Visitor
Her little face is like a walnut shell
With wrinkling lines; her soft, white hair adorns
Her withered brows in quaint, straight curls, like horns;
And all about her clings an old, sweet smell.
Prim is her gown and quakerlike her shawl.
Well might her bonnets have been born on her.
Can you conceive a Fairy Godmother
The subject of a strong religious call?
In snow or shine, from bed to bed she runs,
All twinkling smiles and texts and pious tales,
Her mittened hands, that ever give or pray,
Bearing a sheaf of tracts, a bag of buns:
A wee old maid that sweeps the Bridegroom's way,
Strong in a cheerful trust that never fails.
poem by William Ernest Henley
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London Types: Bus Driver
He's called The General from the brazen craft
And dash with which he sneaks a bit of road
And all its fares; challenged, or chafed, or chaffed,
Back-answers of the newest he'll explode;
He reins his horses with an air; he treats
With scoffing calm whatever powers there be;
He gets it straight, puts a bit on, and meets
His losses with both lip and £ s. d.;
He arrogates a special taste in short;
Is loftily grateful for a flagrant smoke;
At all the smarter housemaids winks his court,
And taps them for half-crowns; being stoney-broke,
Lives lustily; is ever on the make;
And hath, I fear, none other gods but Fake.
poem by William Ernest Henley
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London Types:
Time, the old humourist, has a trick to-day
Of moving landmarks and of levelling down,
Till into Town the Suburbs edge their way,
And in the Suburbs you may scent the Town.
With Mount Street thus approaching Muswell Hill,
And Clapham Common marching with the Mile,
You get a Hammersmith that fills the bill,
A Hampstead with a serious sense of style.
So this fair creature, pictured in The Row,
As one of that 'gay adulterous world,' whose round
Is by the Serpentine, as well would show,
And might, I deem, as readily be found
On Streatham's Hill, or Wimbledon's, or where
Brixtonian kitchens lard the late-dining air.
poem by William Ernest Henley
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Staff Nurse:Old Style
The greater masters of the commonplace,
REMBRANDT and good SIR WALTER-only these
Could paint her all to you: experienced ease
And antique liveliness and ponderous grace;
The sweet old roses of her sunken face;
The depth and malice of her sly, grey eyes;
The broad Scots tongue that flatters, scolds, defies;
The thick Scots wit that fells you like a mace.
These thirty years has she been nursing here,
Some of them under SYME , her hero still.
Much is she worth, and even more is made of her.
Patients and students hold her very dear.
The doctors love her, tease her, use her skill.
They say 'The Chief' himself is half-afraid of her.
poem by William Ernest Henley
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If I Were King
If I were king, my pipe should be premier.
The skies of time and chance are seldom clear,
We would inform them all with bland blue weather.
Delight alone would need to shed a tear,
For dream and deed should war no more together.
Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear;
Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather;
And love, sweet love, should never fall to sere,
If I were king.
But politics should find no harbour near;
The Philistine should fear to slip his tether;
Tobacco should be duty free, and beer;
In fact, in room of this, the age of leather,
An age of gold all radiant should appear,
If I were king.
poem by William Ernest Henley
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London Types: News Boy
Take any station, pavement, circus, corner,
Where men their styles of print may call or choose,
And there-ten times more on it than Jack Horner-
There you shall find him swathed in sheets of news.
Nothing can stay the placing of his wares-
Not 'bus, nor cab, nor dray! The very Slop,
That imp of power, is powerless! Ever he dares,
And, daring, lands his public neck and crop.
Even the many-tortured London ear,
The much-enduring, loathes his Speeshul yell,
His shriek of Winnur! But his dart and leer
And poise are irresistible. Pall Mall
Joys in him, and Mile End; for his vocation
Is to purvey the stuff of conversation.
poem by William Ernest Henley
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The Gods Are Dead
The gods are dead? Perhaps they are! Who knows?
Living at least in Lempriere undeleted,
The wise, the fair, the awful, the jocose,
Are one and all. I like to think, retreated
In some still land of lilacs and the rose.
Once high they sat, and high o’er earthly shows
With sacrificial dance and song were greeted.
Once… long ago. But now, the story goes,
The gods are dead.
It must be true. The world, a world of prose,
Full-crammed with facts, in science swathed and sheeted,
Nods in a stertorous after-dinner doze!
Plangent and sad, in every wind that blows
Who will may hear the sorry words repeated: –
‘The Gods are Dead!’
poem by William Ernest Henley
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London Types: Flower-Girl
There's never a delicate nurseling of the year
But our huge London hails it, and delights
To wear it on her breast or at her ear,
Her days to colour and make sweet her nights.
Crocus and daffodil and violet,
Pink, primrose, valley-lily, close-carnation,
Red rose and white rose, wall-flower, mignonette,
The daisies all-these be her recreation,
Her gaudies these! And forth from Drury Lane,
Trapesing in any of her whirl of weathers,
Her flower-girls foot it, honest and hoarse and vain,
All boot and little shawl and wilted feathers:
Of populous corners right advantage taking,
And, where they squat, endlessly posy-making.
poem by William Ernest Henley
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At Queensferry
The blackbird sang, the skies were clear and clean
We bowled along a road that curved a spine
Superbly sinuous and serpentine
Thro' silent symphonies of summer green.
Sudden the Forth came on us--sad of mien,
No cloud to colour it, no breeze to line:
A sheet of dark, dull glass, without a sign
Of life or death, two spits of sand between.
Water and sky merged blank in mist together,
The Fort loomed spectral, and the Guardship's spars
Traced vague, black shadows on the shimmery glaze:
We felt the dim, strange years, the grey, strange weather,
The still, strange land, unvexed of sun or stars,
Where Lancelot rides clanking thro' the haze.
poem by William Ernest Henley
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Attadale, West Highlands
A black and glassy float, opaque and still,
The loch, at furthest ebb supine in sleep,
Reversing, mirrored in its luminous deep
The calm grey skies; the solemn spurs of hill;
Heather, and corn, and wisps of loitering haze;
The wee white cots, black-hatted, plumed with smoke;
The braes beyond--and when the ripple awoke,
They wavered with the jarred and wavering glaze.
The air was hushed and dreamy. Evermore
A noise of running water whispered near.
A straggling crow called high and thin. A bird
Trilled from the birch-leaves. Round the shingled shore,
Yellow with weed, there wandered, vague and clear,
Strange vowels, mysterious gutturals, idly heard.
poem by William Ernest Henley
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