Hawthorn and Lavender, by William Ernest Henley

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 Phœnix
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!

1.  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.

PRÆLUDIUM

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, but the distance clears!
O, but the daylight grows!

Soon shall the pied wind-flowers
Babble of greening hours,
Primrose and daffodil
Yearn to a fathering sun,
The lark have all his will,
The thrush be never done,
And April, May, and June
Go to the same blythe tune
As this blythe dream of mine!
Moon when the crocus peers,
Moon when the violet blows,
   February Fair-Maid,
Haste, and let come the rose—
   Let come the rose!