March

 The first day of March (St David's Day), so here is a March poem – indeed a poem of two Marches, in which Thomas Hardy, writing in 1913, looks back to the March day in 1870 when he and his new love, Emma Gifford, rode out to Beeny Cliff (in Cornwall), he on a bicycle, she on horseback 'with bright hair flapping free'. She was a bold horsewoman, and remembered in later life 'scampering up and down the hills on my beloved mare alone, wanting no protection, the rain going down my back. … The villagers stopped to gaze when I rushed down the hills … for no one dared except myself to ride in such wild fearless fashion.' Poor Emma made the mistake of marrying Hardy: it was a notably unhappy relationship, partly because of her increasing eccentricity and delusions of grandeur, partly because of his difficult personality. After she died in November 1912, Hardy's mind went back to the early days of their relationship, when there was still some chance of happiness. He revisited the scenes of their romance, and wrote some of his best poetry in the elegiac sequence published as Poems of 1912-13, from which this one is taken... 

Beeny Cliff

March 1870 - March 1913

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free –
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.

Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is – elsewhere – whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.

['Mews', by the way, are gulls.]