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To her who, cast with me in trying days,
Stood in the place of health and power and praise;
Who, when I thought all light was out, became
A lamp of hope that put my fears to shame;
Who faced for love's sole sake the life austere
That waits upon the man of letters here;
Who, unawares, her deep affection showed
By many a touching little wifely mode;
Whose spirit, self-denying, dear, divine,
Its sorrows hid, so it might lessen mine --
To her, my bright, best friend, I dedicate
This book of songs -- 't will help to compensate
For much neglect. The act, if not the rhyme,
Will touch her heart, and lead her to the time
Of trials past. That which is most intense
Within these leaves is of her influence;
And if aught here is sweetened with a tone
Sincere, like love, it came of love alone.
~~~ Prefatory Sonnets ~~~
I
I purposed once to take my pen and write,
II
So take these kindly, even though there be ~~~ The Hut by the Black Swamp ~~~
Now comes the fierce north-easter, bound
Now twilight, with a shadowy hand
Keen, fitful gusts, that fly before
And, ringed and girt with lurid pomp,
The moss that, like a tender grief,
That gracious growth, whose quiet green
Nor comes the bird whose speech is song --
But rather here the wild-dog halts,
Across this hut the nettle runs,
Here Summer's grasp of fire is laid
Unhallowed thunders, harsh and dry,
And night by night the fitful gale
No sign of grace -- no hope of green,
For on this hut hath murder writ, ~~~ September in Australia ~~~
Grey Winter hath gone, like a wearisome guest,
September, the maid with the swift, silver feet!
The stream from its home in the hollow hill slips
The West, when it blows at the fall of the noon
We, having a secret to others unknown,
High places that knew of the gold and the white
On the tops of the hills, on the turreted cones --
Oh, season of changes -- of shadow and shine -- ~~~ Ghost Glen ~~~
"Shut your ears, stranger, or turn from Ghost Glen now,
To-night the north-easter goes travelling slowly,
For over the pitfall the moon-dew is thawing,
Whenever the storm-wind comes driven and driving,
And across a burnt body, as black as an adder,
"Oh, count your beads deftly," saith the grey mother, crooning
Ay, count your beads deftly, and keep your ways wary,
One starts, with a forehead wrinkled and livid,
The stranger, who came from the loved, the romantic
Who was left in the forest, shrunken and starkly,
Yea, cross your breast humbly and hold your breath tightly,
I tell you -- that bushman is braver than most men ~~~ Daphne ~~~
Daphne! Ladon's daughter, Daphne! Set thyself in silver light,
Came the yellow-tressed Far-darter -- came the god whose feet are fire,
Was there help for Ladon's daughter? Saturn's son is high and just: ~~~ The Warrigal ~~~
(* The Dingo, or Wild Dog of Australia.)
The warrigal's lair is pent in bare,
Through forest boles the storm-wind rolls,
In the gully-deeps the blind creek sleeps,
On the topmost peak of mountains bleak
The swift rains beat, and the thunders fleet
He roves through the lands of sultry sands, ~~~ Euroclydon ~~~
On the storm-cloven Cape
When the fruits of the year
And the wilted thyme,
On the wrinkled hills,
From ridge to ridge
The dead, dry lips
And all thro' the year,
Like one who sees
So I, that stand
Of the Beauty that grows ~~~ Araluen ~~~
(* A stream in the Braidwood district, New South Wales.)
River, myrtle rimmed, and set
Now that soft September lays
Cities soil the life with rust;
Now the month from shade to sun
Here are cushioned tufts and turns
On this spot wan Winter casts
Rather here abideth Spring,
Faithful friend beyond the main,
Ah, the days! -- the old, old theme,
Since we rested on these slopes
But, believe me, still mine eyes
Solace do I sometimes find
Araluen -- home of dreams,
Why should I still love it so,
Evermore of you I think,
Evermore in quiet lands, ~~~ At Euroma ~~~
(* Charles Harpur was buried at Euroma, N.S.W., but this poem refers to the grave of a stranger whose name is unknown.)
They built his mound of the rough, red ground,
The songs austere of the forests drear,
No human foot or paw of brute
Ah! in his life, had he mother or wife,
To: The List of Poetic Works of Henry Kendall
To: Australian Master Poets Menu
Not songs, like some, tormented and awry
With passion, but a cunning harmony
Of words and music caught from glen and height,
And lucid colours born of woodland light
And shining places where the sea-streams lie.
But this was when the heat of youth glowed white,
And since I've put the faded purpose by.
I have no faultless fruits to offer you
Who read this book; but certain syllables
Herein are borrowed from unfooted dells
And secret hollows dear to noontide dew;
And these at least, though far between and few,
May catch the sense like subtle forest spells.
Some notes that unto other lyres belong,
Stray echoes from the elder sons of song;
And think how from its neighbouring native sea
The pensive shell doth borrow melody.
I would not do the lordly masters wrong
By filching fair words from the shining throng
Whose music haunts me as the wind a tree.
Lo, when a stranger in soft Syrian glooms
Shot through with sunset, treads the cedar dells,
And hears the breezy ring of elfin bells
Far down be where the white-haired cataract booms,
He, faint with sweetness caught from forest smells,
Bears thence, unwitting, plunder of perfumes.
About with clouds and racks of rain,
And dry, dead leaves go whirling round
In rings of dust, and sigh like pain
Across the plain.
Of wild dominionship, doth keep
Strong hold of hollow straits of land,
And watery sounds are loud and deep
By gap and steep.
The wings of storm when day hath shut
Its eyes on mountains, flaw by flaw,
Fleet down by whistling box-tree butt,
Against the hut.
Far eastern cliffs start up, and take
Thick steaming vapours from a swamp
That lieth like a great blind lake,
Of face opaque.
About an English ruin clings --
What time the wan autumnal leaf
Faints, after many wanderings
On windy wings --
Is as a love in days austere,
Was never seen -- hath never been --
On slab or roof, deserted here
For many a year.
Whose songs are silvery syllables
That unto glimmering woods belong,
And deep, meandering mountain dells
By yellow wells.
And lifts the paw, and looks, and howls;
And here, in ruined forest vaults,
Abide dim, dark, death-featured owls,
Like monks in cowls.
And livid adders make their lair
In corners dank from lack of suns,
And out of foetid furrows stare
The growths that scare.
On bark and slabs that rot, and breed
Squat ugly things of deadly shade,
The scorpion, and the spiteful seed
Of centipede.
And flaming noontides, mute with heat,
Beneath the breathless, brazen sky,
Upon these rifted rafters beat
With torrid feet.
Doth carry past the bittern's boom,
The dingo's yell, the plover's wail,
While lumbering shadows start, and loom,
And hiss through gloom.
Cool-blossomed seasons marks the spot;
But chained to iron doom, I ween,
'Tis left, like skeleton, to rot
Where ruth is not.
With bloody fingers, hellish things;
And God will never visit it
With flower or leaf of sweet-faced Springs,
Or gentle wings.
And, behold, for repayment,
September comes in with the wind of the West
And the Spring in her raiment!
The ways of the frost have been filled of the flowers,
While the forest discovers
Wild wings, with the halo of hyaline hours,
And the music of lovers.
She glides, and she graces
The valleys of coolness, the slopes of the heat,
With her blossomy traces;
Sweet month, with a mouth that is made of a rose,
She lightens and lingers
In spots where the harp of the evening glows,
Attuned by her fingers.
In a darling old fashion;
And the day goeth down with a song on its lips,
Whose key-note is passion.
Far out in the fierce, bitter front of the sea
I stand, and remember
Dead things that were brothers and sisters of thee,
Resplendent September!
And beats on the beaches,
Is filled with a tender and tremulous tune
That touches and teaches;
The stories of Youth, of the burden of Time,
And the death of Devotion,
Come back with the wind, and are themes of the rhyme
In the waves of the ocean.
In the cool mountain-mosses,
May whisper together, September, alone
Of our loves and our losses!
One word for her beauty, and one for the grace
She gave to the hours;
And then we may kiss her, and suffer her face
To sleep with the flowers.
On the forehead of Morning
Now darken and quake, and the steps of the Night
Are heavy with warning.
Her voice in the distance is lofty and loud
Through the echoing gorges;
She hath hidden her eyes in a mantle of cloud,
And her feet in the surges.
Chief temples of thunder --
The gale, like a ghost, in the middle watch moans,
Gliding over and under.
The sea, flying white through the rack and the rain,
Leapeth wild at the forelands;
And the plover, whose cry is like passion with pain,
Complains in the moorlands.
September the splendid!
My song hath no music to mingle with thine,
And its burden is ended;
But thou, being born of the winds and the sun,
By mountain, by river,
Mayst lighten and listen, and loiter and run,
With thy voices for ever!
For the paths are grown over, untrodden by men now;
Shut your ears, stranger," saith the grey mother, crooning
Her sorcery runic, when sets the half-moon in.
But it never stoops down to that hollow unholy;
To-night it rolls loud on the ridges red-litten,
But it cannot abide in that forest, sin-smitten.
And, with never a body, two shadows stand sawing --
The wraiths of two sawyers (~step under and under~),
Who did a foul murder and were blackened with thunder!
Through the blood-spattered timber you may see the saw striving --
You may see the saw heaving, and falling, and heaving,
Whenever the sea-creek is chafing and grieving!
Sits the sprite of a sheep-dog (was ever sight sadder?)
For, as the dry thunder splits louder and faster,
This sprite of a sheep-dog howls for his master.
Her sorcery runic, when sets the half-moon in.
And well may she mutter, for the dark, hollow laughter
You will hear in the sawpits and the bloody logs after.
For the sake of the Saviour and sweet Mother Mary.
Pray for your peace in these perilous places,
And pray for the laying of horrible faces.
Aghast at the lightnings sudden and vivid;
One telleth, with curses, the gold that they drew there
(Ah! cross your breast humbly) from him whom they slew there:
Island that sleeps on the moaning Atlantic,
Leaving behind him a patient home, yearning
For the steps in the distance -- never returning;
Burnt by his slayers (so men have said, darkly),
With the half-crazy sheep-dog, who cowered beside there,
And yelled at the silence, and marvelled, and died there.
Or fly for your life from those shadows unsightly,
From the set staring features (cold, and so young, too),
And the death on the lips that a mother hath clung to.
Who even in daylight doth go through the Ghost Glen,
Although in that hollow, unholy and lonely,
He sees the dank sawpits and bloody logs only.
Take thy thoughts of fairest texture, weave them into words of white --
Weave the rhyme of rose-lipped Daphne, nymph of wooded stream and shade,
Flying love of bright Apollo, -- fleeting type of faultless maid!
She, when followed from the forelands by the lord of lyre and lute,
Sped towards far-singing waters, past deep gardens flushed with fruit;
Took the path against Peneus, panted by its yellow banks;
Turned, and looked, and flew the faster through grey-tufted thicket ranks;
Flashed amongst high flowered sedges: leaped across the brook, and ran
Down to where the fourfold shadows of a nether glade began;
There she dropped, like falling Hesper, heavy hair of radiant head
Hiding all the young abundance of her beauty's white and red.
On his lips the name of Daphne, in his eyes a great desire;
Fond, full lips of lord and lover, sad because of suit denied;
Clear, grey eyes made keen by passion, panting, pained, unsatisfied.
Here he turned, and there he halted, now he paused, and now he flew,
Swifter than his sister's arrows, through soft dells of dreamy dew.
Vext with gleams of Ladon's daughter, dashed along the son of Jove,
Fast upon flower-trammelled Daphne fleeting on from grove to grove;
Flights of seawind hard behind him, breaths of bleak and whistling straits;
Drifts of driving cloud above him, like a troop of fierce-eyed Fates!
So he reached the water-shallows; then he stayed his steps, and heard
Daphne drop upon the grasses, fluttering like a wounded bird.
Did he come between her beauty and the fierce Far-darter's lust?
As she lay, the helpless maiden, caught and bound in fast eclipse,
Did the lips of god drain pleasure from her sweet and swooning lips?
Now that these and all Love's treasures blushed, before the spoiler, bare,
Was the wrong that shall be nameless done, and seen, and suffered there?
No! for Zeus is King and Father. Weary nymph and fiery god,
Bend the knee alike before him -- he is kind, and he is lord!
Therefore sing how clear-browed Pallas -- Pallas, friend of prayerful maid,
Lifted dazzling Daphne lightly, bore her down the breathless glade,
Did the thing that Zeus commanded: so it came to pass that he
Who had chased a white-armed virgin, caught at her, and clasped a tree.
Black rocks at the gorge's mouth;
It is set in ways where Summer strays
With the sprites of flame and drouth;
But when the heights are touched with lights
Of hoar-frost, sleet, and shine,
His bed is made of the dead grass-blade
And the leaves of the windy pine.
Vext of the sea-driv'n rain;
And, up in the clift, through many a rift,
The voices of torrents complain.
The sad marsh-fowl and the lonely owl
Are heard in the fog-wreaths grey,
When the warrigal wakes, and listens, and takes
To the woods that shelter the prey.
And the silver, showery moon
Glides over the hills, and floats, and fills,
And dreams in the dark lagoon;
While halting hard by the station yard,
Aghast at the hut-flame nigh,
The warrigal yells -- and flats and fells
Are loud with his dismal cry.
The south wind sobs, and strays
Through moaning pine and turpentine,
And the rippling runnel ways;
And strong streams flow, and great mists go,
Where the warrigal starts to hear
The watch-dog's bark break sharp in the dark,
And flees like a phantom of fear.
On the wings of the fiery gale,
And down in the glen of pool and fen,
The wild gums whistle and wail,
As over the plains and past the chains
Of waterholes glimmering deep,
The warrigal flies from the shepherd's cries,
And the clamour of dogs and sheep.
He hunts in the iron range,
Untamed as surge of the far sea verge,
And fierce and fickle and strange.
The white man's track and the haunts of the black
He shuns, and shudders to see;
For his joy he tastes in lonely wastes
Where his mates are torrent and tree.
The bitter waves roll,
With the bergs of the Pole,
And the darks and the damps of the Northern Sea:
For the storm-cloven Cape
Is an alien Shape
With a fearful face; and it moans, and it stands
Outside all lands
Everlastingly!
Have been gathered in Spain,
And the Indian rain
Is rich on the evergreen lands of the Sun,
There comes to this Cape
To this alien Shape,
As the waters beat in and the echoes troop forth,
The Wind of the North,
Euroclydon!
And the patches past
Of the nettles cast
In the drift of the rift, and the broken rime,
Are tumbled and blown
To every zone
With the famished glede, and the plovers thinned
By this fourfold Wind --
This Wind sublime!
By starts and fits,
The wild Moon sits;
And the rindles fill and flash and fall
In the way of her light,
Through the straitened night,
When the sea-heralds clamour, and elves of the war,
In the torrents afar,
Hold festival!
The polar fires
On the naked spires,
With a foreign splendour, flit and flow;
And clough and cave
And architrave
Have a blood-coloured glamour on roof and on wall,
Like a nether hall
In the hells below!
Of the ledges, split
By the thunder fit
And the stress of the sprites of the forked flame,
Anon break out,
With a shriek and a shout,
Like a hard, bitter laughter, cracked and thin,
From a ghost with a sin
Too dark for a name!
The fierce seas run
From sun to sun,
Across the face of a vacant world!
And the Wind flies forth
From the wild, white North,
That shivers and harries the heart of things,
And shapes with its wings
A chaos uphurled!
A rebel light
In the thick of the night,
As he stumbles and staggers on summits afar --
Who looks to it still,
Up hill and hill,
With a steadfast hope (though the ways be deep,
And rough, and steep),
Like a steadfast star --
On the outermost peaks
Of peril, with cheeks
Blue with the salts of a frosty sea,
Have learnt to wait,
With an eye elate
And a heart intent, for the fuller blaze
Of the Beauty that rays
Like a glimpse for me --
Whenever I hear
The winds of Fear
From the tops and the bases of barrenness call;
And the duplicate lore
Which I learn evermore,
Is of Harmony filling and rounding the Storm,
And the marvellous Form
That governs all!
Deep amongst unfooted dells --
Daughter of grey hills of wet,
Born by mossed and yellow wells;
Tender hands on thee and thine,
Let me think of blue-eyed days,
Star-like flowers and leaves of shine!
Water banks are cool and sweet;
River, tired of noise and dust,
Here I come to rest my feet.
Fleets and sings supremest songs,
Now the wilful wood-winds run
Through the tangled cedar throngs.
Where the sumptuous noontide lies:
Here are seen by flags and ferns
Summer's large, luxurious eyes.
Eyes of ruth, and spares its green
From his bitter sea-nursed blasts,
Spears of rain and hailstones keen.
Lady of a lovely land,
Dear to leaf and fluttering wing,
Deep in blooms -- by breezes fanned.
Friend that time nor change makes cold;
Now, like ghosts, return again
Pallid, perished days of old.
Never stale, but never new,
Floating like a pleasant dream,
Back to me and back to you.
Seasons fierce have beaten down
Ardent loves and blossoming hopes --
Loves that lift and hopes that crown.
Often fill with light that springs
From divinity, which lies
Ever at the heart of things.
Where you used to hear with me
Songs of stream and forest wind,
Tones of wave and harp-like tree.
Fairer for its flowerful glade
Than the face of Persian streams
Or the slopes of Syrian shade;
Friend and brother far away?
Ask the winds that come and go,
What hath brought me here to-day.
When the leaves begin to fall,
Where our river breaks its brink,
And a rest is over all.
Friend of mine beyond the sea,
Memory comes with cunning hands,
Stays, and paints your face for me.
By the dip of a desert dell,
Where all things sweet are killed by the heat,
And scattered o'er flat and fell;
In a burning zone they left him alone,
Past the uttermost western plain,
And the nightfall dim heard his funeral hymn
In the voices of wind and rain.
And the echoes of clift and cave,
When the dark is keen where the storm hath been,
Fleet over the far-away grave.
And through the days when the torrid rays
Strike down on a coppery gloom,
Some spirit grieves in the perished leaves,
Whose theme is that desolate tomb.
Halts now where the stranger sleeps;
But cloud and star his fellows are,
And the rain that sobs and weeps.
The dingo yells by the far iron fells,
The plover is loud in the range,
But they never come near to the slumberer here,
Whose rest is a rest without change.
To wait for his step on the floor?
Did beauty wax dim while watching for him
Who passed through the threshold no more?
Doth it trouble his head? He is one with the dead;
He lies by the alien streams;
And sweeter than sleep is death that is deep
And unvexed by the lordship of dreams.