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