Analysis of London Voluntaries IV: Out of the Poisonous East
William Ernest Henley 1849 (Gloucester) – 1903 (Woking)
Out of the poisonous East,
Over a continent of blight,
Like a maleficent Influence released
From the most squalid cellerage of hell,
The Wind-Fiend, the abominable--
The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light--
Comes slouching, sullen and obscene,
Hard on the skirts of the embittered night;
And in a cloud unclean
Of excremental humours, roused to strife
By the operation of some ruinous change,
Wherever his evil mandate run and range,
Into a dire intensity of life,
A craftsman at his bench, he settles down
To the grim job of throttling London Town.
So, by a jealous lightlessness beset
That might have oppressed the dragons of old time
Crunching and groping in the abysmal slime,
A cave of cut-throat thoughts and villainous dreams,
Hag-rid and crying with cold and dirt and wet,
The afflicted City. prone from mark to mark
In shameful occultation, seems
A nightmare labryrinthine, dim and drifting,
With wavering gulfs and antic heights, and shifting,
Rent in the stuff of a material dark,
Wherein the lamplight, scattered and sick and pale,
Shows like the leper's living blotch of bale:
Uncoiling monstrous into street on street
Paven with perils, teeming with mischance,
Where man and beast go blindfold and in dread,
Working with oaths and threats and faltering feet
Somewhither in the hideousness ahead;
Working through wicked airs and deadly dews
That make the laden robber grin askance
At the good places in his black romance,
And the poor, loitering harlot rather choose
Go pinched and pined to bed
Than lurk and shiver and curse her wretched way
From arch to arch, scouting some threepenny prey.
Forgot his dawns and far-flushed afterglows,
His green garlands and windy eyots forgot,
The old Father-River flows,
His watchfires cores of menace in the gloom,
As he came oozing from the Pit, and bore,
Sunk in his filthily transfigured sides,
Shoals of dishonoured dead to tumble and rot
In the squalor of the universal shore:
His voices sounding through the gruesome air
As from the Ferry where the Boat of Doom
With her blaspheming cargo reels and rides:
The while his children, the brave ships,
No more adventurous and fair,
Nor tripping it light of heel as home-bound brides,
But infamously enchanted,
Huddle together in the foul eclipse,
Or feel their course by inches desperately,
As through a tangle of alleys murder-haunted,
From sinister reach to reach out -- out -- to sea.
And Death the while --
Death with his well-worn, lean, professional smile,
Death in his threadbare working trim--
Comes to your bedside, unannounced and bland,
And with expert, inevitable hand
Feels at your windpipe, fingers you in the lung,
Or flicks the clot well into the labouring heart:
Thus signifying unto old and young,
However hard of mouth or wild of whim,
'Tis time -- 'tis time by his ancient watch -- to part
From books and women and talk and drink and art.
And you go humbly after him
To a mean suburban lodging: on the way
To what or where
Not Death, who is old and very wise, can say:
And you -- how should you care
So long as, unreclaimed of hell,
The Wind-Fiend, the insufferable,
Thus vicious and thus patient, sits him down
To the black job of burking London Town?
Scheme | ABACDBEBEFGGFHHIJJKILKMMLNNOKPOPQRRQPSSTUTVWXUWYVXZYX1 Z2 3 2 4 4 5 6 6 7 8 7 5 8 8 5 SYSYCDHH |
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Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1101001 10010011 10110001 10110111 011001000 01011101001 11010001 1101100101 000101 111111 10010111001 0101101101 0101010011 0101111101 10111100101 11010101 11101010111 10010000101 01111101001 11010110101 00101011111 01011 0111010 110010101010 10011001001 0101100101 110110111 11001111 11101011 110111001 10110101001 100101 1011010101 1101010101 1011001101 00110010101 110111 11010010101 111110111 011101110 111010101 0110101 111110001 1111010101 101111 111111001 0010100101 1101010101 1101010111 1011101 01110011 11010001 11011111111 11010 1001000101 11111101000 110101101010 11001111111 0101 11111101001 1011101 11110101 0110010001 1111101001 1101101011 110010101 101111111 11111110111 11010010101 01110101 10101010101 1111 11111010111 011111 111111 011001000 1100110111 101111101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 3,131 |
Words | 549 |
Sentences | 7 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 78 |
Lines Amount | 78 |
Letters per line (avg) | 32 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 2,533 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 547 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:45 min read
- 121 Views
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"London Voluntaries IV: Out of the Poisonous East" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 10 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/40516/london-voluntaries-iv%3A-out-of-the-poisonous-east>.
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