| If but some vengeful god would call to me / From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, / Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, / That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!” |
| —“Hap” |
| Thomas Hardy |
Wessex Poems & Other Verses
Thomas Hardy
Hardy’s verse is spare, unadorned, and unromantic, and its pervasive theme is man’s futile struggle against cosmic forces. Like many of his novels, these 51 poems are set against the bleak and forbidding Dorset landscape, whose physical harshness echoes that of an indifferent, if not malevolent, universe.
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NEW YORK: HARPER, 1898
NEW YORK: BARTLEBY.COM, 2000