Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

Poems 1898

Henley (1849-1903) is one of the most underrated poets of the 1890s. He is usually seen as a muscular imperialist, a category that also partly fits Kipling. He was also however an impressively experimental poet. His life was dogged by illness, and the illness became his subject matter: his sequence ‘In Hospital’ is realistic, powerful, and innovative. He can now be seen as one of the significant forerunners of the poetry of the twentieth century.

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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 as ‘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.

(‘Staff-Nurse: New Style’, page 15)

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Poetry of the 1890s