Poems by William Ernest Henley

Poems by William Ernest Henley

 

Contents:

Dedication Advertisement In Hospital Preface Enter Patient Waiting Interior Before Operation After Vigil Staff-Nurse: Old Style Lady Probationer Staff-Nurse: New Style Clinical Etching Casualty Ave, Caeser! ‘The Chief’ House-Surgeon Interlude Children: Private Ward Srcubber Visitor Romance Pastoral Music Suicide Apparition Anterotics Nocturn Discharged Envoy The Song of the Sword Arabian Nights’ Entertainments Bric-e-Brac Ballade of the Toyokuni Colour-Print Ballade of Youth and Age Ballade of Midsummer Days and Nights Ballade of Dead Actors Ballade Made in the Hot Weather Ballade of Truisms Double Ballade of Life and Death Double Ballade of the Nothingness of Things At Queensferry Orientale In Fisherrow Back-View Croquis Attadale, West Highlands From a Window in Princes Street In the Dials The gods are dead Let us be drunk When you are old Beside the idle summer sea The ways of Death are soothing and serene We shall surely die What is to come Echos Preface To my mother Life is bitter O, gather me the rose Out of the night that covers me I am the Reaper Praise the generous gods Fill a glass with golden wine We’ll go no more a-roving Madam Life’s a piece in bloom The sea is full of wandering foam Thick is the darkness To me at my fifth-floor window Bring her again, O western wind The wan sun westers, faint and slow There is a wheel inside my head While the west is paling The sands are alive with sunshine The nightingale has a lyre of gold Your heart has trembled to my tongue The surges gushed and sounded We flash across the level The West a glimmering lake of light The skies are strown with stars The full sea rolls and thunders In the year that’s come and gone In the placid summer midnight She sauntered by the swinging seas Blithe dreams arise to greet us A child Kate-A-Whimsies, John-a-Dreams O, have you blessed, behind the stars O, Falmouth is a fine town The ways are green Life in her creaking shoes A late lark twitters from the quiet skies I gave my heart to a woman Or ever the knightly years were gone On the way to Kew The past was goodly once The spring, my dear The Spirit of Wine A Wink from Hesper Friends… old friends If it should come to be From the brake the Nightingale In the waste hour Crosses and troubles London Voluntaries Grave Andante con Moto Scherzando Largo e Mesto Allegro Maestoso Rhymes and Rhyhms Prologue Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade We are the Choice of the Will A desolate shore It came with the threat of a waning moon Why, my heart, do we love her so? One with the ruined sunset There’s a regret Time and the Earth As like the Woman as you can Midsummer midnight skies Gulls in an aery morrice Some starlit garden grey with dew Under a stagnant sky Fresh from his fastnesses You played and sang a snatch of song Space and dread and the dark Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook When you wake in your crib O, Time and Change The shadow of Dawn When the wind storms by with a shout Trees and the menace of night Here they trysted, here they strayed Not to the staring Day What have I done for you Epilogue

DEDICATION—TO MY WIFE

Take, dear, my little sheaf of songs, For, old or new, All that is good in them belongs Only to you;

And, singing as when all was young, They will recall Those others, lived but left unsung - The bent of all. W. E. H APRIL 1888 SEPTEMBER 1897.

 

ADVERTISEMENT

 

My friend and publisher, Mr. Alfred Nutt, asks me to introduce this re-issue of old work in a new shape. At his request, then, I have to say that nearly all the numbers contained in the present volume are reprinted from ‘A Book of Verses’ (1888) and ‘London Voluntaries’ (1892-3). From the first of these I have removed some copies of verse which seemed to me scarce worth keeping; and I have recovered for it certain others from those publications which had made room for them. I have corrected where I could, added such dates as I might, and, by re-arrangement and revision, done my best to give my book, such as it is, its final form. If any be displeased by the result, I can but submit that my verses are my own, and that this is how I would have them read.

The work of revision has reminded me that, small as is this book of mine, it is all in the matter of verse that I have to show for the years between 1872 and 1897. A principal reason is that, after spending the better part of my life in the pursuit of poetry, I found myself (about 1877) so utterly unmarketable that I had to own myself beaten in art, and to addict myself to journalism for the next ten years. Came the production by my old friend, Mr. H. B. Donkin, in his little collection of ‘Voluntaries’ (1888), compiled for that East-End Hospital to which he has devoted so much time and energy and skill, of those unrhyming rhythms in which I had tried to quintessentialize, as (I believe) one scarce can do in rhyme, my impressions of the Old Edinburgh Infirmary. They had long since been rejected by every editor of standing in London—I had well-nigh said in the world; but as soon as Mr. Nutt had read them, he entreated me to look for more. I did as I was told; old dusty sheaves were dragged to light; the work of selection and correction was begun; I burned much; I found that, after all, the lyrical instinct had slept—not died; I ventured (in brief) ‘A Book of Verses.’ It was received with so much interest that I took heart once more, and wrote the numbers presently reprinted from ‘The National Observer’ in the collection first (1892) called ‘The Song of the Sword’ and afterwards (1893), ‘London voluntaries.’ If I have said nothing since, it is that I have nothing to say which is not, as yet, too personal—too personal and too a afflicting—for utterance.

For the matter of my book, it is there to speak for itself:-

 

‘Here’s a sigh to those who love me And a smile to those who hate.’

 

I refer to it for the simple pleasure of reflecting that it has made me many friends and some enemies.

W. E. H.

Muswell Hill, 4th September 1897.

 

IN HOSPITAL

 

On ne saurait dire e quel point un homme, seul dans son lit et malade, devient personnel. -

BALZAC

 

I—ENTER PATIENT

 

The morning mists still haunt the stony street; The northern summer air is shrill and cold; And lo, the Hospital, grey, quiet, old, Where Life and Death like friendly chafferers meet. Thro’ the loud spaciousness and draughty gloom A small, strange child—so aged yet so young! - Her little arm besplinted and beslung, Precedes me gravely to the waiting-room. I limp behind, my confidence all gone. The grey-haired soldier-porter waves me on, And on I crawl, and still my spirits fail: A tragic meanness seems so to environ These corridors and stairs of stone and iron, Cold, naked, clean—half-workhouse and half-jail.

 

II—WAITING

 

A square, squat room (a cellar on promotion), Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight; Plasters astray in unnatural-looking tinware; Scissors and lint and apothecary’s jars.

Here, on a bench a skeleton would writhe from, Angry and sore, I wait to be admitted: Wait till my heart is lead upon my stomach, While at their ease two dressers do their chores.

One has a probe—it feels to me a crowbar. A small boy sniffs and shudders after bluestone. A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers. Life is (I think) a blunder and a shame.

 

III—INTERIOR

 

The gaunt brown walls Look infinite in their decent meanness. There is nothing of home in the noisy kettle, The fulsome fire.

The atmosphere Suggests the trail of a ghostly druggist. Dressings and lint on the long, lean table - Whom are they for?

The patients yawn, Or lie as in training for shroud and coffin. A nurse in the corridor scolds and wrangles. It’s grim and strange.

Far footfalls clank.