Raised, he settled stiffly sideways:
You could see the 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 feet protruded
Sharp 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.

I was told she was his sweetheart.
They were on the eve of marriage.
She was quiet as a statue,
But her lip was gray and writhen.

In this poem, the rhythm and the music, such as it is, are
obvious--perhaps a little too obvious. In the following I see nothing
but ingeniously printed prose. It is a description--and a very accurate
one--of a scene in a hospital ward. The medical students are supposed to
be crowding round the doctor. What I quote is only a fragment, but the
poem itself is a fragment:

So shows the ring
Seen, from behind, round a conjuror
Doing his pitch in the street.
High shoulders, low shoulders, broad shoulders, narrow ones,
Round, square, and angular, serry and shove;
While from within a voice,
Gravely and weightily fluent,
Sounds; and then ceases; and suddenly
(Look at the stress of the shoulders!)
Out of a quiver of silence,
Over the hiss of the spray,
Comes a low cry, and the sound
Of breath quick intaken through teeth
Clenched in resolve. And the master
Breaks from the crowd, and goes,
Wiping his hands,
To the next bed, with his pupils
Flocking and whispering behind him.

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.

Theophile Gautier once said that Flaubert's style was meant to be read,
and his own style to be looked at. Mr. Henley's unrhymed rhythms form
very dainty designs, from a typographical point of view. From the point
of view of literature, they are a series of vivid, concentrated
impressions, with a keen grip of fact, a terrible actuality, and an
almost masterly power of picturesque presentation. But the poetic
form--what of that?

Well, let us pass to the later poems, to the rondels and