Wessex Poems by Thomas Hardy - 26/48. A Sign-Seeker (read by Libby Gohn)

A SIGNSEEKER I mark the months in liveries dank and dry, The noontides many-shaped and hewed, I see the nightfall shades subtrude, And hear the monotonous hours Clang negligently by. I view the evening bonfires of the sun, On hills where morning rains have hissed, The eyeless countenance of the mist, Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done. I have seen the lightning blade, the leaping star, The cauldrons of the sea in storm, Have felt the earthquake's lifting arm, And trodden where abysmal fires and snow-cones are. I learn to prophesy the hid eclipse, The coming of eccentric orbs, To meet the dust the sky absorbs, To weigh the sun, and fix the hour Each planet dips. I witness fellow-earthmen surge and strive, Assemblies meet and throb and part, Death's soothing finger, sorrow's smart, All the vast various moils That mean a world alive. But that I fain would wote of shuns my sense, Those sights of which old prophets tell, Those signs the general word so well, Thought safe to therean heed, Denied my long suspense. In graveyard green, behind his monument, To glimpse a phantom parent, friend, Wearing his smile, and not the end, Out-breathing softly, That were best enlightenment. Or if a dead love's lips, whose dreams reveal When midnight imps of King Decay Delve sly to solve me back to clay, Should leave some print to prove Her spirit kisses real. Or when earth's frail lie bleeding of her strong, If some recorder, as in writ, Near to the weary scene should flit, Then drop one plume, as pledged, That heaven in scrolls the wrong. There are those who, wrapped to heights of trancid trust, These tokens claim to feel and see, Read radiant hints of times to be, Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust. Such scope is granted not to lives like mine. I have laid in dead men's beds, have walked The tombs of those with whom I talked, Called many a gone and goodly one to shape a sign, And panted for response. But none replies, no warnings loom, Nor whisperings to open out my limitings, And Nessiance mutely muses, when a man falls, he lies.