A Popular Personage At Home
By Thomas Hardy
“I live here: ‘Wessex’ is my name,
I am a dog known rather well:
I guard the house; but how that came
To be my lot I cannot tell.
“With a leap and a heart elate I go,
At the end of an hour’s expectancy,
To take a walk of a mile or so,
With the folk who share the house with me.
“Along the path amid the grass
I sniff, and find out rarest smells
For rolling over as I pass
The open fields towards the dells.
“No doubt I shall always cross this sill,
And turn the corner, and stand steady,
Gazing back for my mistress till
She reaches where I have run already.
“And that this meadow with its brook,
And bulrush, just as it appears
As I plunge past with hasty look,
Will stay the same a thousand years.”
Thus “Wessex.” Yet a dubious ray
At times informs his steadfast eye,
Just for a trice, as though to say:
“Will these things, after all, go by?”
