Poems   By: William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

Poems by William Ernest Henley

Contents:

Dedication Advertisement In Hospital Preface Enter Patient Waiting Interior Before Operation After Vigil Staff Nurse: Old Style Lady Probationer Staff Nurse: New Style Clinical Etching Casualty Ave, Caeser! 'The Chief' House Surgeon Interlude Children: Private Ward Srcubber Visitor Romance Pastoral Music Suicide Apparition Anterotics Nocturn Discharged Envoy The Song of the Sword Arabian Nights' Entertainments Bric e Brac Ballade of the Toyokuni Colour Print Ballade of Youth and Age Ballade of Midsummer Days and Nights Ballade of Dead Actors Ballade Made in the Hot Weather Ballade of Truisms Double Ballade of Life and Death Double Ballade of the Nothingness of Things At Queensferry Orientale In Fisherrow Back View Croquis Attadale, West Highlands From a Window in Princes Street In the Dials The gods are dead Let us be drunk When you are old Beside the idle summer sea The ways of Death are soothing and serene We shall surely die What is to come Echos Preface To my mother Life is bitter O, gather me the rose Out of the night that covers me I am the Reaper Praise the generous gods Fill a glass with golden wine We'll go no more a roving Madam Life's a piece in bloom The sea is full of wandering foam Thick is the darkness To me at my fifth floor window Bring her again, O western wind The wan sun westers, faint and slow There is a wheel inside my head While the west is paling The sands are alive with sunshine The nightingale has a lyre of gold Your heart has trembled to my tongue The surges gushed and sounded We flash across the level The West a glimmering lake of light The skies are strown with stars The full sea rolls and thunders In the year that's come and gone In the placid summer midnight She sauntered by the swinging seas Blithe dreams arise to greet us A child Kate A Whimsies, John a Dreams O, have you blessed, behind the stars O, Falmouth is a fine town The ways are green Life in her creaking shoes A late lark twitters from the quiet skies I gave my heart to a woman Or ever the knightly years were gone On the way to Kew The past was goodly once The spring, my dear The Spirit of Wine A Wink from Hesper Friends. . . old friends If it should come to be From the brake the Nightingale In the waste hour Crosses and troubles London Voluntaries Grave Andante con Moto Scherzando Largo e Mesto Allegro Maestoso Rhymes and Rhyhms Prologue Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade We are the Choice of the Will A desolate shore It came with the threat of a waning moon Why, my heart, do we love her so? One with the ruined sunset There's a regret Time and the Earth As like the Woman as you can Midsummer midnight skies Gulls in an aery morrice Some starlit garden grey with dew Under a stagnant sky Fresh from his fastnesses You played and sang a snatch of song Space and dread and the dark Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook When you wake in your crib O, Time and Change The shadow of Dawn When the wind storms by with a shout Trees and the menace of night Here they trysted, here they strayed Not to the staring Day What have I done for you Epilogue

DEDICATION TO MY WIFE

Take, dear, my little sheaf of songs, For, old or new, All that is good in them belongs Only to you;