I try not to include too many anthology standards, but I feel I can no longer pass over this perennial Hardy favourite. Let us admit, though, that for a great poem it has a very shaky start. ‘When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay’. Come again? The guy is saying ‘When I’m dead’. Oh, right. But it soon becomes a most touching meditation on mortality, drawing its strength in typical Hardy fashion from the specific and sensuous: the darkness of a summer night, ‘mothy and warm’, the thorn trees bent by the wind, the night skies of winter with Orion bright above.

Dewfall-hawk: the nightjar, that is known for making what are called roding flights at dusk, the time when the dew forms.

Bell of quittance: the bell tolled at a church to mark a parishioner’s passing. Cf. Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’: ‘They tolled the one bell only/Groom was there none to see’.

Afterwards

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbors say,
‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
‘To him this must have been a familiar sight.’

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.’

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winters sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,
‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’?

Thomas Hardy