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Home  »  The English Poets  »  To A. C.

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)

To A. C.

NOT to the staring Day,

For all the importunate questionings he pursues

In his big, violent voice,

Shall those mild things of bulk and multitude,

The Trees—God’s sentinels

Over His gift of live, life-giving air—

Yield of their huge, unutterable selves.

Midsummer-manifold, each one

Voluminous, a labyrinth of life,

They keep their greenest musings, and the dim dreams

That haunt their leaner privacies,

Dissembled, baffling the random gapeseed still

With blank full-faces, or the innocent guile

Of laughter flickering back from shine to shade,

And disappearances of homing birds,

And frolicsome freaks

Of little boughs that frisk with little boughs.

But at the word

Of the ancient, sacerdotal Night,

Night of the many secrets, whose effect—

Transfiguring, hierophantic, dread—

Themselves alone may fully apprehend,

They tremble and are changed.

In each, the uncouth individual soul

Looms forth and glooms

Essential, and, their bodily presences

Touched with inordinate significance,

Wearing the darkness like the livery

Of some mysterious and tremendous guild,

They brood—they menace—they appal;

Or the anguish of prophecy tears them, and they wring

Wild hands of warning in the face

Of some inevitable advance of doom;

Or, each to the other bending, beckoning, signing

As in some monstrous market-place,

They pass the news, these Gossips of the Prime,

In that old speech their forefathers

Learned on the lawns of Eden, ere they heard

The troubled voice of Eve

Naming the wondering folk of Paradise.

Your sense is sealed, or you should hear them tell

The tale of their dim life, with all

Its compost of experience: how the Sun

Spreads them their daily feast,

Sumptuous, of light, firing them as with wine;

Of the old Moon’s fitful solicitude

And those mild messages the Stars

Descend in silver silences and dews;

Or what the sweet-breathing West,

Wanton with wading in the swirl of the wheat,

Said, and their leafage laughed;

And how the wet-winged Angel of the Rain

Came whispering … whispering; and the gifts of the Year—

The sting of the stirring sap

Under the wizardry of the young-eyed Spring,

Their summer amplitudes of pomp,

Their rich autumnal melancholy, and the shrill,

Embittered housewifery

Of the lean Winter: all such things,

And with them all the goodness of the Master,

Whose right hand blesses with increase and life,

Whose left hand honours with decay and death.

Thus under the constraint of Night

These gross and simple creatures,

Each in his scores of rings, which rings are years,

A servant of the Will!

And God, the Craftsman, as He walks

The floor of His workshop; hearkens, full of cheer

In thus accomplishing

The aims of His miraculous artistry.