Thomas Hardy is the poet not of love that’s gone but of love never allowed to arrive, the love we missed because our heart was hard or pride dismissive or mind busy elsewhere. His poems are painful to read because they’re so potent, present. He was old and famous when he wrote most of them, an amazing success, only he didn’t feel successful or amazing, but a contemptible failure at the work that mattered most: loving 

                  This little poem is representative:

In the Moonlight

"O lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave, as no other grave there were?" 

"If your great gaunt eyes so importune
Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon,
Maybe you'll raise her phantom soon!" 

"Why, fool, it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is no such joy for me!" 

"Ah - she was one you loved, no doubt,
Through good and evil, through rain and drought,
And when she passed, all your sun went out?" 

"Nay: she was the woman I did not love,
Whom all the others were ranked above,
Whom during her life I thought nothing of."

                  What an excruciating self-encounter! In his dream, the poet happens on a “lonely workman” – and what poet isn’t a “lonely workman”? – staring obsessively at a grave on a coldly moonlit night, staring with an intensity that seems to summon the deceased from the ground. The spectacle irks the observer, as stubborn grief tends to. It’s OK to mourn, even commendable for a while, but get over it, can’t you! Interminable gloom befouls the common air.

                  The observing poet almost mocks his obsessive opposite. Keep at it, pal, and your stare might resurrect her yet, ha-ha.

                  The distraught workman snarls back: “Why, fool,” her restoration

    is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be.

 Quite the claim, if true. He loves this memory more than anyone living. We shudder at the ferocity of such remorse.

                  Dream poet number one, a sentimentalist, seeks to mollify the scene by interpreting it as a sighing recollection of a once thrilling hour. The workman may be grieving now, but at least he has the memory of his great love to feed his soul.

                  That would be nice, but no dice. “Nay,” growls the lonely workman, 

         she was the woman I did not love,
Whom all the others were ranked above,
Whom during her life I thought nothing of."

No memory-as-balm; as blame rather, lacerating self-abuse. We are judged as much, or even more, by what we didn’t do, as by what we did. The “road not taken” sneers relentlessly and implacably at our timidity, stupidity, whatever prevented us from doing what we knew we ought.

                  Haven’t we all felt such stabbing regret? In my life, the love I betrayed was the life of the mind, literature, beautiful words. I chose commerce over passion because commerce was practical, paid the bills, and face it, I likely didn’t have what it took to make a go at the life I sighed for. What luck to have lived long enough to reboot – with a new life, new creed, new ladylove, new direction. My second life has lasted longer than Keats’ or Schubert’s one and only. Literature awaited my eventual regard as the workman’s buried heartthrob did not. That I did not deserve this happy ending makes it even happier.

                  My whole life I dreamed of drinking in music together, then sitting silently rapt. Now here we are.