Poems by William Ernest Henley Part 17

Live on, O brave and true, In us thy children, in ours whose life is thine - Our best and theirs! What is that best but thee - Thee, and thy gift to us, to pa.s.s Like light along the infinite of s.p.a.ce To the immitigable end?

Between the river and the stars, O royal and radiant soul, Thou dost return, thine influences return Upon thy children as in life, and death Turns stingless! What is Death But Life in act? How should the Unteeming Grave Be victor over thee, Mother, a mother of men?

XLVII

Crosses and troubles a-many have proved me.

One or two women (G.o.d bless them!) have loved me.

I have worked and dreamed, and I've talked at will.

Of art and drink I have had my fill.

I've comforted here, and I've succoured there.

I've faced my foes, and I've backed my friends.

I've blundered, and sometimes made amends.

I have prayed for light, and I've known despair.

Now I look before, as I look behind, Come storm, come s.h.i.+ne, whatever befall, With a grateful heart and a constant mind, For the end I know is the best of all.

1888-1889

LONDON VOLUNTARIES--To Charles Whibley

I--GRAVE

St. Margaret's bells, Quiring their innocent, old-world canticles, Sing in the storied air, All rosy-and-golden, as with memories Of woods at evensong, and sands and seas Disconsolate for that the night is nigh.

O, the low, lingering lights! The large last gleam (Hark! how those brazen choristers cry and call!) Touching these solemn ancientries, and there, The silent River ranging tide-mark high And the callow, grey-faced Hospital, With the strange glimmer and glamour of a dream!

The Sabbath peace is in the slumbrous trees, And from the wistful, the fast-widowing sky (Hark! how those plangent comforters call and cry!) Falls as in August plots late roseleaves fall.

The sober Sabbath stir - Leisurely voices, desultory feet! - Comes from the dry, dust-coloured street, Where in their summer frocks the girls go by, And sweethearts lean and loiter and confer, Just as they did an hundred years ago, Just as an hundred years to come they will:- When you and I, Dear Love, lie lost and low, And sweet-throats none our welkin shall fulfil, Nor any sunset fade serene and slow; But, being dead, we shall not grieve to die.

II--ANDANTE CON MOTO

Forth from the dust and din, The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare, The odour and sense of life and l.u.s.t aflare, The wrangle and jangle of unrests, Let us take horse, Dear Heart, take horse and win - As from swart August to the green lap of May - To quietness and the fresh and fragrant b.r.e.a.s.t.s Of the still, delicious night, not yet aware In any of her innumerable nests Of that first sudden plash of dawn, Clear, sapphirine, luminous, large, Which tells that soon the flowing springs of day In deep and ever deeper eddies drawn Forward and up, in wider and wider way, Shall float the sands, and brim the sh.o.r.es, On this our lith of the World, as round it roars And spins into the outlook of the Sun (The Lord's first gift, the Lord's especial charge), 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 Ring 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!

O, the mysterious distances, the glooms Romantic, the august And solemn shapes! At night this City of Trees Turns to a tryst of vague and strange And monstrous Majesties, Let loose from some dim underworld to range 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, His silent, s.h.i.+ning sorcery winged with power!

Still, still the streets, between their carcanets Of linking gold, are avenues of sleep.

But see how gable ends and parapets In gradual beauty and significance Emerge! And did you hear That little twitter-and-cheep, Breaking inordinately loud and clear On this still, spectral, exquisite atmosphere?

'Tis a first nest at matins! And behold A rakeh.e.l.l cat--how furtive and acold!

A spent witch homing from some infamous dance - Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade!

And now! a little wind and shy, The smell of s.h.i.+ps (that earnest of romance), A sense of s.p.a.ce and water, and thereby A lamplit bridge ouching the troubled sky, And look, O, look! a tangle of silver gleams And dusky lights, our River and all his dreams, His dreams that never save in our deaths can die.

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 perks it like a spire On the little formal 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!

And in the piles the water frolics clear, The ripples into loose rings wander and flee, And we--we can behold that could but hear The ancient River singing as he goes, New-mailed in morning, to the ancient Sea.

The gas burns lank and jaded in its gla.s.s: The old Ruffian soon shall yawn himself awake, And light his pipe, and shoulder his tools, and take His hobnailed way to work!

Let us too pa.s.s - Pa.s.s ere the sun leaps and your shadow shows - Through these long, blindfold rows Of cas.e.m.e.nts staring blind to right and left, 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 - Pa.s.s to an exquisite night's more exquisite close!

Reach upon reach of burial--so they feel, These colonies of dreams! And as we steal Homeward together, but for the buxom breeze, Fitfully frolicking to heel With news of dawn-drenched woods and tumbling seas, We might--thus awed, thus lonely that we are - Be wandering some dispeopled star, Some world of memories and unbroken graves, So broods the abounding Silence near and far: Till even your footfall craves Forgiveness of the majesty it braves.

III--SCHERZANDO

Down through the ancient Strand The spirit of October, mild and boon And sauntering, takes his way This golden end of afternoon, As though the corn stood yellow in all the land, And the ripe apples dropped to the harvest-moon.

Lo! the round sun, half-down the western slope - Seen as along an unglazed telescope - Lingers and lolls, loth to be done with day: Gifting the long, lean, lanky street And its abounding confluences of being With aspects generous and bland; Making a thousand harnesses to s.h.i.+ne As with new ore from some enchanted mine, And every horse's coat so full of sheen He looks new-tailored, and every 'bus feels clean, And never a hansom but is worth the feeing; And every jeweller within the pale Offers a real Arabian Night for sale; And even the roar Of the strong streams of toil, that pause and pour Eastward and westward, sounds suffused - Seems as it were bemused And blurred, and like the speech Of lazy seas on a lotus-haunted beach - With this enchanted l.u.s.trousness, This mellow magic, that (as a man's caress Brings back to some faded face, beloved before, A heavenly shadow of the grace it wore Ere the poor eyes were minded to beseech) Old things transfigures, and you hail and bless Their looks of long-lapsed loveliness once more: Till Clement's, angular and cold and staid, Gleams forth in glamour's very stuffs arrayed; And Bride's, her aery, unsubstantial charm Through flight on flight of springing, soaring stone Grown flushed and warm, Laughs into life full-mooded and fresh-blown; And the high majesty of Paul's Uplifts a voice of living light, and calls - Calls to his millions to behold and see How goodly this his London Town can be!

For earth and sky and air Are golden everywhere, And golden with a gold so suave and fine The looking on it lifts the heart like wine.

Trafalgar Square (The fountains volleying golden glaze) s.h.i.+nes like an angel-market. High aloft Over his couchant Lions, in a haze s.h.i.+mmering and bland and soft, A dust of chrysoprase, Our Sailor takes the golden gaze Of the saluting sun, and flames superb, As once he flamed it on his ocean round.

The dingy dreariness of the picture-place, Turned very nearly bright, Takes on a luminous transiency of grace, And shows no more a scandal to the ground.

The very blind man pottering on the kerb, Among the posies and the ostrich feathers And the rude voices touched with all the weathers Of the long, varying year, Shares in the universal alms of light.

The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires, The height and spread of frontage s.h.i.+ning sheer, The quiring 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.

IV--LARGO E MESTO

Out of the poisonous East, Over a continent of blight, Like a maleficent Influence released From the most squalid cellarage of h.e.l.l, The Wind-Fiend, the abominable - The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light - Comes slouching, sullen and obscene, Hard on the skirts of the embittered night; And in a cloud unclean Of excremental humours, roused to strife By the operation of some ruinous change, Wherever his evil mandate run and range, Into a dire intensity of life, A craftsman at his bench, he settles down To the grim job of throttling London Town.

So, by a jealous lightlessness beset That might have oppressed the dragons of old time Crunching and groping in the abysmal slime, A cave of cut-throat thoughts and villainous dreams, Hag-rid and crying with cold and dirt and wet, The afflicted City, p.r.o.ne from mark to mark In shameful occultation, seems A nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting, With wavering gulfs and antic heights, and s.h.i.+fting, Rent in the stuff of a material dark, Wherein the lamplight, scattered and sick and pale, Shows like the leper's living blotch of bale: Uncoiling monstrous into street on street Paven with perils, teeming with mischance, Where man and beast go blindfold and in dread, Working with oaths and threats and faltering feet Somewhither in the hideousness ahead; Working through wicked airs and deadly dews That make the laden robber grin askance At the good places in his black romance, And the poor, loitering harlot rather choose Go pinched and pined to bed Than lurk and s.h.i.+ver and curse her wretched way From arch to arch, scouting some threepenny prey.

Forgot his dawns and far-flushed afterglows, His green garlands and windy eyots forgot, The old Father-River flows, His watchfires cores of menace in the gloom, As he came oozing from the Pit, and bore, Sunk in his filthily transfigured sides, Shoals of dishonoured dead to tumble and rot In the squalor of the universal sh.o.r.e: His voices sounding through the gruesome air As from the Ferry where the Boat of Doom With her blaspheming cargo reels and rides: The while his children, the brave s.h.i.+ps, No more adventurous and fair, Nor tripping it light of heel as home-bound brides, But infamously enchanted, Huddle together in the foul eclipse, Or feel their course by inches desperately, As through a tangle of alleys murder-haunted, From sinister reach to reach out--out--to sea.

And Death the while - Death with his well-worn, lean, professional smile, Death in his threadbare working trim - Comes to your bedside, unannounced and bland, And with expert, inevitable hand Feels at your windpipe, fingers you in the lung, Or flicks the clot well into the labouring heart: Thus signifying unto old and young, However hard of mouth or wild of whim, 'Tis time--'tis time by his ancient watch--to part From books and women and talk and drink and art.

And you go humbly after him To a mean suburban lodging: on the way To what or where Not Death, who is old and very wise, can say: And you--how should you care So long as, unreclaimed of h.e.l.l, The Wind-Fiend, the insufferable, Thus vicious and thus patient, sits him down To the black job of burking London Town?