Thanks for this, Barb. An interesting idea for a thread - and a good poem to start with. The poems Hardy wrote for characters from his novels are often intriguing - especially as they usually appeared decades after the novels. There are a few he wrote for Tess, for example. I'm already drawn to this poem because The Woodlanders is perhaps my favourite Hardy novel.
I'll be interested to see what other people make of the scansion. I think he uses vary variable feet, maintaining just the regularity of the two feet per line.
In the first line you scan - "We work here together" - one could describe it as two amphibrachs, if it weren't for the fact that it's very unusual to write whole lines of amphibrachs (Coleridge does it for instructive purposes, but it's pretty eccentric).
Anyway, here's Frost great dimeter poem "Dust of Snow", which is in a fairly characteristic mixture of anapaests and iambs:
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
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