Explore "After the Fair" by Thomas Hardy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE singers are gone from the Cornmarket-place / With their broadsheets of rhymes, / The street rings no longer in treble and bass / With their skits on the times, / And the Cross, lately thronged, is a dim naked space / That but echoes the stammering chimes.
From Clock-corner steps, as each quarter ding-dongs, / Away the folk roam / By the "Hart" and Grey's Bridge into byways and "drongs," / Or across the ridged loam; / The younger ones shrilling the lately heard songs, / The old saying, "Would we were home."
The shy-seeming maiden so mute in the fair / Now rattles and talks, / And that one who looked the most swaggering there / Grows sad as she walks, / And she who seemed eaten by cankering care / In statuesque sturdiness stalks.
And midnight clears High Street of all but the ghosts / Of its buried burghees, / From the latest far back to those old Roman hosts / Whose remains one yet sees, / Who loved, laughed, and fought, hailed their friends, drank their / toasts / At their meeting-times here, just as these!