Skip to content

Quotes from Wessex Poems and Other Verses — Thomas Hardy

1840–1928 England

← All quotes by Thomas Hardy

14 quotes

All the vast various moils that mean a world alive.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

For winning love we win the risk of losing,
And losing love is as one's life were riven.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

Like chastened children sitting silent in a school.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

Those house them best who house for secrecy.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

For incensed love breathes quick and dies,
When famished love a-lingering lies.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

Love is lovelier
The more it shapes its moan in selfish-wise.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

When Lawyers strive to heal a breach,
And Parsons practise what they preach.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

Numb as a vane that cankers on its point,
True to the wind that kissed ere canker came.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

You may prate of your prowess in lusty times,
But as years gnaw inward you blink your bays,
And see too well your crimes!

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

Yet saw he something in the lives
Of those who'd ceased to live
That rounded them with majesty
Which living failed to give.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's,
And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now!

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

"Gone," I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads;
Yet at mothy curfew-tide,
And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads,
They've a way of whispering to me—fellow-wight who yet abide.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

Attribution

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