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Download "The Five Students"

Album Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses by Thomas Hardy

ALBUM

Thomas Hardy

1917

The Five Students by Thomas Hardy

Performed by
Thomas Hardy
About

‘The Five Students’ traces the progress of five friends through to the end of their lives, using an extended metaphor of the seasons. One by one the students succumb to death leaving only the speaker contemplating his own mortality in the final stanza. The trope of the seasons as a metaphor for lif...

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The Five Students Annotated

The sparrow dips in his wheel-rut bath,
The sun grows passionate-eyed,
And boils the dew to smoke by the paddock-path;
As strenuously we stride, -
Five of us; dark He, fair He, dark She, fair She, I,
All beating by.

The air is shaken, the high-road hot,
Shadowless swoons the day,
The greens are sobered and cattle at rest; but not
We on our urgent way, -
Four of us; fair She, dark She, fair He, I, are there,
But one—elsewhere.

Autumn moulds the hard fruit mellow,
And forward still we press
Through moors, briar-meshed plantations, clay-pits yellow,
As in the spring hours—yes,
Three of us: fair He, fair She, I, as heretofore,
But—fallen one more.

The leaf drops: earthworms draw it in
At night-time noiselessly,
The fingers of birch and beech are skeleton-thin,
And yet on the beat are we, -
Two of us; fair She, I. But no more left to go
The track we know.

Icicles tag the church-aisle leads,
The flag-rope gibbers hoarse,
The home-bound foot-folk wrap their snow-flaked heads,
Yet I still stalk the course, -
One of us . . . Dark and fair He, dark and fair She, gone:
The rest—anon.

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