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Title: The Song of the Sword, and Other Verses

Author: William Ernest Henley

Release Date: January 18, 2008 [EBook #24363]

Language: English

Credits:

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ***

Transcribed from the 1892 David Nutt edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

THE SONG

OF THE SWORD

AND OTHER VERSES

BY

W. E. HENLEY

LONDON

Published by DAVID NUTT

in the Strand

1892

To R. T. Hamilton-Bruce

Edinburgh, Mar. 17, 1892

With three exceptions, these numbers have appeared in ‘The National Observer,’ by permission of whose proprietors they are here reprinted.

THE SONG OF THE SWORD

(To Rudyard Kipling)

The Sword

Singing—

The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword

Clanging imperious

Forth from Time’s battlements

His ancient and triumphing Song.

In the beginning,

Ere God inspired Himself

Into the clay thing

Thumbed to His image,

The vacant, the naked shell

Soon to be Man:

Thoughtful He pondered it,

Prone there and impotent,

Fragile, inviting

Attack and discomfiture:

Then, with a smile—

As He heard in the Thunder

That laughed over Eden

The voice of the Trumpet,

The iron Beneficence,

Calling His dooms

To the Winds of the world—

Stooping, He drew

On the sand with His finger

A shape for a sign

Of His way to the eyes

That in wonder should waken,

For a proof of His will

To the breaking intelligence:

That was the birth of me:

I am the Sword.

Hard and bleak, keen and cruel,

Short-hilted, long-shafted,

I froze into steel:

And the blood of my elder,

His hand on the hafts of me,

Sprang like a wave

In the wind, as the sense

Of his strength grew to ecstasy,

Glowed like a coal

At the throat of the furnace,

As he knew me and named me

The War-Thing, the Comrade,

Father of honour

And giver of kingship,

The fame-smith, the song-master,

Bringer of women

On fire at his hands

For the pride of fulfilment,

Priest (saith the Lord)

Of his marriage with victory.

Ho! then, the Trumpet,

Handmaid of heroes,

Calling the peers

To the place of espousal!

Ho! then, the splendour

And sheen of my ministry,

Clothing the earth

With a livery of lightnings!

Ho! then, the music

Of battles in onset

And ruining armours,

And God’s gift returning

In fury to God!

Glittering and keen

As the song of the winter stars,

Ho! then, the sound

Of my voice, the implacable

Angel of Destiny!—

I am the Sword.

Heroes, my children,

Follow, O follow me,

Follow, exulting

In the great light that breaks

From the sacred companionship:

Thrust through the fatuous,

Thrust through the fungous brood

Spawned in my shadow

And gross with my gift!

Thrust through, and hearken,

O hark, to the Trumpet,

The Virgin of Battles,

Calling, still calling you

Into the Presence,

Sons of the Judgment,

Pure wafts of the Will!

Edged to annihilate,

Hilted with government,

Follow, O follow me

Till the waste places

All the grey globe over

Ooze, as the honeycomb

Drips, with the sweetness

Distilled of my strength:

And, teeming in peace

Through the wrath of my coming,

They give back in beauty

The dread and the anguish

They had of me visitant!

Follow, O follow, then,

Heroes, my harvesters!

Where the tall grain is ripe

Thrust in your sickles:

Stripped and adust

In a stubble of empire,

Scything and binding

The full sheaves of sovranty:

Thus, O thus gloriously,

Shall you fulfil yourselves:

Thus, O thus mightily,

Show yourselves sons of mine—

Yea, and win grace of me:

I am the Sword.

I am the feast-maker:

Hark, through a noise

Of the screaming of eagles,

Hark how the Trumpet,

The mistress of mistresses,

Calls, silver-throated

And stern, where the tables

Are spread, and the work

Of the Lord is in hand!

Driving the darkness,

Even as the banners

And spears of the Morning;

Sifting the nations,

The slag from the metal,

The waste and the weak

From the fit and the strong;

Fighting the brute,

The abysmal Fecundity;

Checking the gross,

Multitudinous blunders,

The groping, the purblind

Excesses in service,

Of the Womb universal,

The absolute Drudge;

Changing the charactry

Carved on the World,

The miraculous gem

In the seal-ring that burns

On the hand of the Master—

Yea! and authority

Flames through the dim,

Unappeasable Grisliness

Prone down the nethermost

Chasms of the Void;

Clear singing, clean slicing;

Sweet spoken, soft finishing;

Making death beautiful,

Life but a coin

To be staked in the pastime

Whose playing is more

Than the transfer of being;

Arch-anarch, chief builder,

Prince and evangelist,

I am the Will of God:

I am the Sword.

The Sword

Singing—

The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword

Clanging majestical,

As from the starry-staired

Courts of the primal Supremacy,

His high, irresistible song.

LONDON

VOLUNTARIES

(To Charles Whibley)

I

Andante con mote

Forth from the dust and din,

The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare,

The odour and sense of life and lust 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 breasts

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 shores

On this our haunch of Earth, as round she 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

Tunis 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

Whose shining, silent sorcery hath such 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 rakehell 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 lo! a little wind and shy,

The smell of ships (that earnest of romance),

A sense of space 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 of a dead past that cannot 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 fain would strut for spire

On the formal little 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 glass:

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 pass:

Through these long blindfold rows

Of casements 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

(Perchance of shadow-shapes from shadow-shows),

Whose upshot all men know yet no man knows.

Reach upon reach of burial—so they feel,

These colonies of dreams!  And as we steal

Homeward together, but for the buxom breeze

That frolics at our heel,

Greeting the town with news of the summer seas,

We might—thus awed, thus lonely that we are—

Be wandering some depopulated 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.

II

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 shine

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 upon a lotus-eating beach—

With this enchanted lustrousness,

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 the sedate and mannered elegance

Of Clement’s is all tinctured with romance;

The while the fanciful, formal, finicking charm

Of Bride’s, that madrigal in stone,

Glows flushed and warm

And beauteous with a beauty not its own;

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)

Gleams like an angel-market.  High aloft

Over his couchant Lions in a haze

Shimmering 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 certain dismal grace,

And shows not all 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 all the varying year,

Shares in the universal alms of light.

The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires,

The height and spread of frontage shining sheer,

The glistering 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.

III

Largo e mesto

Out of the poisonous East,

Over a continent of blight,

Like a maleficent Influence released

From the most squalid cellarage of hell,

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.

And, 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, prone from mark to mark

In shameful occultation, seems

A nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting,

With wavering gulfs and antic heights and shifting

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 shiver 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 shore:

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 ships,

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

With 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 hell,

The Wind-Fiend, the insufferable,

Thus vicious and thus patient sits him down

To the black job of burking London Town?

IV

Allegro maëstoso

Spring winds that blow

As over leagues of myrtle-blooms and may;

Bevies of spring clouds trooping slow,

Like matrons heavy-bosomed and aglow

With the mild and placid pride of increase!  Nay,

What makes this insolent and comely stream

Of appetence, this freshet of desire

(Milk from the wild breasts of the wilful Day!),

Down Piccadilly dance and murmur and gleam

In genial wave on wave and gyre on gyre?

Why does that nymph unparalleled splash and churn

The wealth of her enchanted urn

Till, over-billowing all between

Her cheerful margents grey and living green,

It floats and wanders, glittering and fleeing,

An estuary of the joy of being?

Why should the buxom leafage of the Park

Touch to an ecstasy the act of seeing?

—As if my paramour, my bride of brides,

Lingering and flushed, mysteriously abides

In some dim, eye-proof angle of odorous dark,

Some smiling nook of green-and-golden shade,

In the divine conviction robed and crowned

The globe fulfils his immemorial round

But as the marrying-place of all things made!

There is no man, this deifying day,

But feels the primal blessing in his blood.

The sacred impulse of the May

Brightening like sex made sunshine through her veins,

There is no woman but disdains

To vail the ensigns of her womanhood.

None but, rejoicing, flaunts them as she goes,

Bounteous in looks of her delicious best,

On her inviolable quest:

These with their hopes, with their sweet secrets those,

But all desirable and frankly fair,

As each were keeping some most prosperous tryst,

And in the knowledge went imparadised.

For look! a magical influence everywhere,

Look how the liberal and transfiguring air

Washes this inn of memorable meetings,

This centre of ravishments and gracious greetings,

Till, through its jocund loveliness of length

A tidal-race of lust from shore to shore,

A brimming reach of beauty met with strength,

It shines and sounds like some miraculous dream,

Some vision multitudinous and agleam,

Of happiness as it shall be evermore!

Praise God for giving

Through this His messenger among the days

His word the life He gave is thrice-worth living!

For Pan, the bountiful, imperious Pan—

Not dead, not dead, as dreamers feigned,

But the lush genius of a million Mays

Renewing his beneficent endeavour!—

Still reigns and triumphs, as he hath triumphed and reigned

Since in the dim blue dawn of time

The universal ebb-and-flow began,

To sound his ancient music, and prevails

By the persuasion of his mighty rhyme

Here in this radiant and immortal street

Lavishly and omnipotently as ever

In the open hills, the undissembling dales,

The laughing-places of the juvenile earth.

For lo! the wills of man and woman meet,

Meet and are moved, each unto each endeared

As once in Eden’s prodigal bowers befell,

To share his shameless, elemental mirth

In one great act of faith, while deep and strong,

Incomparably nerved and cheered,

The enormous heart of London joys to beat

To the measures of his rough, majestic song:

The lewd, perennial, overmastering spell

That keeps the rolling universe ensphered

And life and all for which life lives to long

Wanton and wondrous and for ever well.

RHYMES

AND RHYTHMS

I

Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade

On desolate sea and lonely sand,

Out of the silence and the shade

What is the voice of strange command

Calling you still, as friend calls friend

With love that cannot brook delay,

To rise and follow the ways that wend

Over the hills and far away?

Hark in the city, street on street

A roaring reach of death and life,

Of vortices that clash and fleet

And ruin in appointed strife,

Hark to it calling, calling clear,

Calling until you cannot stay

From dearer things than your own most dear

Over the hills and far away.

Out of the sound of ebb and flow,

Out of the sight of lamp and star,

It calls you where the good winds blow,

And the unchanging meadows are:

From faded hopes and hopes agleam,

It calls you, calls you night and day

Beyond the dark into the dream

Over the hills and far away.

II

A desolate shore,

The sinister seduction of the Moon,

The menace of the irreclaimable Sea.

Flaunting, tawdry and grim,

From cloud to cloud along her beat,

Leering her battered and inveterate leer,

She signals where he prowls in the dark alone,

Her horrible old man,

Mumbling old oaths and warming

His villainous old bones with villainous talk—

The secrets of their grisly housekeeping

Since they went out upon the pad

In the first twilight of self-conscious Time:

Growling, obscene and hoarse,

Tales of unnumbered Ships,

Goodly and strong, Companions of the Advance

In some vile alley of the night

Waylaid and bludgeoned—

Dead.

Deep cellared in primeval ooze,

Ruined, dishonoured, spoiled,

They lie where the lean water-worm

Crawls free of their secrets, and their broken sides

Bulge with the slime of life.  Thus they abide,

Thus fouled and desecrate,

The summons of the Trumpet, and the while

These Twain, their murderers,

Unravined, imperturbable, unsubdued,

Hang at the heels of their children—She aloft

As in the shining streets,

He as in ambush at some fetid stair.

The stalwart Ships,

The beautiful and bold adventurers!

Stationed out yonder in the isle,

The tall Policeman,

Flashing his bull’s-eye, as he peers

About him in the ancient vacancy,

Tells them this way is safety—this way home.

III

(To R. F. B.)

We are the Choice of the Will: God, when He gave the word

That called us into line, set in our hand a sword;

Set us a sword to wield none else could lift and draw,

And bade us forth to the sound of the trumpet of the Law.

East and west and north, wherever the battle grew,

As men to a feast we fared, the work of the Will to do.

Bent upon vast beginnings, bidding anarchy cease—

(Had we hacked it to the Pit, we had left it a place of peace!)—

Marching, building, sailing, pillar of cloud or fire,

Sons of the Will, we fought the fight of the Will, our sire.

Road was never so rough that we left its purpose dark;

Stark was ever the sea, but our ships were yet more stark;

We tracked the winds of the world to the steps of their very thrones;

The secret parts of the world were salted with our bones;

Till now the name of names, England, the name of might,

Flames from the austral bounds to the ends of the northern night;

And the call of her morning drum goes in a girdle of sound,

Like the voice of the sun in song, the great globe round and round;

And the shadow of her flag, when it shouts to the mother-breeze,

Floats from shore to shore of the universal seas;

And the loneliest death is fair with a memory of her flowers,

And the end of the road to Hell with the sense of her dews and showers!

Who says that we shall pass, or the fame of us fade and die,

While the living stars fulfil their round in the living sky?

For the sire lives in his sons, and they pay their father’s debt,

And the Lion has left a whelp wherever his claw was set:

And the Lion in his whelps, his whelps that none shall brave,

Is but less strong than Time and the all-devouring Grave.

IV

It came with the threat of a waning moon

And the wail of an ebbing tide,

But many a woman has lived for less,

And many a man has died;

For life upon life took hold and passed,

Strong in a fate set free,

Out of the deep, into the dark,

On for the years to be.

Between the gleam of a waning moon

And the song of an ebbing tide,

Chance upon chance of love and death

Took wing for the world so wide.

Leaf out of leaf is the way of the land,

Wave out of wave of the sea;

And who shall reckon what lives may live

In the life that we bade to be?

V

Why, my heart, do we love her so?

(Geraldine, Geraldine!)—

Why does the great sea ebb and flow?

Why does the round world spin?

Geraldine, Geraldine,

Bid me my life renew,

What is it worth unless I win,

Love—love and you?

Why, my heart, when we speak her name

(Geraldine, Geraldine!),

Throbs the word like a flinging flame?—

Why does the spring begin?

Geraldine, Geraldine,

Bid me indeed to be,

Open your heart and take us in,

Love—love and me.

VI

Space and dread and the dark—

Over a livid stretch of sky

Cloud-monsters crawling like a funeral train

Of huge primeval presences

Stooping beneath the weight

Of some enormous, rudimentary grief;

While in the haunting loneliness

The far sea waits and wanders, with a sound

As of the trailing skirts of Destiny

Passing unseen

To some immitigable end

With her grey henchman, Death.

What larve, what spectre is this

Thrilling the wilderness to life

As with the bodily shape of Fear?

What but a desperate sense,

A strong foreboding of those dim,

Interminable continents, forlorn

And many-silenced in a dusk

Inviolable utterly, and dead

As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes

In hugger-mugger through eternity?

Life—life—let there be life!

Better a thousand times the roaring hours

When wave and wind,

Like the Arch-Murderer in flight

From the Avenger at his heel,

Storm through the desolate fastnesses

And wild waste places of the world!

Life—give me life until the end,

That at the very top of being,

The battle-spirit shouting in my blood,

Out of the reddest hell of the fight

I may be snatched and flung

Into the everlasting lull,

The immortal, incommunicable dream.

VII

There’s a regret

So grinding, so immitigably sad,

Remorse thereby feels tolerant, even glad. . . .

Do you not know it yet?

For deeds undone

Rankle, and snarl, and hunger for their due

Till there seems naught so despicable as you

In all the grin o’ the sun.

Like an old shoe

The sea spurns and the land abhors, you lie

About the beach of Time, till by-and-by

Death, that derides you too—

Death, as he goes

His ragman’s round, espies you, where you stray,

With half-an-eye, and kicks you out of his way;

And then—and then, who knows

But the kind Grave

Turns on you, and you feel the convict Worm,

In that black bridewell working out his term,

Hanker and grope and crave?

‘Poor fool that might—

That might, yet would not, dared not, let this be,

Think of it, here and thus made over to me

In the implacable night!’

And writhing, fain

And like a lover, he his fill shall take

Where no triumphant memory lives to make

His obscene victory vain.

VIII

(To J. A. C.)

Fresh from his fastnesses

Wholesome and spacious,

The north wind, the mad huntsman,

Halloos on his white hounds

Over the grey, roaring

Reaches and ridges,

The forest of ocean,

The chace of the world.

Hark to the peal

Of the pack in full cry,

As he thongs them before him

Swarming voluminous,

Weltering, wide-wallowing,

Till in a ruining

Chaos of energy,

Hurled on their quarry,

They crash into foam!

Old Indefatigable,

Time’s right-hand man, the sea

Laughs as in joy

From his millions of wrinkles:

Laughs that his destiny,

Great with the greatness

Of triumphing order,

Shows as a dwarf

By the strength of his heart

And the might of his hands.

Master of masters,

O maker of heroes,

Thunder the brave,

Irresistible message:—

‘Life is worth living

Through every grain of it

From the foundations

To the last edge

Of the cornerstone, death.’

IX

‘As like the Woman as you can’—

(Thus the New Adam was beguiled)—

‘So shall you touch the Perfect Man’—

(God in the Garden heard and smiled).

‘Your father perished with his day:

‘A clot of passions fierce and blind

‘He fought, he slew, he hacked his way:

‘Your muscles, Child, must be of mind.

‘The Brute that lurks and irks within,

‘How, till you have him gagged and bound,

‘Escape the foullest form of Sin?’

(God in the Garden laughed and frowned).

‘So vile, so rank, the bestial mood

‘In which the race is bid to be,

‘It wrecks the Rarer Womanhood:

‘Live, therefore, you, for Purity!

‘Take for your mate no buxom croup,

‘No girl all grace and natural will:

‘To make her happy were to stoop

‘From light to dark, from Good to Ill.

‘Choose one of whom your grosser make’—

(God in the Garden laughed outright)—

‘The true refining touch may take

‘Till both attain Life’s highest height.

‘There, equal, purged of soul and sense,

‘Beneficent, high-thinking, just,

‘Beyond the appeal of Violence,

‘Incapable of common Lust,

‘In mental Marriage still prevail’—

(God in the Garden hid His face)—

‘Till you achieve that Female-Male,

‘In Which shall culminate the race.

X

Midsummer midnight skies,

Midsummer midnight influences and airs,

The shining sensitive silver of the sea

Touched with the strange-hued blazonings of dawn:

And all so solemnly still I seem to hear

The breathing of Life and Death,

The secular Accomplices,

Renewing the visible miracle of the world.

The wistful stars

Shine like good memories.  The young morning wind

Blows full of unforgotten hours

As over a region of roses.  Life and Death

Sound on—sound on. . . . And the night magical,

Troubled yet comforting, thrills

As if the Enchanted Castle at the heart

Of the wood’s dark wonderment

Swung wide his valves and filled the dim sea-banks

With exquisite visitants:

Words fiery-hearted yet, dreams and desires

With living looks intolerable, regrets

Whose voice comes as the voice of an only child

Heard from the grave: shapes of a Might-Have-Been—

Beautiful, miserable, distraught—

The Law no man may baffle denied and slew.

The spell-bound ships stand as at gaze

To let the marvel by.  The grey road glooms . . .

Glimmers . . . goes out . . . and there, O there where it fades,

What grace, what glamour, what wild will,

Transfigure the shadows?  Whose,

Heart of my heart, Soul of my soul, but yours?

Ghosts—ghosts—the sapphirine air

Teems with them even to the gleaming ends

Of the wild day-spring!  Ghosts,

Everywhere—everywhere—till I and you

At last—dear love, at last!—

Are in the dreaming, even as Life and Death,

Twin-ministers of the unoriginal Will.

XI

Gulls in an aëry morrice

Gleam and vanish and gleam . . .

The full sea, sleepily basking,

Dreams under skies of dream.

Gulls in an aëry morrice

Circle and swoop and close . . .

Fuller and ever fuller

The rose of the morning blows.

Gulls in an aëry morrice

Frolicking float and fade . . .

O the way of a bird in the sunshine,

The way of a man with a maid!

XII

Some starlit garden grey with dew,

Some chamber flushed with wine and fire,

What matters where, so I and you

Are worthy our desire?

Behind, a past that scolds and jeers

For ungirt loin and lamp unlit;

In front the unmanageable years,

The trap upon the pit;

Think on the shame of dreams for deeds,

The scandal of unnatural strife,

The slur upon immortal needs,

The treason done to life:

Arise! no more a living lie

And with me quicken and control

A memory that shall magnify

The universal Soul.

XIII

(To James McNeill Whistler)

Under a stagnant sky,

Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom,

The River, jaded and forlorn,

Welters and wanders wearily—wretchedly—on;

Yet in and out among the ribs

Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles

Of some dead lake-built city, fall of skulls,

Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories,

Lingers to babble, to a broken tune

(Once, O the unvoiced music of my heart!)

So melancholy a soliloquy

It sounds as it might tell

The secret of the unending grief-in-grain,

The terror of Time and Change and Death,

That wastes this floating, transitory world.

What of the incantation

That forced the huddled shapes on yonder short

To take and wear the night

Like a material majesty?

That touched the shafts of wavering fire

About this miserable welter and wash—

(River, O River of Journeys, River of Dreams!—)

Into long, shining signals from the panes

Of an enchanted pleasure-house

Where life and life might live life lost in life

For ever and evermore?

O Death!  O Change!  O Time!

Without you, O the insufferable eyes

Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,

These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays!

XIV

Time and the Earth—

The old Father and Mother—

Their teeming accomplished,

Their purpose fulfilled,

Close with a smile

For a moment of kindness

Ere for the winter

They settle to sleep.

Failing yet gracious,

Slow pacing, soon homing,

A patriarch that strolls

Through the tents of his children,

The Sun, as he journeys

His round on the lower

Ascents of the blue,

Washes the roofs

And the hillsides with clarity;

Charms the dark pools

Till they break into pictures;

Scatters magnificent

Alms to the beggar trees;

Touches the mist-folk

That crowd to his escort

Into translucencies

Radiant and ravishing,

As with the visible

Spirit of Summer

Gloriously vaporised,

Visioned in gold.

Love, though the fallen leaf

Mark, and the fleeting light

And the loud, loitering

Footfall of darkness

Sign, to the heart

Of the passage of destiny,

Here is the ghost

Of a summer that lived for us,

Here is a promise

Of summers to be.

XV

You played and sang a snatch of song,

A song that all-too well we knew;

But whither had flown the ancient wrong;

And was it really I and you?

O since the end of life’s to live

And pay in pence the common debt,

What should it cost us to forgive

Whose daily task is to forget?

You babbled in the well-known voice—

Not new, not new, the words you said.

You touched me off that famous poise,

That old effect, of neck and head.

Dear, was it really you and I?

In truth the riddle’s ill to read,

So many are the deaths we die

Before we can be dead indeed.

XVI

One with the ruined sunset,

The strange forsaken sands,

What is it waits and wanders

And signs with desperate hands?

What is it calls in the twilight—

Calls as its chance were vain?

The cry of a gull sent seaward

Or the voice of an ancient pain?

The red ghost of the sunset,

It walks them as its own,

These dreary and desolate reaches . . .

But O that it walked alone!

XVII

CARMEN PATIBULARE

(To H. S.)

Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook

And the rope of the Black Election,

’Tis the faith of the Fool that a race you rule

Can never achieve perfection:

And ‘It’s O for the time of the New Sublime

And the better than human way

When the Wolf (poor beast) shall come to his own

And the Rat shall have his day!’

For Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Beam

And the power of provocation,

You have cockered the Brute with your dreadful fruit

Till your thought is mere stupration:

And ‘It’s how should we rise to be pure and wise,

And how can we choose but fall,

So long as the Hangman makes us dread

And the Noose floats free for all?’

So Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Coign

And the trick there’s no recalling,

They will haggle and hew till they hack you through

And at last they lay you sprawling:

When ‘Hey! for the hour of the race in flower

And the long good-bye to sin!’

And ‘Ho! for the fires of Hell gone out

For the want of keeping in!’

But Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Bough

And the ghastly Dreams that tend you,

Your growth began with the life of Man

And only his death can end you:

They may tug in line at your hempen twine,

They may flourish with axe and saw,

But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs

In the living rock of Law.

And Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Fork,

When the spent sun reels and blunders

Down a welkin lit with the flare of the Pit

As it seethes in spate and thunders,

Stern on the glare of the tortured air

Your lines august shall gloom,

And your master-beam be the last thing whelmed

In the ruining roar of Doom.

XVIII

(To M. E. H.)

When you wake in your crib,

You, an inch of experience—

Vaulted about

With the wonder of darkness;

Wailing and striving

To reach from your feebleness

Something you feel

Will be good to and cherish you,

Something you know

And can rest upon blindly:

O then a hand

(Your mother’s, your mother’s!)

By the fall of its fingers

All knowledge, all power to you,

Out of the dreary,

Discouraging strangenesses

Comes to and masters you,

Takes you, and lovingly

Woos you and soothes you

Back, as you cling to it,

Back to some comforting

Corner of sleep.

So you wake in your bed,

Having lived, having loved:

But the shadows are there,

And the world and its kingdoms

Incredibly faded;

And you grope in the Terror

Above you and under

For the light, for the warmth,

The assurance of life;

But the blasts are ice-born,

And your heart is nigh burst

With the weight of the gloom

And the stress of your strangled

And desperate endeavour:

Sudden a hand—

Mother, O Mother!—

God at His best to you,

Out of the roaring,

Impossible silences,

Falls on and urges you,

Mightily, tenderly,

Forth, as you clutch at it,

Forth to the infinite

Peace of the Grave.

XIX

O Time and Change, they range and range

From sunshine round to thunder!—

They glance and go as the great winds blow,

And the best of our dreams drive under:

For Time and Change estrange, estrange—

And, now they have looked and seen us,

O we that were dear we are all-too near

With the thick of the world between us.

O Death and Time, they chime and chime

Like bells at sunset falling!—

They end the song, they right the wrong,

They set the old echoes calling:

For Death and Time bring on the prime

Of God’s own chosen weather,

And we lie in the peace of the Great Release

As once in the grass together.

XX

The shadow of Dawn;

Stillness and stars and over-mastering dreams

Of Life and Death and Sleep;

Heard over gleaming flats the old unchanging sound

Of the old unchanging Sea.

My soul and yours—

O hand in hand let us fare forth, two ghosts,

Into the ghostliness,

The infinite and abounding solitudes,

Beyond—O beyond!—beyond . . .

Here in the porch

Upon the multitudinous silences

Of the kingdoms of the grave,

We twain are you and I—two ghosts Omnipotence

Can touch no more—no more!

XXI

When the wind storms by with a shout, and the stern sea-caves

Exult in the tramp and the roar of onsetting waves,

Then, then, it comes home to the heart that the top of life

Is the passion that burns the blood in the act of strife—

Till you pity the dead down there in their quiet graves.

But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog before,

When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore,

Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong,

Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire’s old song—

O you envy the blessèd dead that can live no more!

XXII

Trees and the menace of night;

Then a long, lonely, leaden mere

Backed by a desolate fell

As by a spectral battlement; and then,

Low-brooding, interpenetrating all,

A vast, grey, listless, inexpressive sky,

So beggared, so incredibly bereft

Of starlight and the song of racing worlds

It might have bellied down upon the Void

Where as in terror Light was beginning to be.

Hist!  In the trees fulfilled of night

(Night and the wretchedness of the sky)

Is it the hurry of the rain?

Or the noise of a drive of the Dead

Streaming before the irresistible Will

Through the strange dusk of this, the Debateable Land

Between their place and ours?

Like the forgetfulness

Of the work-a-day world made visible,

A mist falls from the melancholy sky:

A messenger from some lost and loving soul,

Hopeless, far wandered, dazed

Here in the provinces of life,

A great white moth fades miserably past.

Thro’ the trees in the strange dead night,

Under the vast dead sky,

Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead

Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell,

And the unimagined vastitudes beyond.

XXIII

(To P. A. G.)

Here they trysted, here they strayed,

In the leafage dewy and boon,

Many a man and many a maid,

And the morn was merry June:

‘Death is fleet, Life is sweet,’

Sang the blackbird in the may;

And the hour with flying feet

While they dreamed was yesterday.

Many a maid and many a man

Found the leafage close and boon;

Many a destiny began—

O the morn was merry June.

Dead and gone, dead and gone,

(Hark the blackbird in the may!),

Life and Death went hurrying on,

Cheek on cheek—and where were they?

Dust in dust engendering dust

In the leafage fresh and boon,

Man and maid fulfil their trust—

Still the morn turns merry June.

Mother Life, Father Death

(O the blackbird in the may!),

Each the other’s breath for breath,

Fleet the times of the world away.

XXIV

(To A. C.)

What should the Trees,

Midsummer-manifold, each one,

Voluminous, a labyrinth of life—

What should such things of bulk and multitude

Yield of their huge, unutterable selves,

To the random importunity of Day,

The blabbing journalist?

Alert to snatch and publish hour by hour

Their greenest hints, their leafiest privacies,

How can he other than endure

The ruminant irony that foists him off

With broad-blown falsehoods, or the obviousness

Of laughter flickering back from shine to shade,

And disappearances of homing birds,

And frolicsome freaks

Of little boughs that frisk with little boughs?

Now, at the word

Of the ancient, sacerdotal Night,

Night of the many secrets, whose effect—

Transfiguring, hierophantic, dread—

Themselves alone may fully apprehend,

They tremble and are changed:

In each, the uncouth individual soul

Looms forth and glooms

Essential, and, their bodily presences

Touched with inordinate significance,

Wearing the darkness like the livery

Of some mysterious and tremendous guild,

They brood—they menace—they appal:

Or the anguish of prophecy tears them, and they wring

Wild hands of warning in the face

Of some inevitable advance of doom:

Or, each to the other bending, beckoning, signing,

As in some monstrous market-place,

They pass the news, these Gossips of the Prime,

In that old speech their forefathers

Learned on the lawns of Eden, ere they heard

The troubled voice of Eve

Naming the wondering folk of Paradise.

Your sense is sealed, or you should hear them tell

The tale of their dim life and all

Its compost of experience: how the Sun

Spreads them their daily feast,

Sumptuous, of light, firing them as with wine;

Of the old Moon’s fitful solicitude

And those mild messages the Stars

Descend in silver silences and dews;

Or what the buxom West,

Wanton with wading in the swirl of the wheat,

Said, and their leafage laughed;

And how the wet-winged Angel of the Rain

Came whispering . . . whispering; and the gifts of the Year—

The sting of the stirring sap

Under the wizardry of the young-eyed Spring,

Their summer amplitudes of pomp

And rich autumnal melancholy, and the shrill,

Embittered housewifery

Of the lean Winter: all such things,

And with them all the goodness of the Master

Whose right hand blesses with increase and life,

Whose left hand honours with decay and death.

So, under the constraint of Night,

These gross and simple creatures,

Each in his scores of rings, which rings are years,

A servant of the Will.

And God, the Craftsman, as He walks

The floor of His workshop, hearkens, full of cheer

In thus accomplishing

The aims of His miraculous artistry.

XXV

What have I done for you,

England, my England?

What is there I would not do,

England my own?

With your glorious eyes austere,

As the Lord were walking near,

Whispering terrible things and dear

As the Song on your bugles blown,

England—

Round the world on your bugles blown!

Where shall the watchful Sun,

England, my England,

Match the master-work you’ve done,

England my own?

When shall he rejoice agen

Such a breed of mighty men

As come forward, one to ten,

To the Song on your bugles blown,

England—

Down the years on your bugles blown?

Ever the faith endures,

England, my England:—

‘Take and break us: we are yours,

‘England, my own!

‘Life is good, and joy runs high

‘Between English earth and sky:

‘Death is death; but we shall die

‘To the Song on your bugles blown,

‘England—

‘To the stars on your bugles blown!’

They call you proud and hard,

England, my England:

You with worlds to watch and ward,

England, my own!

You whose mailed hand keeps the keys

Of such teeming destinies

You could know nor dread nor ease

Were the Song on your bugles blown,

England,

Round the Pit on your bugles blown!

Mother of Ships whose might,

England, my England,

Is the fierce old Sea’s delight,

England, my own,

Chosen daughter of the Lord,

Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword,

There’s the menace of the Word

In the Song on your bugles blown,

England—

Out of heaven on your bugles blown!

Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty

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Table of Contents

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Song of the Sword, and Other Verses, by William Ernest Henley

THE SONG OF THE SWORD and other verses

THE SONG OF THE SWORD (To Rudyard Kipling)

LONDON VOLUNTARIES (To Charles Whibley)

I

II

III

IV

RHYMES AND RHYTHMS

I

II

III (To R. F. B.)

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII (To J. A. C.)

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII (To James McNeill Whistler)

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII CARMEN PATIBULARE (To H. S.)

XVIII (To M. E. H.)

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII (To P. A. G.)

XXIV (To A. C.)

XXV

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE