Hawthorn and Lavender

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Title: Hawthorn and Lavender
with Other Verses
Author: William Ernest Henley
Release Date: June 1, 2007 [eBook #21662]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
HAWTHORN AND LAVENDER***
Transcribed from the 1901 David Nutt edition by David Price, email
[email protected]
HAWTHORN
AND LAVENDER
_With Other Verses_, _by_
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
_O_, _how shall summer's honey breath hold out_
_Against the
wrackful siege of battering days_?
SHAKESPEARE
LONDON
_Published by DAVID NUTT_
at the Sign of the

Phoenix
IN LONG ACRE
1901
_First Edition printed October_ 1901
_Second Edition printed
November_ 1901
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, (late) Printers to Her Majesty
Dedication
_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.
PROLOGUE
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!

0. HAWTHORN AND LAVENDER
ENVOY
_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_.
PRAELUDIUM
_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 grace,
And flower by flower discharmed,
Comes,
to a purpose none,
Not even the Scorner, which is the Fool, can blink,

The dead-march of the year.

Dead things and dying! Now the long-laboured soul
Listens, and
pines. But never a note of hope
Sounds: whether in those high,

Transcending unisons of resignation
That speed the sovran sun,
As
he goes southing, weakening, minishing,
Almighty in obedience; or
in those
Small, sorrowful colloquies
Of bronze and russet and gold,

Colour with colour, dying things with dead,
That break along this
visual orchestra:
As in that other one, the audible,
Horn answers
horn, hautboy and violin
Talk, and the 'cello calls the clarionet
And
flute, and the poor heart is glad.
There is no hope in these--only
despair.
Then, destiny in act, ensues
That most tremendous passage in the
score:
When hangman rains and winds have wrought
Their worst,
and, the brave lights gone down,
The low strings, the brute brass, the
sullen drums
Sob, grovel, and curse themselves
Silent. . . .
But on the spirit of Man
And on the heart of the World there falls
A
strange, half-desperate peace:
A war-worn, militant, gray jubilance

In the unkind, implacable tyranny
Of Winter, the obscene,
Old,
crapulous Regent, who in his loins--
O, who but feels he carries in his
loins
The wild, sweet-blooded, wonderful harlot, Spring?
I.
Low--low
Over a perishing after-glow,
A thin, red shred of moon

Trailed. In the windless air
The poplars all ranked lean and chill.

The smell of winter loitered there,
And the Year's heart felt still.

Yet not so far away
Seemed the mad Spring,
But that, as lovers will,

I let my laughing heart go play,
As it had been a fond maid's
frolicking;
And, turning thrice the gold I'd got,

In the good gloom

Solemnly wished me--what?
What, and with whom?
II

Moon of half-candied meres
And flurrying, fading snows;
Moon of
unkindly rains,
Wild skies, and troubled vanes;
When the Norther
snarls and bites,
And the lone moon walks a-cold,
And the lawns
grizzle o' nights,
And wet fogs search the fold:
Here in this heart of
mine
A dream that warms like wine,
A dream one other knows,

Moon of the roaring weirs
And the sip-sopping close,
February Fill-Dyke,
Shapes like a royal rose--
A red, red rose!
O,