Transcribed from the 1901 David Nutt edition ,
With Other Verses, by
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
O, how shall summer’s honey breathhold out
Against the wrackful siege of battering days?shakespeare
LONDON
Published by DAVID NUTT
at the Sign of the Phœnix
in Long Acre
1901
p. ivFirst Edition printed October 1901
Second Edition printed November 1901
Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, (late) Printers to Her Majesty
Ask me not how they came,
These songs of love and death,
These dreams of a futile stage,
These thumb-nails seen in the street:
Ask me not how nor why,
But take them for your own,
Dear Wife of twenty years,
Knowing—O, who so well?—
You it was made the man
That made these songs of love,
Death, and the trivial rest:
So that, your love elsewhere,
These songs, or bad or good—
How should they ever have been?
Worthing, July 31, 1901.
These to the glory and praise of the green land
That bred my women, and that holds my dead,
England, and with her the strong broods that stand
Wherever her fighting lines are thrust or spread!
They call us proud?—Look at our English Rose!
Shedders of blood?—Where hath our own been spared?
Shopkeepers?—Our accompt the high God knows.
Close?—In our bounty half the world hath shared.
They hate us, and they envy? Envy and hate
Should drive them to the Pit’s edge?—Be it so!
That race is damned which misesteems its fate;
And this, in God’s good time, they all shall know,
And know you too, you good green England, then—
Mother of mothering girls and governing men!
My songs were once of the sunrise:
They shouted it over the bar;
First-footing the dawns, they flourished,
And flamed with the morning star.
My songs are now of the sunset:
Their brows are touched with light,
But their feet are lost in the shadows
And wet with the dews of night.
Yet for the joy in their making
Take them, O fond and true,
And for his sake who made them
Let them be dear to You.
Largo espressivo
In sumptuous chords, and strange,
Through rich yet poignant harmonies:
Subtle and strong browns, reds
Magnificent with death and the pride of death,
Thin, clamant greens
And delicate yellows that exhaust
The exquisite chromatics of decay:
From ruining gardens, from reluctant woods—
Dear, multitudinously reluctant woods!—
And sering margents, forced
To be lean and bare and perished grace by