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Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses
Contents:
VII
AFTER THE FAIR
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!
1902.
NOTE.—"The Chimes" (line 6) will be listened for in vain here at midnight now, having been abolished some years ago.
Contents:
Chicago:
Thomas Hardy, "VII After the Fair," Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses, ed. Keil, Heinrich, 1822-1894 and trans. Seaton, R. C. in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (New York: George E. Wood, ""Death-bed"" edition, 1892), Original Sources, accessed July 15, 2025, http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=4T2HWTVE1TGQTQ8.
MLA:
Hardy, Thomas. "VII After the Fair." Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses, edited by Keil, Heinrich, 1822-1894, and translated by Seaton, R. C., in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses, New York, George E. Wood, ""Death-bed"" edition, 1892, Original Sources. 15 Jul. 2025. http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=4T2HWTVE1TGQTQ8.
Harvard:
Hardy, T, 'VII After the Fair' in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses, ed. and trans. . cited in ""Death-bed"" edition, 1892, Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses, George E. Wood, New York. Original Sources, retrieved 15 July 2025, from http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=4T2HWTVE1TGQTQ8.
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