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Going and Staying

[words Thomas Hardy, music Howard Evans]

Thomas Hardy’s poem Going and Staying is from his 1922 book Late Lyrics and Earlier.

Martin Carthy sang Going and Staying in 2001 as the title track of Brass Monkey fourth album, Going and Staying. The album’s sleeve notes commented:

This short poem by Hardy ends, unusually for him, on a note of optimism—or at least an acceptance that adverse destiny is moderated by time and that what goes around comes around. The tune was written on a plane somewhere over the USA during an early Brass Monkey tour. Later regulation was necessary to fit it to the uncommon scansion.

Lyrics

Going and Staying

The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.

Seasons of blankness as of snow,
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.

Then we looked closelier at Time,
And saw his ghostly arms revolving
To sweet off woeful things with prime,
Things sinister with things sublime
Alike dissolving.