Poem by Thomas Hardy

The Sailor’s Mother

‘O whence do you come,
Figure in the night-fog that chills me numb?’

‘I come to you across from my house up there,
And I don’t mind the brine-mist clinging to me
That blows from the quay,
For I heard him in my chamber, and thought you unaware.’

‘But what did you hear,
That brought you blindly knocking in this middle-watch so drear?’

‘My sailor son’s voice as ’twere calling at your door,
And I don’t mind my bare feet clammy on the stones,
And the blight to my bones,
For he only knows of this house I lived in before.’

‘Nobody’s nigh,
Woman like a skeleton, with socket-sunk eye.’

‘Ah – nobody’s nigh! And my life is drearisome,
And this is the old home we loved in many a day
Before he went away;
And the salt fog mops me. And nobody’s come!’

From ‘To Please His Wife’

1. The End of the Episode
2. The Month’s Calendar
3. The Strange House
4. On a Discovered Curl of Hair
5. There Seemed a Strangeness

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