Hawthorn and Lavender, with Other Verses

by William Ernest Henley

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?