Hawthorn and Lavender, with Other Verses

Transcribed from the 1901 David Nutt edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
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
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.
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!
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 .