Explore "The Pity of It" by Thomas Hardy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I WALKED in loamy Wessex lanes, afar / From rail-track and from highway, and I heard / In field and farmstead many an ancient word / Of local lineage like "Thu bist," "Er war,"
"Ich woll," "Er sholl," and by-talk similar, / Nigh as they speak who in this month's moon gird / At England's very loins, thereunto spurred / By gangs whose glory threats and slaughters are.
Then seemed a Heart crying: "Whosoever they be / At root and bottom of this, who flung this flame / Between kin folk kin tongued even as are we,
"Sinister, ugly, lurid, be their fame; / May their familiars grow to shun their name, / And their brood perish everlastingly. "