If it's ever Spring again (Song)


















If it's ever spring again,
   Spring again,
I shall go where went I when
Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen,
Seeing me not, amid their flounder,
Standing with my arm around her;
If it's ever spring again,
   Spring again,
I shall go where went I then.

If it's ever summer-time,
   Summer-time,
With the hay crop at the prime,
And the cuckoos--two--in rhyme,
As they used to be, or seemed to,
We shall do as long we've dreamed to,
If it's ever summer-time,
   Summer-time,
With the hay, and bees achime.

She hears the storm














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!

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,
   The drone of Thorncombe trees,
The Froom in flood upon the moor,
   The mud of Mellstock Leaze,

The candle slanting sooty wick'd,
   The thuds upon the thatch,
The eaves-drops on the window flicked,
   The clacking garden-hatch,

And what they mean to wayfarers,
   I scarcely heed or mind;
He has won that storm-tight roof of hers
   Which Earth grants all her kind.

The Roman Road


















The Roman Road runs straight and bare
As the pale parting-line in hair
Across the heath.  And thoughtful men
Contrast its days of Now and Then,
And delve, and measure, and compare;

Visioning on the vacant air
Helmed legionaries, who proudly rear
The Eagle, as they pace again
   The Roman Road.

But no tall brass-helmed legionnaire
Haunts it for me.  Uprises there
A mother's form upon my ken,
Guiding my infant steps, as when
We walked that ancient thoroughfare,
   The Roman Road.

A January Night (1879)














The rain smites more and more,
The east wind snarls and sneezes;
Through the joints of the quivering door
   The water wheezes.

The tip of each ivy-shoot
Writhes on its neighbour's face;
There is some hid dread afoot
   That we cannot trace.

Is it the spirit astray
Of the man at the house below
Whose coffin they took in to-day?
   We do not know.