Old Furniture by Thomas Hardy

I know not how it may be with others

Who sit amid relics of householdry

That date from the days of their mothers’ mothers,

But well I know how it is with me

Continually

 

I see the hands of the generations

that owned each shiny familiar thing

In play on it’s knobs and indentations,

And with it’s ancient fashioning

Still dallying

 

Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler

As in a mirror a candle flame

Shows images of itself, each frailer

As it recedes, though the eye may frame

Its shape the same

 

On the clock’s dull dial a foggy finger

Moving to set the minutes right

With tentative touches that lift and linger

In the wont of a moth on a summer night,

creeps to my sight

 

On this old viol, fingers are dancing

…….as whilom

…….just over the strings by the nut

The tip of the bow receding, advancing

in airy quivers, as if it would cut

the plaintive gut

 

And I see a face by that box for tinder

Glowing forth in fits from the dark,

And fading again, as linten cinder,

kindles to red at the flinty spark

Or goes out start

Well, well

It is best to be up and doing

The world has no use for one to -day

Who eyes things thus…..no aim pursuing!

He should not continue in this stay,

But sink away.

 

 

Read ‘At tea’ by Hardy

Read the Wooer’s song by Hardy