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Quotes from Poems of the Past and the Present — Thomas Hardy

1840–1928 England

← All quotes by Thomas Hardy

19 quotes

No man can change the common lot to rare.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

The world-imprinting power of perished Rome.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

Con the dead page as ’twere live love: press on!
Cold wisdom’s words will ease thy track for thee.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

O memory, where is now my youth,
Who used to say that life was truth?

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

How fares the Truth now?—Ill?
—Do pens but slily further her advance?
May one not speed her but in phrase askance?

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

And feign like truth, for one mad day,
That Earth is Paradise?

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

Still rule those minds on earth
At whom sage Milton's wormwood words were hurled:
‘Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

Is your heart far away,
Or with mine beating?
When false things are brought low,
And swift things have grown slow,
Feigning like froth shall go,
Faith be for aye.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

O fatuous man, this truth infer,
Brides are not what they seem;
Thou lovest what thou dreamest her;
I am thy very dream!

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

It surely is far sweeter and more wise
To water love, than toil to leave anon
A name whose glory-gleam will but advise
Invidious minds to quench it with their own.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

As newer comers crowd the fore,
We drop behind.
—We who have laboured long and sore
Times out of mind,
And keen are yet, must not regret
To drop behind.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land,
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

Thou should’st have learnt that Not to Mend
For Me could mean but Not to Know.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

I saw a dead man’s finer part
Shining within each faithful heart
Of those bereft. Then said I: 'This must be
His immortality.'

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

Whence comes solace? Not from seeing,
What is doing, suffering, being;
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Not from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream
And in gazing at the Gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

Time’s central city, Rome.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

My ardours for emprize nigh lost
Since Life has bared its bones to me,
I shrink to seek a modern coast
Whose riper times have yet to be;
Where the new regions claim them free
From that long drip of human tears
Which peoples old in tragedy
Have left upon the centuried years.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Hardy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.