Transcribed from the 1922 Macmillan and Co. edition by DavidPrice,
LATE LYRICS
AND EARLIER
WITH MANY OTHER VERSES
BY
THOMAS HARDY
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1922
PRINTED INGREAT BRITAIN
p.vAPOLOGY
About half the verses that followwere written quite lately. The rest are older, having beenheld over in MS. when past volumes were published, on consideringthat these would contain a sufficient number of pages to offerreaders at one time, more especially during the distractions ofthe war. The unusually far back poems to be found here are,however, but some that were overlooked in gathering previouscollections. A freshness in them, now unattainable, seemedto make up for their inexperience and to justify theirinclusion. A few are dated; the dates of others are notdiscoverable.
The launching of a volume of this kind in neo-Georgian days byone who began writing in mid-Victorian, and has published nothingto speak of for some years, may seem to call for a few words ofexcuse or p.viexplanation. Whether or no, readers may feelassured that a new book is submitted to them with greathesitation at so belated a date. Insistent practicalreasons, however, among which were requests from some illustriousmen of letters who are in sympathy with my productions, theaccident that several of the poems have already seen the light,and that dozens of them have been lying about for years,compelled the course adopted, in spite of the naturaldisinclination of a writer whose works have been so frequentlyregarded askance by a pragmatic section here and there, to drawattention to them once more.
I do not know that it is necessary to say much on the contentsof the book, even in deference to suggestions that will bementioned presently. I believe that those readers who carefor my poems at all—readers to whom no passport isrequired—will care for this new instalment of them, perhapsthe last, as much as for any that have preceded them. Moreover, in the eyes of a less friendly class the pieces, thougha very mixed collection indeed, contain, so far as I am able tosee, little or nothing in technic or teaching that can beconsidered a Star-Chamber matter, or so much as agitating to aladies’ p.viischool; even though, to use Wordsworth’sobservation in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, suchreaders may suppose “that by the act of writing in verse anauthor makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certainknown habits of association: that he not only thus apprises thereader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will befound in his book, but that others will be carefullyexcluded.”
It is true, nevertheless, that some grave, positive, stark,delineations are interspersed among those of the passive,lighter, and traditional sort presumably nearer to stereotypedtastes. For—while I am quite aware that a thinker isnot