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 rondeaus, the sonnets and quatorzains, the echoes and the ballades.  How brilliant and fanciful this is!  The Toyokuni colour-print that suggested it could not be more delightful.  It seems to have kept all the wilful fantastic charm of the original: 

   Was I a Samurai renowned,
   Two-sworded, fierce, immense of bow? 
   A histrion angular and profound? 
   A priest? a porter?—­Child, although
   I have forgotten clean, I know
   That in the shade of Fujisan,
   What time the cherry-orchards blow,
   I loved you once in old Japan.

   As here you loiter, flowing-gowned
   And hugely sashed, with pins a-row
   Your quaint head as with flamelets crowned,
   Demure, inviting—­even so,
   When merry maids in Miyako
   To feel the sweet o’ the year began,
   And green gardens to overflow,
   I loved you once in old Japan.

   Clear shine the hills; the rice-fields round
   Two cranes are circling; sleepy and slow,
   A blue canal the lake’s blue bound
   Breaks at the bamboo bridge; and lo! 
   Touched with the sundown’s spirit and glow,
   I see you turn, with flirted fan,
   Against the plum-tree’s bloomy snow . . . 
   I loved you once in old Japan!