Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, November 4th, 2024.

Today's poem comes from Thomas Hardy, and it's called The Shadow on the Stone.

It is a poem of grief, written a few years after the death of his wife, Emma. And so it is both a poem

rooted in a particular moment in time, but it is also contemplating something timeless,

inspired by the loss of a particular person, but wrestling with the emotion of grief that

is recognizable to many. And in a parallel way,

this poem is written to deal with a problem that is universal, the desire for consolation,

but also particular to its historical moment, and that Hardy is writing in a time when many, including himself,

have come unmoored from the traditional means of consolation

and sources of consolation.

Here is the shadow on the stone.

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 envision a shape which somehow there may be.

...