Thomas Hardy: Author, Poet (1840–1928)

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet who set his work--including The Return of the Native and Far from the Madding Crowd--in the semi-fictionalized county of Wessex.



The Shadow on the Stone

      I went by the Druid stone 

   That broods in the garden white and lone,   

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows   

   That at some moments fall thereon 

   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,   

   And they shaped in my imagining 

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders   

   Threw there when she was gardening. 

      I thought her behind my back, 

   Yea, her I long had learned to lack, 

And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,   

   Though how do you get into this old track?’   

   And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf   

   As a sad response; and to keep down grief 

I would not turn my head to discover 

   That there was nothing in my belief. 

      Yet I wanted to look and see 

   That nobody stood at the back of me; 

But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision   

   A shape which, somehow, there may be.’   

   So I went on softly from the glade, 

   And left her behind me throwing her shade,   

As she were indeed an apparition— 

   My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/48729



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