At Lulworth Cove a Century Back

By Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 Thomas Hardy

Had I but lived a hundred years ago

I might have gone, as I have gone this year,

By Warmwell Cross on to a Cove I know,

And Time have placed his finger on me there:

"You see that man?" — I might have looked, and said,

"O yes: I see him. One that boat has brought

Which dropped down Channel round Saint Alban's Head.

So commonplace a youth calls not my thought."

"You see that man?" — "Why yes; I told you; yes:

Of an idling town-sort; thin; hair brown in hue;

And as the evening light scants less and less

He looks up at a star, as many do."

"You see that man?" — "Nay, leave me!" then I plead,

"I have fifteen miles to vamp across the lea,

And it grows dark, and I am weary-kneed:

I have said the third time; yes, that man I see!"

"Good. That man goes to Rome — to death, despair;

And no one notes him now but you and I:

A hundred years, and the world will follow him there,

And bend with reverence where his ashes lie."

Biography

One of the most renowned poets and novelists in English literary history, Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in the English village of Higher Bockhampton in the county of Dorset. He died in 1928 at Max Gate, a house he built for himself and his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, in Dorchester, a few miles from his birthplace. Hardy’s youth was influenced by the musicality of his father, a stonemason and fiddler, and his mother, Jemima . . .

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