A Parting-scene

by Thomas Hardy (1925) — a poem card from Justes Mots

A brief, poignant scene of a soldier and his family parting at a railway station before his deployment to the East for five years, with restrained emotion and unspoken anguish. The poem captures the psychological and emotional toll of wartime separation through Hardy's characteristic understatement. It expresses the deep pain of enforced parting and serves those grieving military separation or loss.

THE two pale women cried,
But the man seemed to
suffer more,
Which he strove hard to hide.
They stayed in the waiting-room, behind
the door,
Till startled by the entering engine-roar,
As if they could not bear to have unfurled…

Themes: sympathy · grief · reflection · long-distance