Thomas Hardy - At the dinner-table lyrics

I sat at dinner in my prime, And glimpsed my face in the sideboard-gla**, And started as if I had seen a crime, And prayed the ghastly show might pa**. Wrenched wrinkled features met my sight, Grinning back to me as my own; I well-nigh fainted with affright At finding me a haggard crone. My husband laughed. He had slily set A warping mirror there, in whim To startle me. My eyes grew wet; I spoke not all the eve to him. He was sorry, he said, for what he had done, And took away the distorting gla**, Uncovering the accustomed one; And so it ended? No, alas, Fifty years later, when he died, I sat me in the selfsame chair, Thinking of him. Till, weary-eyed, I saw the sideboard facing there; And from its mirror looked the lean Thing I'd become, each wrinkle and score The image of me that I had seen In jest there fifty years before.