Thomas Hardy - The Five Students lyrics

The sparrow dips in his wheel-rut bath, The sun grows pa**ionate-eyed, And boils the dew to smoke by the paddock-path; As strenuously we stride, - Five of us; dark He, fair He, dark She, fair She, I, All beating by. The air is shaken, the high-road hot, Shadowless swoons the day, The greens are sobered and cattle at rest; but not We on our urgent way, - Four of us; fair She, dark She, fair He, I, are there, But one—elsewhere. Autumn moulds the hard fruit mellow, And forward still we press Through moors, briar-meshed plantations, clay-pits yellow, As in the spring hours—yes, Three of us: fair He, fair She, I, as heretofore, But—fallen one more. The leaf drops: earthworms draw it in At night-time noiselessly, The fingers of birch and beech are skeleton-thin, And yet on the beat are we, - Two of us; fair She, I. But no more left to go The track we know. Icicles tag the church-aisle leads, The flag-rope gibbers hoarse, The home-bound foot-folk wrap their snow-flaked heads, Yet I still stalk the course, - One of us . . . Dark and fair He, dark and fair She, gone: The rest—anon.