The Roman Road
The Roman Road runs straight and bare
As the pale parting-line in hair
Across the heath. And thoughtful men
Contrast its days of Now and Then,
And delve, and measure, and compare;
Visioning on the vacant air
Helmeted legionnaires, who proudly rear
The Eagle, as they pace again
The Roman Road.
But no tall brass-helmeted legionnaire
Haunts it for me. Uprises there
A mother's form upon my ken,
Guiding my infant steps, as when
We walked that ancient thoroughfare,
The Roman Road.
Commentary
There is something ineffably romantic about the old Roman roads, those enduring remnants of a vanished empire. They spoke then, and speak now, of the might and organization of that empire, and their present day existence is a continuing point of contact between Then and Now.
It is the second of these properties that forms the basis of Hardy’s poem, a reflection on the Road, and the way it bridges the past and present - except that he refers to a far more personal and immediate past, and in doing so, raises the road to the same level of immediacy. The two images overlap - the Road of the ancient Romans, that survives even now and recalls a bygone civilisation, and the road of the poet’s youth, recalling a bygone past.
And finally, the use of ‘ancient’ in the penultimate line brings the whole thing into focus - the road not only is ancient, it was ancient even in childhood memory, and so the timeline clicks into place and two roads become one again.
Links
You can find a biography at
We’ve recently done a theme on ancient Rome:
poem #490
poem #492
poem #494
poem #495
And rather longer ago, one on roads:
poem #47
poem #49
poem #51
And, of course, you can see all the previous Hardy poems we’ve run at
Postscript
This is, by Hardy’s standards, a remarkably cheerful poem :)
— Martin