The Ways of Death...

Literary Commentary

"The Ways of Death..." is a thirteen-line rondel that William Ernest Henley wrote in 1878, three years after he left the Edinburgh Infirmary and while he was editing the weekly London. The poem personifies Death as a gentle female figure who beckons "from camp and church, the fireside and the street," greeting each speaker as "this last of all your lovers." Its tone is the opposite of "Invictus": welcome rather than defiance.

The form does much of the argument's work. A rondel returns its opening couplet twice — once intact at lines seven and eight, once truncated to a single closing line — so the claim that Death's ways are "soothing and serene" is not stated and developed but circled and reinstated. Each return narrows the rhetorical room until the poem closes on the refrain alone. The encircling pattern lets the form carry what plain assertion would have to insist on.

Within Henley's body of work the poem occupies a quieter chamber than "Invictus" or the free-verse In Hospital sequence (1873–75). It belongs instead to his fixed-forms phase, the rondels and ballades and villanelles he produced while editing London and which Gleeson White gathered in his 1887 anthology Ballades and Rondeaus. The poem's interest is partly technical — Henley fitting an old French shape to Victorian English — and partly tonal: a poet who had lost a leg to disease writing about death not as an enemy he had bested but as a presence he could imagine welcoming.

Key themes

• Death as gentle comforter rather than enemy
• Universality of mortality across station and vocation
• Form as argument: the rondel's refrain enacts encirclement
• The late-Victorian aestheticisation of dying

Notable craft elements

• Rondel form (ABba abAB abbaA): two rhymes, three stanzas, refrain returning twice
• Iambic pentameter loosely kept; Henley allows substitutions
• Feminine personification sustained across all three stanzas ("She," "this last of all your lovers," "the Comforter's" kiss)
• Catalogue of social locations ("camp and church, the fireside and the street") flattens distinctions of class and calling

Reread prompt

Read the refrain in each of its three positions — opening, middle, end. Does it mean the same thing each time, or does its meaning change with what surrounds it?

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