Source identified
“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.
Source identified
“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.
Source identified
“Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, And a pond edged with grayish leaves.”
The speaker remembers a painful relationship through the landscape that surrounded it, showing how later experience can fuse emotional lessons with particular natural images.
Source note: “Neutral Tones,” Wessex Poems and Other Verses; Project Gutenberg #3167. The statement belongs to the poem's speaker and should not be treated as Hardy's universal doctrine that love deceives.
Source identified
“How great my grief, my joys how few, Since first it was my fate to know thee!”
The speaker measures a relationship by the imbalance between grief and joy, making recollection itself the structure through which attachment and loss are assessed.
Source note: “How Great My Grief,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. It is a dramatic lyric statement and is not automatically read as direct autobiography.
Source identified
“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.
Source identified
“Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers, From those brown hills, have melted into spring.”
The poem measures bereavement through fifteen winters turning into spring, making seasonal change a visible clock for grief that has lasted across years.
Source note: “Remembrance,” in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846); Project Gutenberg #1019. The line belongs to a dramatic lyric voice and is not biographical evidence by itself.