greykit.poetry — Thomas Hardy
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1914
[thomas-hardy]
Channel Firing
Gunnery practice in April 1914 wakes the dead, who take it for Judgement Day; God tells them it is only the world making red war redder — and the sound carries inland to Stourton Tower, Camelot, and Stonehenge.
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1912
[thomas-hardy]
The Convergence of the Twain
Hardy's cold meditation on the Titanic and the iceberg, grown in shadowy distance as twin halves of one august event, until the Spinner of the Years said "Now!" and jarred two hemispheres.
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1902
[thomas-hardy]
The Darkling Thrush
On the last evening of the century, Hardy leans on a gate in a desolate frost-gray landscape when a frail old thrush flings out a full-hearted evensong — suggesting some blessed hope the poet cannot share.
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1902
[thomas-hardy]
The Man He Killed
A soldier tries to explain why he shot a man he would have stood a drink in any old inn — and gets no further than because he was my foe, quaint and curious as war is.
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1898
[thomas-hardy]
Hap
A vengeful god would at least be an answer; what the poem finds instead is Crass Casualty and dicing Time, purblind Doomsters who had as readily strown blisses about the pilgrimage as pain.
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1898
[thomas-hardy]
Neutral Tones
By a winter pond under a white, chidden sun, Hardy distills the death of a love into a few grey images — the starving sod, the deadest smile, the God-curst sun — that return to him whenever love proves a deceiver.