"The Shadow on the Stone" (A Poem)

Originally published in Poems of 1912-13, Thomas Hardy’s “The Shadow on the Stone” is one of three elegies the author penned to his first wife Emma, who died in 1912.[1] Using the Neolithic stone block in their garden as the opening image, Hardy envisions her ghost standing behind him as he stares at the spot where she once gardened. Although the writer knows there is no entity, he chooses not to turn around and confirm this fact. Rather, he hopelessly holds on to the fleeting hope that her presence is still with him.

I went by the Druid stone

That broods in the garden white and lone,

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows

That at some moments fall thereon

From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,

And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

Threw there when she was gardening.

I thought her behind my back,

Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: “I am sure you are standing behind me,

Though how do you get into this old track?”

And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf

As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

That there was nothing in my belief.

Yet I wanted to look and see

That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: “Nay, I’ll not unvision

A shape which, somehow, there may be.”

So I went on softly from the glade,

And left her behind me throwing her shade,

As she were indeed an apparition -

My head unturned lest my dream should fade.[2]

Works Referenced

Hardy, Thomas. “The Shadow on the Stone.” Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems. Ed. Robert Mezey. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. 137.

Riquelme, John Paul. “The Modernity of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry.” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy. Ed. Dale Kramer. London: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 204-223.

____________________

[1] Riquelme, 215.
[2] Hardy, 137.