Dec 12

Again, how are we here? We’re halfway to Christmas! That can’t be right.

It’s also quite late so you’re getting another lightening round of the blog. Today we had English Breakfast tea, belatedly, around 6:40. That’s twenty minutes later than usual, but after last night we thought we would sleep in – except we’re too set in our routine to fall back asleep, so we gave up and went into the office anyway.

Then we went to the Scottish Dance Christmas party and the evening out afterwards, and now here we are, still unable to bring ourselves to use Dickenson, but still short of poems about dancing. As much as possible we like to give you variety, so we try not to repeat them.

But we also thought something so quintessentially British as English Breakfast with milk should have a British poem. So here’s one by a writer who was also a musician. You can here it in the meter – a lot of Hardy’s poems can be set to hymn tunes. And if they don’t fit hymn tunes there’s a good chance they fit fiddle music.

A Commonplace Day
Thomas Hardy
The day is turning ghost,
And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively,
  To join the anonymous host
Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe,
  To one of like degree.

  I part the fire-gnawed logs,
Rake forth the embers, spoil the busy flames, and lay the ends
  Upon the shining dogs;
Further and further from the nooks the twilight’s stride extends,
  And beamless black impends.

  Nothing of tiniest worth
Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or
praise,
  Since the pale corpse-like birth
Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays –
  Dullest of dull-hued Days!

  Wanly upon the panes
The rain slides as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and
yet
  Here, while Day’s presence wanes,
And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set,
  He wakens my regret.

  Regret—though nothing dear
That I wot of, was toward in the wide world at his prime,
  Or bloomed elsewhere than here,
To die with his decease, and leave a memory sweet, sublime,
  Or mark him out in Time . . .

  —Yet, maybe, in some soul,
In some spot undiscerned on sea or land, some impulse rose,
  Or some intent upstole
Of that enkindling ardency from whose maturer glows
  The world’s amendment flows;

  But which, benumbed at birth
By momentary chance or wile, has missed its hope to be
  Embodied on the earth;
And undervoicings of this loss to man’s futurity
  May wake regret in me.