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Hospital Poems by William Ernest Henley
From The Cornhill Magazine Vol 32 1875 pp 120-128
Based on Royal Infirmary Edinburgh 18 Short Poems
Hospital Outlines - Sketches and Portraits.
Sketches
Portraits
Biography of Henley William Ernest
Poems in Hospital Series
Sketches
I First Impressions
The mist of morn still drapes the clattering street,
The northern summer air is dank and cold,
And, lo, the Hospital - grey, quiet, old;
My only hope, the Art's best loved retreat.
Through the loud emptiness and airy gloom,
A small, strange child, so old and yet so young !
Her little arm besplinted and beslung,
Precedes me gravely to the waiting room.
Sequent I limp - my confidence is gone;
The grey-haired soldier-porter bids me on,
And on I limp, and still my spirits fail:
A tragic meanness seeming to environ
These corridors and stairs of stone and iron,
Chill, gaunt, and clean - half workhouse and half jail.
II Waiting
A square, squat room that stinks of drugs and dust,
The walls and atmosphere a brownish drab.
The floor is foul; fair is the dressing-slab
With spotless lint, and tinware pure of rust.
A lank, bare bench shrinks round three sides, and there,
While certain smart young flippant Shallows tend
Such ills as Art incipient may amend,
Two endless hours I sit, and ache, and swear.
The decent woman strips her plastered eye;
The two old men their two old ulcers bare;
The boy, his leg unbandaged, starts to cry;
The girl, tight-lipped - `Yon bluestane's awfu' sair'
To shut mine ears and raise my heart I Try,
Thinking of darker hours that long since were.
III The Ward
Four long brown walls - a waste of plaster, bare
Save in some ragged prints; a glowing grate;
A flooring half of boards, half flagged with slate;
A crowd of bottles; space and light and air.
A lean gas pipe; a table slim and spare,
With bandages and lint; seven truckle beds,
Above whose coarse red rugs the horrent heads
Of seven pale poor devils turn and stare.
Some read; some knit; some sit up wearily,
Resting their arms upon their crooked knees;
Some sleep; more laughter comes from them than moan
This is a ward in hospital. You see
The field where Science battles with Disease,
And Hope - sweet Hope - succumbs to Death alone.
IV The Visit
A many-footed rush resounds without,
Through the long, flagged, deep-vaulted corridor,
And in the Surgeon strides, at least three-score
Of pupils with him - learner, dandy, lout.
He walks as one who is not vexed with doubt;
They straggle after him across the floor,
Silent, respectful of his place and lore,
Not always keen for what he is about.
Presenting to contemplative beholders
A curious plump of sentient backs and shoulders,
They group themselves about a certain bed;
A few short words you cannot catch, are said;
Then comes a silence, and your pulses quicken;
And then a crunch of bone and steel, You sicken.
V Before Operation
Behold me gruesome, 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 helpless child, to think of as I near
The fateful minute; nothing all too dear
Unmans for me my hour of passive strife.
Yet am I tremulous and somewhat sick;
And, face to face with chance, I shrink a little.
My hopes are strong, but ah! my will is weak.
Here comes the basket. Euge! I am ready.
But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle;
You carry Caesar and his fortune - steady !
VI After Operation
Like a weak light involved in heavy smoke,
So through the anaesthetic shows my life;
So flashes and so falls my thought, at strife
With the strong stupor that I gasp and choke
And sicken at, it is so foully sweet.
Faces look strange from space - and disappear.
Far voices, sudden-loud, offend mine ear -
To hush as sudden - all my senses fleet.
All is away - except a heavy pain,
Grinding through 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.
VII Night Picture
Implacable, the speck of gas compels
My fascinated eyes, and makes them sore;
Perverse, the bedclothes ramble, more and more;
Like rockery the mattress sinks and swells.
The men are slumbering, but my soul rebels
Against one resolute, sonorous snore;
An opiated, exasperating roar,
The murder of my sweet first doze it knells.
Waking I dream. My sleepy fancy plumbs
The sea of my mishap; a cinder drops;
The shadow pulses as the loud flames fret;
My neighbour groans and turns; the snorer stops,
Chokes, gasps him free again; the night-nurse comes,
Noiseless and strange: "Are ye no' sleeping yet?"
VIII Another
Round one poor bed is stretched the painted screen,
Whose leaves extemporise a decent gloom,
Where Death and Life, as in a private room,
Meet, and arrange the honours of the scene.
The shadows melt into the growing grey;
The gas burns pale. My thoughts are gruesome yet,
But my vague sense of impotent regret
Fades in my pipe's blue tender whorls away.
Before the creaking fire the widow cries,
Huddled and hushed; the fresh, young night-nurse dozes;
We talk by fits, or think - for in this wise
A gaunt Perhaps itself to us discloses;
And lo, the sun! strong for his new emprise,
All Hope and Health, superb with wild mist roses.
IX Floral
Broad through the open door there stole to me,
Homesick and tires, a sudden smell of flowers;
A memory of mists, and suns, and showers,
Borne beautiful among my reverie.
Two girls come in. They carried, fair to see,
The homely growths of autumn, sweets and sours,
With waifs and strays of summer's golden hours
Tied up in little nosegays daintily.
To each of us they gave, as, week by week,
Nature's cheap gems among the hurt and sick,
With kindest instinct beautiful they share;
And when they left the close infirmary reek,
A sweet abnormal savour lingered there
Of sunburnt green, clear space, and country air.
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Portraits
I A Surgeon
His brow spreads large and quiet, and his eye
Is deep and bright, with steady looks that still;
Soft lines of tranquil thought his face fulfil;
His face at once benign, and proud, and shy.
If envy scout,if ignorance decry,
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
A love and faith that failure cannot quell.
They hold him for another Herakles,
Warring with Custom, Prejudice, Disease,
As once the son of Zeus with Death and Hell.
II A Student
A little black man, admirably neat,
Extremely `gentleman' from head to foot,
All glossy hat, white shirt, and shiny boot,
Gold links and chain, and kerchief smelling sweet.
He soaks his hair in water till the curl
Peculiar to his race will smooth away,
And visits his moustaches day by day,
Though yet, in this respect, a very girl.
His traits? - resentful and suspicious vanity,
Showy dexterity, logical humanity,
Thin brilliance, commonplace intelligence :
And, over all, unquenchable, immense,
Alert to smile and bow, to watch and wait,
An egotism making these things great.
III Staff-Nurse: Old Style
The supreme poets of the common place,
George Eliot and Rembrandt - 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 motive 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.
IV Lady Probationer
This is her picture :- seven and thirty years;
A Roman nose, a dimpling double chin,
And dark, shy eyes, if ignorant of sin,
Not unacquainted, 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, quite, soft in speech and touch -
`Do you like nursing?` `Yes Sir, very much'
Do you not guess (with me) she has a history ?
V Staff-Nurse: New Style
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 the gown of sober grey,
And on her chignon's elegant array
A cap receives the impress of her caste.
She talks of Beethoven, frown disapprobation
At Balzac's name, and sighs at Madame Sand's
Knows that she has exceeding pretty hands.
Speaks Latin words with due accentuation,
And gives at need, as one who understands,
A draught, a judgment, or an exhortation.
VI A Scrubber
Behold her! Gaunt, and in her hard sad face,
With flashes of the old fun's animation,
The fixed and somewhat peevish resignation
Left of a past where trouble waxed apace.
Apace indeed ! Her `man' before he died,
Saw seven of their children pass away,
But never knew the little lass at play
Out on the green - her joy, her hope, her pride.
Her kin dispersed, her friends forgot and gone,
All simple faith her honest Irish mind,
Scolding her spoiled wee saint - she labours on,
Telling her dreams, taking her patients' part,
Trailing her coat sometimes! - and you shall find
No rougher, quainter speech, no kinder heart.
VII A Patient
John Gallagher - `Mad Jack' - from Donegal,
Aged five and forty; reaper, shearer, sinker,
Adores Saint Blackthorn, is a furious drinker,
And, to the priest, a very sheep withal;
Has tramped through Britain, can the route recall;
Believes in ghosts, but in his way's a thinker;
Once threw a tinker's baby at the tinker;
Holds Willie Wallace first of heroes all.
Fell, eighteen months ago, some thirty feet,
Smashing his shin. The cure's almost complete,
And lusty still, save when the surgeon eyes him,
He like a collier swears, prays like a child,
Roars like a bison, laughs like something wild,
And makes us all like, pity, and despise him.
VIII A Visitor
Her little face is like a walnut shell
With wrinkling lines; her soft white hair adorns
Her either brow in quaint straight curls, like horns,
And all about her clings an old sweet smell
She wears prim stuffs and puritanic shawls,
Her bonnets might have well been born on her.
Can you conceive a fairy godmother
Devoted to conventicles and calls ?
In snow or shine, from bed to bed she runs,
Her mittened hands that always give, or pray,
Bearing a sheaf of tracts, a bag of buns:
All twinkling smiles and texts and pious tales,
A wee old maid that sweeps the Bridegroom's way,
Strong in a cheerful trust that never fails.
IX Children : Private Ward
Here in this dim, dull, double-bedded room,
I am the father of a brace of boys,
Ailing, but apt for every sort of noise,
Bedfast, but brilliant yet with healthful bloom.
Roden, the Irishman, is `sie-ven past'
Blue-eyed, snub-nosed, and chubby 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 vessels up, and ties;
Willie, self-chloroformed, with half-shut eyes,
Holding the limb and moaning - Case and Dresser.
Biography of Henley William Ernest
From DNB Concise 1901-70
Poet, critic, dramatist, born at Gloucester a cripple from boyhood. He was in Edinburgh Infirmary : his Hospital Verses, some of which were published in Cornhill Magazine led the editor to visit him and to introduce him to Robert Louis Stevenson - He later worked in Edinburgh and was on the staff of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Obtained Poetic fame by - Book of Verses in 1888 and London Voluntaries 1893
For England's Sake (patriotic songs) 1900
Joint compiler of the Slang Dictionary .
He died at Woking and is buried at Brookwood ?
The Book of Verses also includes other Poems in the Hospital Series
In Hospital Rhymes and Rythms.
1. Enter Patient.
2. Waiting.
3. Interior
4. Before.
5. Operation.
6. After.
7. Vigil.
8. Staff-Nurse Old Style.
9. Lady Probationer.
10. Staff-Nurse New Style.
11. Clinical.
12. Etching.
13. Casualty.
14. Ave Caesar
15. The Chief.
16. House-Surgeon.
17. Interlude.
18. Children :Private Ward.
19. Scrubber.
20. Visitor.
21. Romance.
22. Pastoral.
23. Music.
24. Suicide.
25. Apparition.
26. Anterotics.
27. Nocturn.
28. Discharged.
Envoy
Some of the above Poems have similar titles to those in the Cornhill Magazine but with different words.
Source: From The Cornhill Magazine Vol 32 1875 pp 120-128
Based on Royal Infirmary Edinburgh 18 Short Poems
Submitted by Alan Longbottom
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Page updated November 02, 2004 by Rossbret
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Hospital Poet