With any major poet who produces a large body of work, there are the poems that become famous and end up in anthologies and a lot of less well-known ones that are, perhaps unfairly, overlooked. A trawl through Thomas Hardy’s 900-page Collected Poems reveals many hidden gems.
Nobody Comes is dated 1924, towards the end of Hardy’s long life. It is thought to have been inspired by a real-life incident when his wife was in hospital and he was waiting for news. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is a sense of isolation and loneliness here.
Some of the imagery is not quite what one expects from Hardy, with references to a car and a telegraph wire. You might not identify it as a Hardy poem if you did not already know. Yet this modern imagery is set against a more familiar rural background.
Perhaps some of the powerful sense of melancholy here is that of an elderly man adrift in a changing world.
Nobody Comes by Thomas Hardy
Tree-leaves labour up and down,
And through them the fainting light
Succumbs to the crawl of night.
Outside in the road the telegraph wire
To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travellers like a spectral lyre
Swept by a spectral hand.
A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,
That flash upon a tree:
It has nothing to do with me,
And whangs along in a world of its own,
Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,
And nobody pulls up there.
The Good Reader 