Wessex Poems by Thomas Hardy - 27/48. My Cicely (read by Libby Gohn)

My Sicily, seventeen hundred-something Alive, and I leapt in my wonder, was faint Of my joyance, and grasses and groves Shone in garments of glory to me. She lives in a plenteous well-being, To-day as a forehand, the dead bore the Name, though a rarer name. She lives in a plenteous well-being, To-day as a forehand, the dead bore the Name, though a rarer name. She lived—I, afar in the city Of frenzy-led factions, had squandered Green years and maturer in bowing the knee, To balls elusive and specious, till Chance had there voiced me that one I loved Vainly in nonage had ceased her to be. The passion the planets had scowled on, And change had let dwindle, her death Rumor smartly relifted to full apogee. I mounted a steed in the dawning, With acheful remembrance, and made for the West highway to far Exenbury. Passing heaths and the house of long sieging, I neared the thin steeple that tops The fair fane of Poor's olden Episcopal sea. And changing anew my onbearer, I traversed the downland, whereon bleak Hill-graves of chieftains bulge, barren of tree. And still sadly onward I followed, that highway of the Eysen, which trails Its pale ribbon down Wessex, where Lynchett and Lee. Although the stour-bordered forum, where legions had wayfared, and where The slow river upglasses its green canopy, And by Wetherbury Castle, and thence From, through Casterbridge, held I still on, To entomb her my vision saw Stretched pallidly. No highwayman's trot blew the night-wind To me so life-weary, but only the Creek of the Gibbets, or Wagoner's Gee. Triple-ramparted Midan gloomed grayly Above me from southward, and north The hill-fortress of Egar, and square Pummery. The nine-pillared Cromlech, the Bride-streams, the Axe, and the Otter, I passed, to the gate of the city, where X sensed the sea. Till spent in a grave-acre pausing, I learned t'was not my love to whom Mother Church had just murmured a last lullaby. Then where dwells the cannon's kinswoman, my friend of aforetime? T'was hard to repress my heart-heavings and new ecstasy. She wedded, ah! wedded beneath her. She keeps a stage hostile ten miles hence, Beside the great highway, the famed Lyons Three. Her spouse was her lackey, no option Twixt wedlock and worse things, a lapse over-sad for a lady of her pedigree. I shuddered, said nothing, and wandered To shades of green laurel. Too ghastly had grown those first tidings, So bright some of blea. For on my ride hither I'd halted a while at the Lyons. And her, her whose name had once opened My heart as a key, I looked on unknowing, And witnessed her jests with the tapsters, Her liquor-fired face, her thick accents In naming her fee. O God, why this seeming derision? I cried in my anguish. O once-loved, O fair-unforgotten, That thing, I meant it thee. Inured and at peace, lost but sainted, Were grief I could compass. Depraved, tis for Christ's poor dependent A cruel decree. I backed on the highway, but passed not the hostel. Within there, too mocking to love's re-expression, Was time's repartee. Up-tracking where legions had wayfared, By Cromlech's unstoried, And lynchot's, and sepultured chieftain's, In self-colloquy. A feeling stirred in me, and strengthened, That she was not my love, But she of Garth, who lay rapt In her long reverie. And thence, till to-day, I persuade me, That this was the true one, That death stole intact her young dearness And innocency. Frail-witted, eluded, they call me. I may be. Tis better to dream than to own The debasement of sweet Sicily. Moreover, I rate it unseemly to whole That kind heaven could work such device To her ruin and my misery. So lest I disturb my choice vision, I shun the west highway. Even now, when the naps ring With rhythms from Blackbird and Bee, And feel that with slumber, half-conscious, She rests in the church hay, Her spirit unsoiled as in youth-time, When lovers were we. End of section 27