Thomas Hardy

Last Look round St Martin’s Fair

The sun is like an open furnace door,
Whose round revealed retort confines the roar
Of fires beyond terrene;
The moon presents the lustre-lacking face
Of a brass dial gone green,
Whose hours no eye can trace.
The unsold heathcroppers are driven home
To the shades of the Great Forest whence they come
By men with long cord-waistcoats in brown monochrome.
The stars break out, and flicker in the breeze,
It seems, that twitches the trees. –
From its hot idol soon
The fickle unresting earth has turned to a fresh patroon –
The cold, now brighter, moon.

The woman in red, at the nut-stall with the gun,
Lights up, and still goes on:
She’s redder in the flare-lamp than the sun
Showed it ere it was gone.
Her hands are black with loading all the day,
And yet she treats her labour as ’twere play,
Tosses her ear-rings, and talks ribaldry
To the young men around as natural gaiety,
And not a weary work she’d readily stay,
And never again nut-shooting see,
Though crying, ‘Fire away!’