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by Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)

A Kiss
Language: English 
By a wall the stranger now calls his,
Was born of old a particular kiss,
Without forethought in its genesis;
Which in a trice took wing on the air.
And where that spot is nothing shows:
  There ivy calmly grows,
  And no one knows
  What a birth was there!

That kiss is gone where none can tell –
Not even those who felt its spell:
It cannot have died; that know we well.
Somewhere it pursues its flight,
One of a long procession of sounds
  Travelling aethereal rounds
  Far from earth’s bounds
  In the infinite.

Confirmed with Thomas Hardy, Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, London, MacMillan and Co, 1929, page 78.


Text Authorship:

  • by Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928), "A Kiss", appears in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses, first published 1917 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Ian Venables (b. 1955), "A Kiss", op. 15 (1992) [ voice and string quartet ] [sung text checked 1 time]

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2022-04-24
Line count: 16
Word count: 95

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