Wessex Heights

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy portrait

1840 to 1928

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Track 1

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There’s a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white,
In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man’s friend –
Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed
In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways –
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.
As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
There’s a ghost at Yell’ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night,
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,
Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things –
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there’s a figure against the moon,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.
But mind-chains do not clank where one’s next neighbour is the sky.
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

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