Thomas Hardy (Томас Гарди (Харди))
Old Furniture
I know not how it may be with others Who sit amid relics of householdry That date from the days of their mothers’ mothers, But well I know how it is with me Continually. I see the hands of the generations That owned each shiny familiar thing In play on its knobs and indentations, And with its ancient fashioning Still dallying: Hands behind hands, growing paler and paler, As in a mirror a candle-flame Shows images of itself, each frailer As it recedes, though the eye may frame Its shape the same. On the clock’s dull dial a foggy finger, Moving to set the minutes right With tentative touches that lift and linger In the wont of a moth on a summer night, Creeps to my sight. On this old viol, too, fingers are dancing – As whilom – just over the strings by the nut, The tip of a bow receding, advancing In airy quivers, as if it would cut The plaintive gut. And I see a face by that box for tinder, Glowing forth in fits from the dark, And fading again, as the linten cinder Kindles to red at the flinty spark, Or goes out stark. Well, well. It is best to be up and doing, The world has no use for one to-day Who eyes things thus – no aim pursuing! He should not continue in this stay, But sink away.
Thomas Hardy’s other poems:
935
