Explore "The Blow" by Thomas Hardy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THAT no man schemed it is my hope- / Yea, that it fell by will and scope / Of That Which some enthrone, / And for whose meaning myriads grope.
For I would not that of my kind / There should, of his unbiassed mind, / Have been one known / Who such a stroke could have designed;
Since it would augur works and ways / Below the lowest that man assays / To have hurled that stone / Into the sunshine of our days!
And if it prove that no man did, / And that the Inscrutable, the Hid, / Was cause alone / Of this foul crash our lives amid,
I'll go in due time, and forget / In some deep graveyard's oubliette / The thing whereof I groan, / And cease from troubling; thankful yet
Time's finger should have stretched to show / No aimful author's was the blow / That swept us prone, / But the Immanent Doer's That doth not know,
Which in some age unguessed of us / May lift Its blinding incubus, / And see, and own: / "It grieves me I did thus and thus! "