Week 9

                                                   Stonehenge (built circa 3000 B.C.)

The Shadow on the Stone           by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

I went by the Druid stone

That broods in the garden white and lone,

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows

That at some moments fall thereon

From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,

And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

Threw there when she was gardening.

I thought her behind my back,

Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,

Though how do you get into this old track?’

And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf

As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

That there was nothing in my belief.

Yet I wanted to look and see

That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision

A shape which, somehow, there may be.’

So I went on softly from the glade,

And left her behind me throwing her shade,

As she were indeed an apparition—

My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

English author Thomas Hardy was fascinated with the ancient world that lay in cryptic form all around the Wessex area where he lived and set his novels.  He included many references to pagan history and belief in his accounts of the folkways of the area, and did himself experience the conflict between "reason" and the irrational intuitions and impulses of his being. Here, in the poem above, he seems to see his departed wife near a Druid stone ( a 5000 year old Sarsen stone lay in his garden) and to be reluctant to lose hold of the visionary "shape."