Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses is a collection of poems by English poet Thomas Hardy, and was published in 1909.
It includes poems of various dates,[1] mainly concerned with rural, familial and provincial life.
[3] A not untypical thematic stress on life's ironies is present,[4] though Hardy himself was insistent that the title phrase was a poetic image only, and not to be taken as a philosophical belief.
[5] He also pointed out that behind the "I" of the poems stood not autobiography so much as "dramatic monologues by different characters".
[7] Gilbert Murray thought "He Abjures Love" had a Horatian quality; and Ezra Pound saw "The Revisitation" as anticipating Hardy's Poems 1912-13.