He Revisits His First School

I should not have shown in the flesh,

I ought to have gone as a ghost;

It was awkward, unseemly almost,

Standing solidly there as when fresh,

Pink, tiny, crisp-curled,

My pinions yet furled

From the winds of the world.

After waiting so many a year

To wait longer, and go as a sprite

From the tomb at the mid of some night

Was the right, radiant way to appear;

Not as one wanzing weak

From life's roar and reek,

His rest still to seek:

Yea, beglimpsed through the quaint quarried glass

Of green moonlight, by me greener made,

When they'd cry, perhaps, "There sits his shade

In his olden haunt - just as he was

When in Walkingame he

Conned the grand Rule-of-Three

With the bent of a bee."

But to show in the afternoon sun,

With an aspect of hollow-eyed care,

When none wished to see me come there,

Was a garish thing, better undone.

Yes; wrong was the way;

But yet, let me say,

I may right it - some day.

A quote from a Hardy novel

“Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly...Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.” 

(The Mayor of Casterbridge)

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