Above the weary waiting world,

Asleep in chill despair,

There breaks a sound of joyous bells

Upon the frosted air.

And o’er the humblest rooftree, lo,

A star is dancing on the snow.

What makes the yellow star to dance

Upon the brink of night?

What makes the breaking dawn to glow

So magically bright,—

And all the earth to be renewed

With infinite beatitude?

The singing bells, the throbbing star,

The sunbeams on the snow,

And the awakening heart that leaps

New ecstasy to know,—

They all are dancing in the morn

Because a little child is born.

Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come_; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves (more…)

Nautilus Island’s hermit

Heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea.

Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer

Is first selectman in our village;

She’s in her dotage.

Thirsting for

The hierarchic privacy (more…)

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window (more…)

Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss

Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off

Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,

There is a house that is no more a house

Upon a farm that is no more a farm

And in a town that is no more a town. (more…)

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people.

She was ours

In Massachusetts, in Virginia, (more…)

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the line of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.

Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning (more…)

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, (more…)

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.