William Ernest Henley

“ The far sea waits and wanders, with a sound
As of the trailing skirts of Destiny
Passing unseen
p. 53To some immitigable end
With her grey henchman, Death.
What larve, what spectre is this
Thrilling the wilderness to life
As with the bodily shape of Fear?
What but a desperate sense,
A strong foreboding of those dim,
Interminable continents, forlorn
And many-silenced in a dusk
Inviolable utterly, and dead
As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes
In hugger-mugger through eternity?
Life—life—let there be life! ”

“ Each with his gaze turned inward on some piece
Of life in death’s own likeness—Life bereft
Of living looks as by the Great Release
(Perchance of shadow-shapes from shadow-shows) ,
Whose upshot all men know yet no man knows. ”

“ It floats and wanders, glittering and fleeing,
An estuary of the joy of being?
Why should the buxom leafage of the Park
Touch to an ecstasy the act of seeing?
—As if my paramour, my bride of brides,
Lingering and flushed, mysteriously abides
In some dim, eye-proof angle of odorous dark,
Some smiling nook of green-and-golden shade,
In the divine conviction robed and crowned
The globe fulfils his immemorial round
But as the marrying-place of all things made!
There is no man, this deifying day,
But feels the primal blessing in his blood. ”

“ What miracle is happening in the air,
Charging the very texture of the gray
With something luminous and rare?
The night goes out like an ill-parcelled fire,
And, as one lights a candle, it is day.
The extinguisher that fain would strut for spire
On the formal little church is not yet green
Across the water: but the house-tops nigher,
The corner-lines, the chimneys—look how clean,
How new, how naked! See the batch of boats,
Here at the stairs, washed in the fresh-sprung beam!
And those are barges that were goblin floats,
Black, hag-steered, fraught with devilry and dream! ”

“ The height and spread of frontage shining sheer,
p. 26The glistering signs, the rejoicing roofs and spires—
’Tis El Dorado—El Dorado plain,
The Golden City! And when a girl goes by,
Look! as she turns her glancing head,
A call of gold is floated from her ear!
Golden, all golden! In a golden glory,
Long lapsing down a golden coasted sky,
The day not dies but seems
Dispersed in wafts and drifts of gold, and shed
Upon a past of golden song and story
And memories of gold and golden dreams. ”

“ Waylaid and bludgeoned—
Dead.
Deep cellared in primeval ooze,
Ruined, dishonoured, spoiled,
They lie where the lean water-worm
Crawls free of their secrets, and their broken sides
Bulge with the slime of life. ”

“ O since the end of life’s to live
And pay in pence the common debt,
What should it cost us to forgive
Whose daily task is to forget?
You babbled in the well-known voice—
Not new, not new, the words you said.
You touched me off that famous poise,
That old effect, of neck and head.
p. 75Dear, was it really you and I?
In truth the riddle’s ill to read,
So many are the deaths we die
Before we can be dead indeed.
p. 76XVI
One with the ruined sunset,
The strange forsaken sands,
What is it waits and wanders
And signs with desperate hands? ”

“ These terrene vistas till their twilight sets:
When, dispossessed of wonderfulness, they stand
Beggared and common, plain to all the land
For stooks of leaves! And lo! the wizard hour
Whose shining, silent sorcery hath such power! ”

“ Embittered housewifery
Of the lean Winter: all such things,
And with them all the goodness of the Master
p. 98Whose right hand blesses with increase and life,
Whose left hand honours with decay and death. ”

“ What is the voice of strange command
Calling you still, as friend calls friend
With love that cannot brook delay,
To rise and follow the ways that wend
Over the hills and far away? ”

“ Irresistible message:—
‘Life is worth living
Through every grain of it
From the foundations
To the last edge
Of the cornerstone, death.’
p. 60IX
‘As like the Woman as you can’—
(Thus the New Adam was beguiled) —
‘So shall you touch the Perfect Man’—
(God in the Garden heard and smiled) .
‘Your father perished with his day:
‘A clot of passions fierce and blind
‘He fought, he slew, he hacked his way:
‘Your muscles, Child, must be of mind. ”

“ Some starlit garden grey with dew,
Some chamber flushed with wine and fire,
What matters where, so I and you
Are worthy our desire? ”

“ That called us into line, set in our hand a sword;
Set us a sword to wield none else could lift and draw,
And bade us forth to the sound of the trumpet of the Law.
East and west and north, wherever the battle grew,
As men to a feast we fared, the work of the Will to do.
p. 45Bent upon vast beginnings, bidding anarchy cease—
(Had we hacked it to the Pit, we had left it a place of peace!) —
Marching, building, sailing, pillar of cloud or fire,
Sons of the Will, we fought the fight of the Will, our sire.
Road was never so rough that we left its purpose dark ”

“ Are worthy our desire?
Behind, a past that scolds and jeers
For ungirt loin and lamp unlit;
In front the unmanageable years,
The trap upon the pit;
Think on the shame of dreams for deeds,
The scandal of unnatural strife,
The slur upon immortal needs,
The treason done to life:
p. 68Arise! no more a living lie
And with me quicken and control
A memory that shall magnify
The universal Soul.
p. 69XIII
(To James McNeill Whistler)
Under a stagnant sky,
Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom,
The River, jaded and forlorn,
Welters and wanders wearily—wretchedly—on ”

“ Without you, O the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays! ”

“ With light, with living light, from marge to marge,
Until the course He set and staked be run.
Through street and square, through square and street,
Each with his home-grown quality of dark
And violated silence, loud and fleet,
Waylaid by a merry ghost at every lamp,
The hansom wheels and plunges. Hark, O hark,
Sweet, how the old mare’s bit and chain
p. 17Ring back a rough refrain
Upon the marked and cheerful tramp
Of her four shoes! Here is the Park,
And O the languid midsummer wafts adust,
The tired midsummer blooms! ”

“ Better a thousand times the roaring hours
When wave and wind,
p. 54Like the Arch-Murderer in flight
From the Avenger at his heel,
Storm through the desolate fastnesses
And wild waste places of the world! ”

“ Open your heart and take us in,
Love—love and me. ”

“ Failing yet gracious,
Slow pacing, soon homing,
A patriarch that strolls
Through the tents of his children,
The Sun, as he journeys
His round on the lower
p. 72Ascents of the blue,
Washes the roofs
And the hillsides with clarity; ”

“ Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays! ”