The Self-Unseeing/The Walk- Thomas Hardy

These two go particularly well together. The loss of his wife, the dominance of materialist objects, the sense of unreality between them, the recognition of her death, the attempts to escape, yet like in John Donne's 'A Valediction Forbidding Mourning' being fixed like a compass together- almost unwillingly.
The Self-Unseeing

Thomas Hardy

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!

The Walk

Thomas Hardy

You did not walk with me

Of late to the hill-top tree

By the gated ways,

As in earlier days;

You were weak and lame,

So you never came,

And I went alone, and I did not mind,

Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day

Just in the former way;

Surveyed around

The familiar ground

By myself again:

What difference, then?

Only that underlying sense

Of the look of a room on returning thence.