Laudator Temporis Acti

Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), "Fare Well," Collected Poems, 1901-1918, Vol. I (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), p. 222 (line numbers added):

When I lie where shades of darkness
Shall no more assail mine eyes,
Nor the rain make lamentation
      When the wind sighs;
How will fare the world whose wonder        5
Was the very proof of me?
Memory fades, must the remembered
      Perishing be?

Oh, when this my dust surrenders
Hand, foot, lip, to dust again,        10
May these loved and loving faces
      Please other men!
May the rustling harvest hedgerow
Still the Traveller's Joy entwine,
And as happy children gather        15
      Posies once mine.

Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
      Till to delight        20
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
      In other days.

A.E. Housman (1859-1936), ed., M. Manilii Astronomicon Liber Quintus (London: The Richards Press, 1930), pp. xxxv-xxxvi:

The following stanza of Mr de la Mare's 'Fare well' first met my eyes, thus printed, in a newspaper review.

Oh, when this my dust surrenders
Hand, foot, lip, to dust again,        10
May these loved and loving faces
      Please other men!
May the rustling harvest hedgerow
Still the Traveller's Joy entwine,
And as happy children gather        15
      Posies once mine.

I knew in a moment that Mr de la Mare had not written rustling, and in another moment I had found the true word. But if the book of poems had perished and the verse survived only in the review, who would have believed me rather than the compositor? The bulk of the reading public would have been perfectly content with rustling, nay they would sincerely have preferred it to the epithet which the poet chose. If I had been so ill-advised as to publish my emendation, I should have been told that rustling was exquisitely apt and poetical, because hedgerows do rustle, especially in autumn, when the leaves are dry, and when straws and ears from the passing harvest-wain (to which 'harvest' is so plain an allusion that only a pedant like me could miss it) are hanging caught in the twigs; and I should have been recommended to quit my dusty (or musty) books and make a belated acquaintance with the sights and sounds of the English countryside. And the only possible answer would have been ugh!

Richard Gaskin, Horace and Housman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 202-203:

But we are not told what the true word was—"rusting," in fact. The attitude here exemplified is well documented and familiar. We have all met people who, because they themselves have suffered or been excessively imposed upon, feel the need to compensate by dominating and manipulating others, if only in trivial ways, and the silly power games that Housman here plays with his readers fall squarely within this class. Paul Naiditch suggests that Housman wrote this passage and others like it in order "to let the reader take his own measure, and then, if need be, to confess to himself that the melancholy truth stares him in the face" ([2], p. 152), namely, the truth that he is no critic. This is right, so long as the emphasis falls on the latter part of the sentence: Housman was less interested in educating his readers than in crushing them.

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From Stephen Pentz:

[Y]our reference to the use of “rustling” in the American edition of de la Mare’s Collected Poems, 1901-1918, Volume 1 (Henry Holt 1920) piqued my curiosity. I have a copy of the English edition of the same collection, which was published by Constable in 1920 under the title Poems 1901 to 1918, Volume 1. I checked, and the line reads “May the rusting harvest hedgerow” in the Constable edition (page 250). Comparing the American and English editions on the Internet Archive, it appears that the Holt edition may have been re-set, rather than simply being a re-binding of the Constable sheets for the American edition. Hence, it would appear that someone at Holt decided that “rusting” was “incorrect,” and changed it to “rustling.”

The use of “rusting” in the Constable edition is consistent with Constable’s 1918 edition of Motley and Other Poems, the collection in which “Fare Well” first appeared (to my knowledge) in book form. I have a copy of the 1918 Holt edition of Motley and Other Poems, and “rusting” is used there as well.

Finally, “rusting” is also used in The Collected Poems of Walter de la Mare, which was published by Faber and Faber in 1979.