Why did you give no hint that night <br />That quickly after the morrow's dawn, <br />And calmly, as if indifferent quite, <br />You would close your term here, up and be gone <br />Where I could not follow <br />With wing of swallow <br />To gain one glimpse of you ever anon! <br /> <br />Never to bid good-bye <br />Or lip me the softest call, <br />Or utter a wish for a word, while I <br />Saw morning harden upon the wall, <br />Unmoved, unknowing <br />That your great going <br />Had place that moment, and altered all. <br /> <br />Why do you make me leave the house <br />And think for a breath it is you I see <br />At the end of the alley of bending boughs <br />Where so often at dusk you used to be; <br />Till in darkening dankness <br />The yawning blankness <br />Of the perspective sickens me! <br /> <br />You were she who abode <br />By those red-veined rocks far West, <br />You were the swan-necked one who rode <br />Along the beetling Beeny Crest, <br />And, reining nigh me, <br />Would muse and eye me, <br />While Life unrolled us its very best. <br /> <br />Why, then, latterly did we not speak, <br />Did we not think of those days long dead, <br />And ere your vanishing strive to seek <br />That time's renewal? We might have said, <br />"In this bright spring weather <br />We'll visit together <br />Those places that once we visited." <br /> <br />Well, well! All's past amend, <br />Unchangeable. It must go. <br />I seem but a dead man held on end <br />To sink down soon. . . . O you could not know <br />That such swift fleeing <br />No soul foreseeing-- <br />Not even I--would undo me so!<br /><br />Thomas Hardy<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-going/
