Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OMwas an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 June 1840
sky flux rhythm
So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
faith fire growing leaving march men night within
What of the faith and fire within us / Men who march away / Ere the barncocks say / Night is growing gray, / Leaving all that here can win us?
mind may tess-of-the-d-urbervilles
Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
distance men
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
dawning next passing seemed somebody unknown
Who's in the next room? - who? / I seemed to see / Somebody in the dawning passing through,/ Unknown to me.
family flesh time trace trait
I am the family face; / Flesh perishes, I live on, / Projecting trait and trace / Through time to times anon, / And leaping from place to place / Over oblivion.
afar air blessed cause ecstatic happy knew sound written
So little cause for carolings / Of such ecstatic sound / Was written on terrestrial things / Afar or nigh around, / That I could think there trembled through / His happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.
listen silence wonderful
Silent? ah, he is silent! He can keep silence well. That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
aims earth enjoy forth less loveliness might
Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-enacting Might Which fashioned forth its loveliness Had other aims than my delight.
bring far mass million pay peace priests sing thousand
Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it, / And pay a million priests to bring it. / After two thousand years of mass / We've got as far as poison-gas.
broad desires eyes hearts known open people red souls
If all hearts were open and all desires known -- as they would be if people showed their souls -- how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!
came dreaming nature offered peace release soft unto wood
Unto this wood I came As to a nest; Dreaming that sylvan peace Offered the harrowed ease- Nature a soft release From men's unrest
floors
Where once we danced, where once we sang, Gentlemen, / The floors are shrunken, cobwebs hang.
business gain ghastly laws nature perceive preacher science universe
Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be - and the non-necessity of it.