Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?.
Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?.
Things were not lastly as firstly well.
With us twain, you tell?.
But all's closed now, despite Time's derision.
I see what you are doing: you are leading me on.
To the spots we knew when we first haunted here together,.
The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone.
At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,.
And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow.
That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,.
When you were all aglow,.
And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!.
Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,.
The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,.
Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,.
For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,.
The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!.
I am just the same as when.
Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.
Thomas Hardy's "After a Journey- is about someone who has passed away, and only misses his love and the things that him and his love had done together. In the poem the speaker speaks of how he can see his love (l. 6) and all of her beauty (ll. 7-8) and yet she cannot see him, and how he waits for the day when his love will once again be able to see his face. He can watches her as she goes to the places that they went to together so many times, and he imagines the many memories they had there (ll. 17-18). This poem is a poem that he has written to his love form where he is, and how he only wishes to be with this person of which he loves so dearly.
Hardy uses the literary techniques of aporia, kennings, hendiadys, personification, and alliteration in "After a Journey-. An aporia is an expression of doubt (often in-genuine) by which a speaker appears uncertain as to what he should think, say, or do. An example of an aporia is "Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?- (l.
