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.