Poetry Day - To Sincerity

Here is another of Thomas Hardy's poems, with a page out of my old travel album showing Thorncombe wood, which was tramped through on the way to the cottage where Thomas Hardy was born. I had not long finished reading The Woodlanders at the time, thus my accompanying scrawling (if you click the picture you should be able to read it, if you can decipher my handwriting).

To Sincerity

- Thomas Hardy

O sweet sincerity! -

Where modern methods be

What scope for thine and thee?

Life may be sad past saying,

Its greens for ever graying,

Its faiths to dust decaying;

And youth may have foreknown it,

And riper seasons shown it,

But custom cries: "Disown it:

"Say ye rejoice, though grieving,

Believe, while unbelieving,

Behold, without perceiving!"

- Yet, would men look at true things,

And unilluded view things,

And count to bear undue things,

The real might mend the seeming,

Facts better their foredeeming,

And Life its disesteeming.

February 1899.