Abstract
‘At Casterbridge Fair’, the collection of seven ‘Country Songs’ that begins with ‘The Ballad-Singer’, ends, appropriately, with ‘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
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© 2015 Indy Clark
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Clark, I. (2015). Conclusion. In: Thomas Hardy’s Pastoral. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137505026_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137505026_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57896-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-50502-6
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