Poems by William Ernest Henley

All Poems Original Poems Translations

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London Types: Beef-Eater

His beat lies knee-high through a dust of story—

A dust of terror and torture, grief and crime;

Ghosts that are England's wonder, and shame, and glory

Throng where he walks, an antic of old time;

A sense of long immedicable tears

Were ever with him, could his ears but heed;

The stern Hic Jacets of our bloodiest years

Are for his reading, had he eyes to read,

William Ernest Henley

Double Ballade On The Nothingness Of Things

The big teetotum twirls,

And epochs wax and wane

As chance subsides or swirls;

But of the loss and gain

The sum is always plain.

Read on the mighty pall,

The weed of funeral

That covers praise and blame,

William Ernest Henley

Ave, Caesar!

From the winter's grey despair,

From the summer's golden languor,

Death, the lover of Life,

Frees us for ever.

Inevitable, silent, unseen,

Everywhere always,

Shadow by night and as light in the day,

Signs she at last to her chosen;

William Ernest Henley

London Types: Drum-Major

Who says Drum-Major says a man of mould,

Shaking the meek earth with tremendous tread,

And pacing still, a triumph to behold,

Of his own spine at least two yards ahead!

Attorney, grocer, surgeon, broker, duke—

His calling may be anything, who comes

Into a room, his presence a rebuke

To the dejected, as the pipes and drums

William Ernest Henley

London Types:Life-Guardsman

Joy of the Milliner, Envy of the Line,

Star of the Parks, jack-booted, sworded, helmed,

He sits between his holsters, solid of spine;

Nor, as it seems, though Westminster were whelmed,

With the great globe, in earthquake and eclipse,

Would he and his charger cease from mounting guard,

This Private in the Blues, nor would his lips

Move, though his gorge with throttled oaths were charred!

William Ernest Henley

Staff Nurse:Old Style

The greater masters of the commonplace,

REMBRANDT and good SIR WALTER—only these

Could paint her all to you: experienced ease

And antique liveliness and ponderous grace;

The sweet old roses of her sunken face;

The depth and malice of her sly, grey eyes;

The broad Scots tongue that flatters, scolds, defies;

The thick Scots wit that fells you like a mace.

William Ernest Henley

Beside The Idle Summer Sea

Beside the idle summer sea,

And in the vacant summer days,

Light Love came fluting down the ways,

Where you were loitering with me.

Who have not welcomed even as we,

That jocund minstrel and his lays

Beside the idle summer sea

And in the vacant summer days?

William Ernest Henley

London Types: "Lady"

Time, the old humourist, has a trick to-day

Of moving landmarks and of levelling down,

Till into Town the Suburbs edge their way,

And in the Suburbs you may scent the Town.

With Mount Street thus approaching Muswell Hill,

And Clapham Common marching with the Mile,

You get a Hammersmith that fills the bill,

A Hampstead with a serious sense of style.

William Ernest Henley

I Am The Reaper

I am the Reaper.

All things with heedful hook

Silent I gather.

Pale roses touched with the spring,

Tall corn in summer,

Fruits rich with autumn, and frail winter blossoms—

Reaping, still reaping—

All things with heedful hook

William Ernest Henley

Ballade Of Dead Actors

Where are the passions they essayed,

And where the tears they made to flow?

Where the wild humours they portrayed

For laughing worlds to see and know?

Othello's wrath and Juliet's woe?

Sir Peter's whims and Timon's gall?

And Millamant and Romeo?

Into the night go one and all.

William Ernest Henley

In Rotten Row

In Rotten Row a cigarette

I sat and smoked, with no regret

For all the tumult that had been.

The distances were still and green,

And streaked with shadows cool and wet.

Two sweethearts on a bench were set,

Two birds among the boughs were met;

So love and song were heard and seen

William Ernest Henley

Before

Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife.

A little while, and at a leap I storm

The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform,

The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.

The gods are good to me: I have no wife,

No innocent child, to think of as I near

The fateful minute; nothing all-too dear

Unmans me for my bout of passive strife.

William Ernest Henley