamed, and were as not;

Alone was Jenny left again

As ere her mind had sought

A solace in domestic joys,

And ere the vanished pair of boys

Were sent to sun her cot.

She numbered near on sixty years,

And passed as elderly,

When, on a day, with flushing fears,

She learnt from shouts of glee,

And shine of swords, and thump of drum,

Her early loves from war had come,

The King's-Own Cavalry.

She turned aside, and bowed her head

Anigh Saint Peter's door;

"Alas for chastened thoughts!" she said;

And yet those notes--they thrill me through,

'I'm faded now, and hoar,

And those gay forms move me anew

As they moved me of yore!". . .

'Twas Christmas, and the Phoenix Inn

Was lit with tapers tall,

For thirty of the trooper men

Had vowed to give a ball

As "Theirs" had done ('twas handed down)

When lying in the self-same town

Ere Buonaparté's fall.

That night the throbbing "Soldier's Joy,"

The measured tread and sway

Of "Fancy-Lad" and "Maiden Coy,"

Reached Jenny as she lay

Beside her spouse; till springtide blood

Seemed scouring through her like a flood

That whisked the years away.

She rose, arrayed, and decked her head

Where the bleached hairs grew thin;

Upon her cap two bows of red

She fixed with hasty pin;

Unheard descending to the street

She trod the flags with tune-led feet,

And stood before the Inn.

Save for the dancers', not a sound

Disturbed the icy air;

No watchman on his midnight round

Or traveller was there;

But over All-Saint's high and bright,

Pulsed to the music Sirius white,

The Wain by Bullstake Square.

She knocked, but found her further stride

Checked by a sergeant tall:

"Gay Granny, whence come you?" he cried.

"This is a private ball."

--"No one has more right here than me!

Ere you were born, man," answered she,

"I knew the regiment all!"

"Take not the lady's visit ill!"

The steward said; "for see,

We lack sufficient partners still,

So, prithee, let her be!"

They seized and whirled her mid the maze,

And Jenny felt as in the days

Of her immodesty.

Hour chased each hour, and night advanced;

She sped as shod with wings;

Each time and every time she danced--

Reels, jugs, poussettes, and flings:

They cheered her as she soared and swooped,

(She had learnt ere art in dancing drooped

From hops to slothful swings).

The favourite Quick-step "Speed the Plough"--

(Cross hands, cast off, and wheel)--

"The Triumph," "Sylph," "The Row-dow-dow,"

Famed "Major Malley's Reel,"

"The Duke of York's," "The Fairy Dance,"

"The Bride of Lodi" (brought from France),

She beat out, toe and heel.

The "Fall of Paris" clanged its close,

And Peter's chime went four,

When Jenny, bosom-beating, rose

To seek her silent door.

They tiptoed in escorting her,

Lest stroke of heel or clink of spur

Should break her goodman's snore.

The fire that lately burnt fell slack

When lone at last was she;

Her nine-and-fifty years came back;

She sank upon her knee

Beside the durn, and like a dart

A something arrowed through her heart

In shoots of agony.

Their footsteps died as she leant there,

Lit by the morning star

Hanging above the moorland, where

The aged elm-rows are;

As overnight, from Pummery Ridge

To Maemsbury Ring and Standfast Bridge

No life stirred, near or far.

Though inner mischief worked amain,

She reached her husband's side;

Where, toil-weary, as he had lain

Beneath the patchwork pied

When forthward yestereve she crept,

And as unwitting, still he slept

Who did in her confide.

A tear sprang as she turned and viewed

His features free from guile;

She kissed him long, as when, just wooed,

She chose his domicile.

She felt she would give more than life

To be the single-hearted wife

That she had been erstwhile. . . .

Time wore to six. Her husband rose

And struck the steel and stone;

He glanced at Jenny, whose repose

Seemed deeper than his own.

With dumb dismay, on closer sight,

He gathered sense that in the night,

Or morn, her soul had flown.

When told that some too mighty strain

For one so many-yeared

Had burst her bosom's master-vein,

His doubts remained unstirred.

His Jenny had not left his side

Betwixt the eve and morning-tide:

--The King's said not a word.

Well! times are not as times were then,

Nor fair ones half so free;

And truly they were martial men,

The King's Own Cavalry.

And when they went from Casterbridge

And vanished over Mellstock Ridge,

'Twas saddest morn to see.

The Casterbridge Captains

(KHYBER PASS, 1842)

A TRADITION OF J. B. L____, T. G. B____, and J. L____

Three captains went to Indian wars,

And only one returned:

Their mate of yore, he singly wore

The laurels all had earned.

At home he sought the ancient aisle

Wherein, untrumped of fame,

The three had sat in pupilage,

And each had carved his name.

The names, rough-hewn, of equal size,

Stood on the panel still;

Unequal since.--"'Twas theirs to aim,

Mine was it to fulfil!"

--"Who saves his life shall lose it, friends!"

Outspake the preacher then,

Unweeting he his listener, who

Looked at the names again.

That he had come and they had been stayed

Was but the chance of war:

Another chance, and they had been here,

And he had lain afar.

Yet saw he something in the lives

Of those who had ceased to live

That sphered them with a majesty

Which living failed to give.

Transcendent triumph in return

No longer lit his brain;

Transcendence rayed the distant urn

Where slept the fallen twain.

A Sign-Seeker

I mark the months in liveries dank and dry,

The noontides many-shaped and hued;

I see the nightfall shades subtrude,

And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.

I view the evening bonfires of the sun

On hills where morning rains have hissed;

The eyeless countenance of the mist

Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done.

I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star,

The cauldrons of the sea in storm,

Have felt the earthquake's lifting arm,

And trodden where abysmal fires and snow-cones are.

I learn to prophesy the hid eclipse,

The coming of eccentric orbs;

To mete the dust the sky absorbs,

To weigh the sun, and fix the hour each planet dips.

I witness fellow earth-men surge and strive;

Assemblies meet, and throb, and part;

Death's sudden finger, sorrow's smart;

--All the vast various moils that mean a world alive.

But that I fain would wot of shuns my sense--

Those sights of which old prophets tell,

Those signs the general word so well

As vouchsafed their unheed, denied my long suspense.

In graveyard green, where his pale dust lies pent

To glimpse a phantom parent, friend,

Wearing his smile, and "Not the end!"

Outbreathing softly: that were blest enlightenment:

Or, if a dead Love's lips, whom dreams reveal

When midnight imps of King Decay

Delve sly to solve me back to clay,

Should leave some print to prove her spirit-kisses real;

Or, when Earth's Frail lie bleeding of her Strong,

If some Recorder, as in Writ,

Near to the weary scene should flit

And drop one plume as pledge that Heaven inscrolls the wrong

--There are who, rapt to heights of trancelike trust,

These tokens claim to feel and see,

Read radiant hints of times to be--

Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust.

Such scope is granted not to lives like mine . . .

I have lain in dead men's beds, have walked

The tombs of those with whom I had talked,

Called many a gone and goodly one to shape a sign,

And panted for response. But none replies;

No warnings loom, nor whisperings

To open out my limitings,

And Nescience mutely muses: When a man falls he lies.

My Cicely

(17__)

"Alive?"--And I leapt in my wonder,

Was faint of my joyance,

And grasses and grove shone in garments

Of glory to me.

"She lives, in a plenteous well-being,

To-day as aforehand;

The dead bore the name--though a rare one--

The name that bore she."

She lived . . . I, afar in the city

Of frenzy-led faction,

Had squandered green years and maturer

In bowing the knee

To Baals illusive and specious,

Till chance had there voiced me

That one I loved vainly in nonage

Had ceased to be.

The passion the planets had scowled on,

And change had let dwindle,

Her death-rumor smartly relifted

To full apogee.

I mounted a steed in the dawning

With acheful remembrance,

And made for the ancient West Highway

To far Exonb'ry.

Passing heaths, and the House of Long Sieging,

I neared the thin steeple

That tops the fair fane of Poore's olden

Episcopal see;

And, changing anew my blown bearer,

I traversed the downland

Whereon the bleak hill-graves of Chieftains

Bulge barren of tree;

And still sadly onward I followed

That Highway the Icen,

Which trails its pale riband down Wessex

By lynchet and lea.

Along through the Stour-bordered Forum

Where Legions had wayfared,

And where the slow river-face glasses

Its green canopy,

And by Weatherbury Castle, and thencefrom

Through Casterbridge held I

Still on, to entomb her my mindsight

Saw stretched pallidly.

No highwayman's trot blew the night-wind

To me so life-weary,

But only the creak of a gibbet

Or waggoner's jee.

Triple-ramparted Maidon gloomed grayly

Above me from southward,

And north the hill-fortress of Eggar

And square Pummerie.

The Nine-Pillared Cromlech, the Bride-streams,

The Axe, and the Otter

I passed, to the gate of the city

Where Exe scents the sea;

Till, spent, in the graveacre pausing,

I learnt 'twas not my Love

To whom Mother Church had just murmured

A last lullaby.

--"Then, where dwells the Canon's kinswoman,

My friend of aforetime?"

I asked, to disguise my heart-heavings

And new ecstasy.

"She wedded." -- "Ah" -- "Wedded beneath her--

She keeps the stage-hostel

Ten miles hence, beside the great Highway--

The famed Lions-Three.

"Her spouse was her lackey--no option

'Twixt wedlock and worse things;

A lapse over-sad for a lady

Of her pedigree!"

I shuddered, said nothing, and wandered

To shades of green laurel;

More ghastly than death were these tidings

Of life's irony!

For, on my ride down I had halted

Awhile at the Lions,

And her--her whose name had once opened

My heart as a key--

I'd looked on, unknowing, and witnessed

Her jests with the tapsters,

Her liquor-fired face, her thick accents

In naming her fee.

"Oh God, why this seeming derision!"

I cried in my anguish:

"O once Loved, O fair Unforgotten--

That Thing--meant it thee!

"Inurned and at peace, lost but sainted,

Were grief I could compass;

Depraved--'tis for Christ's poor dependent

A cruel decree!"

I backed on the Highway; but passed not

The hostel. Within there

Too mocking to Love's re-expression

Was Time's repartee!

Uptracking where Legions had wayfared

By cromlechs unstoried,

And lynchets, and sepultured Chieftains

In self-colloquy,

A feeling stirred in me and strengthened

That she was not my Love,

But she of the garth, who lay rapt in

Her long reverie.

And thence till to-day I persuade me

That this was the true one;

That Death stole intact her young dearness

And innocency.

Frail-witted, illuded they call me;

I may be. Far better

To dream than to own the debasement

Of sweet Cicely.

Moreover I rate it unseemly

To hold that kind Heaven

Could work such device--to her ruin

And my misery.

So, lest I disturb my choice vision,

I shun the West Highway,

Even now, when the knaps ring with rhythms

From blackbird and bee;

And feel that with slumber half-conscious

She rests in the church-hay,

Her spirit unsoiled as in youth-time

When lovers were we.