2 quotations linked to The Self-Unseeing — Thomas Hardy by or associated with Thomas Hardy, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
A childhood or family interior, traces of dead household members, remembered brightness, regret and the later recognition of unnoticed blessings.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“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.