Hardy was always meticulous about observing anniversaries, and in 1916, on the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death, did not fail to write him a poem. It dwells on one of Hardy's favourite themes, the callous indifference of time and circumstance to the unique and precious, which in this case means the heedlessness of the ‘borough clocks’ which ‘but samely tongue the hour’ at Shakespeare's passing, and likewise the snobbish indifference of the Stratford burghers:

This complaint about the provincialism of seventeenth-century Stratford nevertheless has a strong flavour of twentieth-century Dorchester to it. Despite his recent freedom of the borough, Hardy had long felt that his birth into the tradesman class still counted for more than his London literary honour with many locals, as it had with his late wife, and the poem's irony is a self-protecting one, like the entry in his notebooks which runs, ‘Base-born. Homer is said to be base-born: so is Virgil. But the implied parallel between his own unappreciated genius and Shakespeare's is misaligned in one important respect:

Hardy celebrates the carefree casualness of Shakespeare's writing in a verse whose compressed hyphenations and alliterations show that nothing in his own harmonies seems ‘all-uncared’, ‘not fore-desired’, unchosen or unchecked.