The Roman Road -- Thomas Hardy

(Poem #519) The Roman Road The Roman Road runs straight and bare As the pale parting-line in hair Across the heath. And thoughtful men Contrast its days of Now and Then, And delve, and measure, and compare; Visioning on the vacant air Helmeted legionnaires, who proudly rear The Eagle, as they pace again The Roman Road. But no tall brass-helmeted legionnaire Haunts it for me. Uprises there A mother's form upon my ken, Guiding my infant steps, as when We walked that ancient thoroughfare, The Roman Road. -- Thomas Hardy

There is something ineffably romantic about the old Roman roads, those
enduring remnants of a vanished empire. They spoke then, and speak now, of
the might and organization of that empire, and their present day existence
is a continuing point of contact between Then and Now.

It is the second of these properties that forms the basis of Hardy's poem,
a reflection on the Road, and the way it bridges the past and present -
except that he refers to a far more personal and immediate past, and in
doing so, raises the road to the same level of immediacy. The two images
overlap - the Road of the ancient Romans, that survives even now and recalls
a bygone civilisation, and the road of the poet's youth, recalling a
bygone past.

And finally, the use of 'ancient' in the penultimate line brings the whole
thing into focus - the road not only is ancient, it *was* ancient even in
childhood memory, and so the timeline clicks into place and two roads become
one again.

Links:

You can find a biography at
  poem #96

We've recently done a theme on ancient Rome:
  poem #490
  poem #492
  poem #494
  poem #495

And rather longer ago, one on roads:
  poem #47
  poem #49
  poem #51

And, of course, you can see all the previous Hardy poems we've run at
  [broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/index_poet.html

PostScript:

This is, by Hardy's standards, a remarkably cheerful poem :)

-martin