[hardy-l] Happy Birthday TH!

[Betty Cortus]

Dear All,

Today is Thomas Hardy's birthday.  Let's celebrate it with a moving  
tribute from a fellow poet, Walter de la Mare.

With all good wishes,
Betty

                                      Thomas Hardy

Mingled the moonlight with daylight—the last in the narrowing west:
Silence of nightfall lay over the shallowing valleys at rest
                In the Earth's green breast:
Yet a small multitudinous singing, a lully of voices of birds,
Unseen in the vague shelving hollows, welled up with my questioning  
words:
All Dorsetshire's larks for connivence of sweetness seemed trysting  
to greet
Him in whose song the bodings of raven and nightingale meet.

Stooping and smiling, he questioned, 'No birdnotes myself do I hear?
Perhaps 'twas the talk of chance farers, abroad in the hush with us  
here–
                In the dusk-light clear?'
And there peered from his eyes, as I listened, a concourse of women  
and men,
Whom his words had made living, long-suffering—they flocked to  
remembrance again;
'O Master,' I cried in my heart, 'lorn thy tidings, grievous thy song;
Yet thine, too, this solacing music, as we earthfolk stumble along.'





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