Explore "The Man who Forgot" by Thomas Hardy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
AT a lonely cross where bye-roads met / I sat upon a gate; / I saw the sun decline and set, / And still was fain to wait.
A trotting boy passed up the way / And roused me from my thought; / I called to him, and showed where lay / A spot I shyly sought.
"A summer-house fair stands hidden where / You see the moonlight thrown; / Go, tell me if within it there / A lady sits alone."
He half demurred, but took the track, / And silence held the scene; / I saw his figure rambling back; / I asked him if he had been.
"I went just where you said, but found / No summer-house was there: / Beyond the slope 'tis all bare ground; / Nothing stands anywhere.
"A man asked what my brains were worth; / The house, he said, grew rotten, / And was pulled down before my birth, / And is almost forgotten!"
My right mind woke, and I stood dumb; / Forty years' frost and flower / Had fleeted since I'd used to come / To meet her in that bower.