Poems by William Ernest Henley

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Etching

Two and thirty is the ploughman.

He's a man of gallant inches,

And his hair is close and curly,

And his beard;

But his face is wan and sunken,

And his eyes are large and brilliant,

And his shoulder-blades are sharp,

And his knees.

William Ernest Henley

Operation

You are carried in a basket,

Like a carcase from the shambles,

To the theatre, a cockpit

Where they stretch you on a table.

Then they bid you close your eyelids,

And they mask you with a napkin,

And the anaesthetic reaches

Hot and subtle through your being.

William Ernest Henley

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.

William Ernest Henley

London Types: Sandwich-Man

An ill March noon; the flagstones gray with dust;

An all-round east wind volleying straws and grit;

St. Martin's Steps, where every venomous gust

Lingers to buffet, or sneap, the passing cit;

And in the gutter, squelching a rotten boot,

Draped in a wrap that, modish ten-year syne,

Partners, obscene with sweat and grease and soot,

A horrible hat, that once was just as fine;

William Ernest Henley

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.

William Ernest Henley

London Types: Mounted Police

Army Reserve; a worshipper of Bobs,

With whom he stripped the smock from Candahar;

Neat as his mount, that neatest among cobs;

Whenever pageants pass, or meetings are,

He moves conspicuous, vigilant, severe,

With his Light Cavalry hand and seat and look,

A living type of Order, in whose sphere

Is room for neither Hooligan nor Hook.

William Ernest Henley

London Types: Barmaid

Though, if you ask her name, she says "Elise,"

Being plain Elizabeth, e'en let it pass,

And own that, if her aspirates take their ease,

She ever makes a point, in washing glass,

Handling the engine, turning taps for tots,

And countering change, and scorning what men say,

Of posing as a dove among the pots,

Nor often gives her dignity away.

William Ernest Henley

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?

William Ernest Henley

Scrubber

She's tall and gaunt, and in her hard, sad face

With flashes of the old fun's animation

There lowers the fixed and peevish resignation

Bred of a past where troubles came apace.

She tells me that her husband, ere he died,

Saw seven of their children pass away,

And never knew the little lass at play

Out on the green, in whom he's deified.

William Ernest Henley

London Types: Bluecoat Boy

So went our boys when Edward Sixth, the King,

Chartered Christ's Hospital, and died. And so

Full fifteen generations in a string

Of heirs to his bequest have had to go.

Thus Camden showed, and Barnes, and Stillingfleet,

And Richardson, that bade our Lovelace be;

Thus to his Genevieve young S. T. C.

With thousands else that, wandering up and down,

William Ernest Henley

Children: Private Ward

Here in this dim, dull, double-bedded room,

I play the father to a brace of boys,

Ailing but apt for every sort of noise,

Bedfast but brilliant yet with health and bloom.

Roden, the Irishman, is 'sieven past,'

Blue-eyed, snub-nosed, chubby, and fair of face.

Willie's but six, and seems to like the place,

A cheerful little collier to the last.

William Ernest Henley

After

Like as a flamelet blanketed in smoke,

So through the anaesthetic shows my life;

So flashes and so fades my thought, at strife

With the strong stupor that I heave and choke

And sicken at, it is so foully sweet.

Faces look strange from space—and disappear.

Far voices, sudden loud, offend my ear -

And hush as sudden. Then my senses fleet:

William Ernest Henley