There was a time in former years? While my roof-tree was his? When I should have been distressed by fears At such a night as this.
5 I should have murmured anxiously, 'The pricking rain strikes cold; His road is bare of hedge or tree, And he is getting old.'
But now the fitful chimney-roar, io The drone of Thorncombe trees, The Froom in flood upon the moor, The mud of Mellstock Leaze,1
The candle slanting sooty wick'd, The thuds upon the thatch, 15 The eaves-drops on the window flicked, The clacking garden-hatch,0 gate
1. The place-names in Hardy's fictional 'Wessex' tions, as in 'A Trampwoman's Tragedy.' 'The were often invented ('Thorncombe,' 'Mellstock Froom' is presumably the river Frome, flowing
Leaze'), but he also used the names of real loca-through Dorset and Somerset.
.
CHANNE L FIRIN G / 187 7 And what they mean to wayfarers, I scarcely heed or mind; He has won that storm-tight roof of hers 20 Which Earth grants all her kind. 1909
Channel Firing1
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel2 window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgement-day 5 And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds, The glebe cow3 drooled. Till God called, 'No;
io It's gunnery practise out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be: 'All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters4
15 They do no more for Christes5 sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters. 'That this is not the judgement-hour
For some of them's a blessed thing,
For if it were they'd have to scour
20 Hell's floor for so much threatening. . . . 'Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).' 25 So down we lay again. 'I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,'
Said one, 'than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!' And many a skeleton shook his head.
30 'Instead of preaching forty year,'
1. Written in April 1914, when Anglo-German 3. I.e., cow on a small plot of land belonging to a naval rivalry was growing steadily more acute; the church (a 'glebe' is a small field).
title refers to gunnery practice in the English 4. Cf. the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's Alice's
Channel. Four months later (August 4), World Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
War I broke out. 5. The archaic spelling and pronunciation suggest
2. Part of church nearest to the altar. a ballad note of doom.
.
187 8 / THOMAS HARDY
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, 'I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.'
Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, 35 As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.6
1914 1914
The Convergence of the Twain
(Lines on the loss of the Titanic)1
In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
