Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses/The West-of-Wessex Girl

by Thomas Hardy

THE WEST-OF-WESSEX GIRL

A VERY West-of-Wessex girl,
As blithe as blithe could be,
Was once well-known to me,
And she would laud her native town,
And hope and hope that we
Might sometime study up and down
Its charms in company.

But never I squired my Wessex girl
In jaunts to Hoe or street
When hearts were high in beat,
Nor saw her in the marbled ways
Where market-people meet
That in her bounding early days
Were friendly with her feet.

Yet now my West-of-Wessex girl,
When midnight hammers slow
From Andrew's, blow by blow,

As phantom draws me by the hand
To the place—Plymouth Hoe—
Where side by side in life, as planned,
We never were to go!

Begun in Plymouth, March 1913.