Poetry Revisited: A January Night by Thomas Hardy

A January Night

(1879; first published in Moments of Vision: 1917)

The rain smites more and more,
The east wind snarls and sneezes;
Through the joints of the quivering door
The water wheezes.

The tip of each ivy-shoot
Writhes on its neighbour's face;
There is some hid dread afoot
That we cannot trace.

Is it the spirit astray
Of the man at the house below
Whose coffin they took in to-day?
We do not know.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
English novelist and poet