Thomas Hardy

The Monument-Maker

I chiselled her monument
To my mind’s content,
Took it to the church by night,
When her planet was at its height,
And set it where I had figured the place in the daytime.
Having niched it there
I stepped back, cheered, and thought its outlines fair,
And its marbles rare.

Then laughed she over my shoulder as in our Maytime:
‘It spells not me!’ she said:
‘Tells nothing about my beauty, wit, or gay time
With all those, quick and dead,
Of high or lowlihead,
That hovered near,
Including you, who carve there your devotion;
But you felt none, my dear!’

And then she vanished. Checkless sprang my emotion
And forced a tear
At seeing I’d not been truly known by her,
And never prized! – that my memorial here,
To consecrate her sepulchre,
Was scorned, almost,
By her sweet ghost:
Yet I hoped not quite, in her very innermost!