If you had Known by Thomas Hardy

IF you had known / When listening with her to the far-down moan / Of the white-selvaged and empurpled sea, / And rain came on that did not hinder talk, / Or damp your flashing facile gaiety / In turning home, despite the slow wet walk / By crooked ways, and over stiles of stone; / If you had known

You would lay roses, / Fifty years thence, on her monument, that discloses / Its graying shape upon the luxuriant green; / Fifty years thence to an hour, by chance led there, / What might have moved you? -yea, had you foreseen / That on the tomb of the selfsame one, gone where / The dawn of every day is as the close is, / You would lay roses!