The Shadow on the Stone

By Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 Thomas Hardy

I went by the Druid stone

That broods in the garden white and lone,

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows

That at some moments fall thereon

From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,

And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

Threw there when she was gardening.

I thought her behind my back,

Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,

Though how do you get into this old track?’

And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf

As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

That there was nothing in my belief.

Yet I wanted to look and see

That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision

A shape which, somehow, there may be.’

So I went on softly from the glade,

And left her behind me throwing her shade,

As she were indeed an apparition—

My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

Source: The Complete Poems (2001)

ABOUT THIS POEM

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Poet Thomas Hardy 1840–1928

POET’S REGION England

SCHOOL / PERIOD Victorian

Subjects Living, Sorrow & Grieving, Death, Mythology & Folklore, Ghosts & the Supernatural

Poetic Terms Rhymed Stanza

More about this poem

Thomas Hardy was both a great poet and a great novelist. Although, as Laurence Lerner and John Holstrom point out in Thomas Hardy and His Readers, Hardy "was a classic of the English novel long before he died," he was not celebrated as a poet of the very first rank until after his death. Helmut E. Gerber's brief synopsis, in the first volume of Thomas Hardy: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him, gives some indication . . .

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