Browse 11 quotations connecting Thomas Hardy with Time, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include De Profundis I — Thomas Hardy, The Last Chrysanthemum — Thomas Hardy, The Self-Unseeing — Thomas Hardy. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include De Profundis I — Thomas Hardy, The Last Chrysanthemum — Thomas Hardy, The Self-Unseeing — Thomas Hardy.
“You did not come, And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.”
Absence becomes more painful as time continues, with the missed meeting represented not as a single moment but as a prolonged experience of disappointed expectation.
Source note: “A Broken Appointment,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The poem's speaker addresses an absent person; the line is retained as dramatic lyric context.
“Thus meet we five, in this still place, At this point of time, at this point in space.”
The speaker's quiet encounter with small nocturnal creatures is fixed to one precise moment and place, making attention itself the poem's central event.
Source note: “An August Midnight,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The five include the speaker and small creatures gathered around his writing table.
“Wintertime nighs; But my bereavement-pain It cannot bring again: Twice no one dies.”
Returning winter cannot recreate the first shock of bereavement, suggesting that repeated seasons may revisit memory without reproducing an earlier loss in exactly the same form.
Source note: “De Profundis I,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The poem reflects on recurring seasons and a past bereavement; it does not prescribe a universal grief timetable.
“Flower-petals flee; But, since it once hath been, No more that severing scene Can harrow me.”
Falling petals accompany a recognition that a severing event belongs to the past and cannot happen for the first time again, joining natural recurrence to changed grief.
Source note: “De Profundis I,” Project Gutenberg #3168. The passage belongs to one speaker's reflection on bereavement and seasonal return.
“We stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod.”
A drained winter landscape mirrors the emotional coldness of a failing relationship, with pale sun, dead leaves and barren ground shaping the poem's remembered scene.
Source note: “Neutral Tones,” collected in Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Project Gutenberg #3167. Hardy's landscape is part of a dramatic lyric memory, not a claim that winter inherently causes sadness.
“Snow-bound in woodland, a mournful word, Dropt now and then from the bill of a bird, Reached me on wind-wafts.”
A winter bird-call reaches the speaker inside a snowbound wood, giving a postponed meeting an atmosphere of distance, waiting and subdued natural sound.
Source note: “Postponement,” collected in Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898), Project Gutenberg #3167. The poem's landscape frames a delayed relationship encounter and is not generic weather description.
“I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day.”
The opening converts a winter landscape into an image of exhaustion and ending, establishing the bleak scene against which the later thrush song becomes striking.
Source note: “The Darkling Thrush,” collected in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The poem first appeared at the turn of the century; this collection uses the represented collection as source identity.
“Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall, And saps all retrocede.”
The late-blooming flower appears precisely as the rest of the season retreats, combining natural decline with an image of delayed emergence rather than simple renewal.
Source note: “The Last Chrysanthemum,” Project Gutenberg #3168. The corpse comparison is figurative seasonal language inside the poem.
“Now is the time of plaintive robin-song, When flowers are in their tombs.”
Seasonal decline is compressed into robin-song and buried flowers, giving late autumn an explicitly elegiac atmosphere before the poem turns to the surviving chrysanthemum.
Source note: “The Last Chrysanthemum,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. Floral death is poetic seasonal imagery, not literal human bereavement.
“Blessings emblazoned that day Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away!”
Looking backward reveals value that was not fully noticed while the moment was being lived, giving the remembered family scene both warmth and regret.
Source note: “The Self-Unseeing,” Project Gutenberg #3168. The exclamation closes a poem of retrospective domestic memory and should not be detached from that remembered household scene.
“Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet walked in.”
A familiar interior is revisited through traces of people who have died, turning worn architecture into a physical prompt for family memory and loss.
Source note: “The Self-Unseeing,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The poem reconstructs a remembered domestic scene; its dead belong to that literary memory.