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

And, singing as when all was young,
   They will recall
Those others, lived but left unsung—
   The bent of all.

W. E. H

April 1888
      September 1897.

My friend and publisher, Mr. Alfred Nutt, asks me to introduce this re-issue of old work in a new shape.  At his request, then, I have to say that nearly all the numbers contained in the present volume are reprinted from ‘A Book of Verses’ (1888) and ‘London Voluntaries’ (1892–3).  From the first of these I have removed some copies of verse which seemed to me scarce worth keeping; and I have recovered for it certain others from those publications which had made room for them.  I have corrected where I could, added such dates as I might, and, by re-arrangement and revision, done my best to give my book, such as it is, its final form.  If any be displeased by the result, I can but submit that my verses are my own, and that this is how I would have them read.

For the matter of my book, it is there to speak for itself:—

‘Here’s a sigh to those who love me
And a smile to those who hate.’

I refer to it for the simple pleasure of reflecting that it has made me many friends and some enemies.

W. E. H.

Muswell Hill, 4th September 1897.

The morning mists still haunt the stony street;
The northern summer air is shrill and cold;
And lo, the Hospital, grey, quiet, old,
Where Life and Death like friendly chafferers meet.
Thro’ the loud spaciousness and draughty gloom
A small, strange child—so agèd yet so young!—
Her little arm besplinted and beslung,
Precedes me gravely to the waiting-room.
I limp behind, my confidence all gone.
The grey-haired soldier-porter waves me on,
And on I crawl, and still my spirits fail:
A tragic meanness seems so to environ
These corridors and stairs of stone and iron,
Cold, naked, clean—half-workhouse and half-jail.

A square, squat room (a cellar on promotion),
   Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight;
   Plasters astray in unnatural-looking tinware;
   Scissors and lint and apothecary’s jars.

Here, on a bench a skeleton would writhe from,
   Angry and sore, I wait to be admitted:
   Wait till my heart is lead upon my stomach,
   While at their ease two dressers do their chores.

One has a probe—it feels to me a crowbar.
   A small boy sniffs and shudders after bluestone.
   A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers.
   Life is (I think) a blunder and a shame.

      The gaunt brown walls
Look infinite in their decent meanness.
There is nothing of home in the noisy kettle,
      The fulsome fire.

      The atmosphere
Suggests the trail of a ghostly druggist.
Dressings and lint on the long, lean table—
      Whom are they for?

      The patients yawn,
Or lie as in training for shroud and coffin.
A nurse in the corridor scolds and wrangles.
      It’s grim and strange.

      Far footfalls clank.
The bad burn waits with his head unbandaged.
My neighbour chokes in the clutch of chloral . . .
      O, a gruesome world!

Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife.
A little while, and at a leap I storm
The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform,
The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.
The gods are good to me: I have no wife,
No innocent child, to think of as I near
The fateful minute; nothing all-too dear
Unmans me for my bout of passive strife.
Yet am I tremulous and a trifle sick,
And, face to face with chance, I shrink a little:
My hopes are strong, my will is something weak.
Here comes the basket?  Thank you.  I am ready.
But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle:
You carry Cæsar and his fortunes—steady!

You are carried in a basket,
   Like a carcase from the shambles,
   To the theatre, a cockpit
   Where they stretch you on a table.

Then they bid you close your eyelids,
   And they mask you with a napkin,
   And the anæsthetic reaches
   Hot and subtle through your being.

And you gasp and reel and shudder
   In a rushing, swaying rapture,
   While the voices at your elbow
   Fade—receding—fainter—farther.

Lights about you shower and tumble,
   And your blood seems crystallising—
   Edged and vibrant, yet within you
   Racked and hurried back and forward.

Till a sudden lull accepts you,
   And you sound an utter darkness . . .
   And awaken . . . with a struggle . . .
   On a hushed, attentive audience.

Like as a flamelet blanketed in smoke,
So through the anæsthetic shows my life;
So flashes and so fades my thought, at strife
With the strong stupor that I heave and choke
And sicken at, it is so foully sweet.
Faces look strange from space—and disappear.
Far voices, sudden loud, offend my ear—
And hush as sudden.  Then my senses fleet:
All were a blank, save for this dull, new pain
That grinds my leg and foot; and brokenly
Time and the place glimpse on to me again;
And, unsurprised, out of uncertainty,
I wake—relapsing—somewhat faint and fain,
To an immense, complacent dreamery.

Lived on one’s back,
In the long hours of repose,
Life is a practical nightmare—
Hideous asleep or awake.

Shoulders and loins
Ache - - - !
Ache, and the mattress,
Run into boulders and hummocks,
Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes—
Tumbling, importunate, daft—
Ramble and roll, and the gas,
Screwed to its lowermost,
An inevitable atom of light,
Haunts, and a stertorous sleeper
Snores me to hate and despair.

Far in the stillness a cat
Languishes loudly.  A cinder
Falls, and the shadows
Lurch to the leap of the flame.  The next man to me
Turns with a moan; and the snorer,
The drug like a rope at his throat,
Gasps, gurgles, snorts himself free, as the night-nurse,
Noiseless and strange,
Her bull’s eye half-lanterned in apron,
(Whispering me, ‘Are ye no sleepin’ yet?’),
Passes, list-slippered and peering,
Round . . . and is gone.

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.

Some three, or five, or seven, and thirty years;
A Roman nose; a dimpling double-chin;
Dark eyes and shy that, ignorant of sin,
Are yet acquainted, it would seem, with tears;
A comely shape; a slim, high-coloured hand,
Graced, rather oddly, with a signet ring;
A bashful air, becoming everything;
A well-bred silence always at command.
Her plain print gown, prim cap, and bright steel chain
Look out of place on her, and I remain
Absorbed in her, as in a pleasant mystery.
Quick, skilful, quiet, soft in speech and touch . . .
‘Do you like nursing?’  ‘Yes, Sir, very much.’
Somehow, I rather think she has a history.

Blue-eyed and bright of face but waning fast
Into the sere of virginal decay,
I view her as she enters, day by day,
As a sweet sunset almost overpast.
Kindly and calm, patrician to the last,
Superbly falls her gown of sober gray,
And on her chignon’s elegant array
The plainest cap is somehow touched with caste.
She talks Beethoven; frowns disapprobation
At Balzac’s name, sighs it at ‘poor George Sand’s’;
Knows that she has exceeding pretty hands;
Speaks Latin with a right accentuation;
And gives at need (as one who understands)
Draught, counsel, diagnosis, exhortation.

Hist? . . .
Through the corridor’s echoes,
Louder and nearer
Comes a great shuffling of feet.
Quick, every one of you,
Strighten your quilts, and be decent!
Here’s the Professor.

Now one can see.
Case Number One
Sits (rather pale) with his bedclothes
Stripped up, and showing his foot
(Alas for God’s Image!)
Swaddled in wet, white lint
Brilliantly hideous with red.

Two and thirty is the ploughman.
He’s a man of gallant inches,
And his hair is close and curly,
      And his beard;
But his face is wan and sunken,
And his eyes are large and brilliant,
And his shoulder-blades are sharp,
      And his knees.

He is weak of wits, religious,
Full of sentiment and yearning,
Gentle, faded—with a cough
      And a snore.
When his wife (who was a widow,
And is many years his elder)
Fails to write, and that is always,
      He desponds.

As with varnish red and glistening
   Dripped his hair; his feet looked rigid;
   Raised, he settled stiffly sideways:
   You could see his hurts were spinal.

He had fallen from an engine,
   And been dragged along the metals.
   It was hopeless, and they knew it;
   So they covered him, and left him.

As he lay, by fits half sentient,
   Inarticulately moaning,
   With his stockinged soles protruded
   Stark and awkward from the blankets,

To his bed there came a woman,
   Stood and looked and sighed a little,
   And departed without speaking,
   As himself a few hours after.

From the winter’s grey despair,
From the summer’s golden languor,
Death, the lover of Life,
Frees us for ever.

Inevitable, silent, unseen,
Everywhere always,
Shadow by night and as light in the day,
Signs she at last to her chosen;
And, as she waves them forth,
Sorrow and Joy
Lay by their looks and their voices,
Set down their hopes, and are made
One in the dim Forever.

Into the winter’s grey delight,
Into the summer’s golden dream,
Holy and high and impartial,
Death, the mother of Life,
Mingles all men for ever.

His brow spreads large and placid, and his eye
Is deep and bright, with steady looks that still.
Soft lines of tranquil thought his face fulfill—
His face at once benign and proud and shy.
If envy scout, if ignorance deny,
His faultless patience, his unyielding will,
Beautiful gentleness and splendid skill,
Innumerable gratitudes reply.
His wise, rare smile is sweet with certainties,
And seems in all his patients to compel
Such love and faith as failure cannot quell.
We hold him for another Herakles,
Battling with custom, prejudice, disease,
As once the son of Zeus with Death and Hell.

Exceeding tall, but built so well his height
Half-disappears in flow of chest and limb;
Moustache and whisker trooper-like in trim;
Frank-faced, frank-eyed, frank-hearted; always bright
And always punctual—morning, noon, and night;
Bland as a Jesuit, sober as a hymn;
Humorous, and yet without a touch of whim;
Gentle and amiable, yet full of fight.
His piety, though fresh and true in strain,
Has not yet whitewashed up his common mood
To the dead blank of his particular Schism.
Sweet, unaggressive, tolerant, most humane,
Wild artists like his kindly elderhood,
And cultivate his mild Philistinism.

O, the fun, the fun and frolic
   That The Wind that Shakes the Barley
   Scatters through a penny-whistle
   Tickled with artistic fingers!

Kate the scrubber (forty summers,
   Stout but sportive) treads a measure,
   Grinning, in herself a ballet,
   Fixed as fate upon her audience.

Stumps are shaking, crutch-supported;
   Splinted fingers tap the rhythm;
   And a head all helmed with plasters
   Wags a measured approbation.

Of their mattress-life oblivious,
   All the patients, brisk and cheerful,
   Are encouraging the dancer,
   And applauding the musician.

There are, maybe, some suspicions
   Of an alcoholic presence . . .
   ‘Tak’ a sup of this, my wumman!’ . . .
   New Year comes but once a twelvemonth.

Here in this dim, dull, double-bedded room,
I play the father to a brace of boys,
Ailing but apt for every sort of noise,
Bedfast but brilliant yet with health and bloom.
Roden, the Irishman, is ‘sieven past,’
Blue-eyed, snub-nosed, chubby, and fair of face.
Willie’s but six, and seems to like the place,
A cheerful little collier to the last.
They eat, and laugh, and sing, and fight, all day;
All night they sleep like dormice.  See them play
At Operations:—Roden, the Professor,
Saws, lectures, takes the artery up, and ties;
Willie, self-chloroformed, with half-shut eyes,
Holding the limb and moaning—Case and Dresser.

She’s tall and gaunt, and in her hard, sad face
With flashes of the old fun’s animation
There lowers the fixed and peevish resignation
Bred of a past where troubles came apace.
She tells me that her husband, ere he died,
Saw seven of their children pass away,
And never knew the little lass at play
Out on the green, in whom he’s deified.
Her kin dispersed, her friends forgot and gone,
All simple faith her honest Irish mind,
Scolding her spoiled young saint, she labours on:
Telling her dreams, taking her patients’ part,
Trailing her coat sometimes: and you shall find
No rougher, quainter speech, nor kinder heart.