Poem by Thomas Hardy

After the Fair

The singers are gone from the Cornmarket-place
With their broadsheets of rhymes,
The street rings no longer in treble and bass
With their skits on the times,
And the Cross, lately thronged, is a dim naked space
That but echoes the stammering chimes.

From Clock-corner steps, as each quarter ding-dongs,
Away the folk roam
By the ‘Hart’ and Grey’s Bridge into byways and ‘drongs’,
Or across the ridged loam;
The younger ones shrilling the lately heard songs,
The old saying, ‘Would we were home.’

The shy-seeming maiden so mute in the fair
Now rattles and talks,
And that one who looked the most swaggering there
Grows sad as she walks,
And she who seemed eaten by cankering care
In statuesque sturdiness stalks.

And midnight clears High Street of all but the ghosts
Of its buried burghees,
From the latest far back to those old Roman hosts
Whose remains one yet sees,
Who loved, laughed, and fought, hailed their friends, drank their toasts
At their meeting-times here, just as these!

1. Afternoon Service at Mellstock
2. At the Word ‘Farewell’
3. Tragedian to Tragedienne
4. The Three Tall Men
5. A Victorian Rehearsal

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