Poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon Part 1

Poems.

by Adam Lindsay Gordon.

IN MEMORIAM.

(A. L. Gordon.)

At rest! Hard by the margin of that sea Whose sounds are mingled with his n.o.ble verse, Now lies the sh.e.l.l that never more will house The fine, strong spirit of my gifted friend.

Yea, he who flashed upon us suddenly, A s.h.i.+ning soul with syllables of fire, Who sang the first great songs these lands can claim To be their own; the one who did not seem To know what royal place awaited him Within the Temple of the Beautiful, Has pa.s.sed away; and we who knew him, sit Aghast in darkness, dumb with that great grief, Whose stature yet we cannot comprehend; While over yonder churchyard, hea.r.s.ed with pines, The night-wind sings its immemorial hymn, And sobs above a newly-covered grave.

The bard, the scholar, and the man who lived That frank, that open-hearted life which keeps The splendid fire of English chivalry From dying out; the one who never wronged A fellow-man; the faithful friend who judged The many, anxious to be loved of him, By what he saw, and not by what he heard, As lesser spirits do; the brave great soul That never told a lie, or turned aside To fly from danger; he, I say, was one Of that bright company this sin-stained world Can ill afford to lose.

They did not know, The hundreds who had read his st.u.r.dy verse, And revelled over ringing major notes, The mournful meaning of the undersong Which runs through all he wrote, and often takes The deep autumnal, half-prophetic tone Of forest winds in March; nor did they think That on that healthy-hearted man there lay The wild specific curse which seems to cling For ever to the Poet's twofold life!

To Adam Lindsay Gordon, I who laid Two years ago on Lionel Michael's grave A tender leaf of my regard; yea I, Who culled a garland from the flowers of song To place where Harpur sleeps; I, left alone, The sad disciple of a s.h.i.+ning band Now gone! to Adam Lindsay Gordon's name I dedicate these lines; and if 'tis true That, past the darkness of the grave, the soul Becomes omniscient, then the bard may stoop From his high seat to take the offering, And read it with a sigh for human friends, In human bonds, and gray with human griefs.

And having wove and proffered this poor wreath, I stand to-day as lone as he who saw At nightfall through the glimmering moony mists, The last of Arthur on the wailing mere, And strained in vain to hear the going voice.

Henry Kendall.

PREFACE.

The poems of Gordon have an interest beyond the mere personal one which his friends attach to his name. Written, as they were, at odd times and leisure moments of a stirring and adventurous life, it is not to be wondered at if they are unequal or unfinished. The astonishment of those who knew the man, and can gauge the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct, is that such work was ever produced here at all.

Intensely nervous, and feeling much of that shame at the exercise of the higher intelligence which besets those who are known to be renowned in field sports, Gordon produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on sc.r.a.ps of paper, and sent them anonymously to magazines. It was not until he discovered one morning that everybody knew a couplet or two of "How we Beat the Favourite" that he consented to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a versemaker. The success of his republished "collected" poems gave him courage, and the unreserved praise which greeted "Bush Ballads" should have urged him to forget or to conquer those evil promptings which, unhappily, brought about his untimely death.

Adam Lindsay Gordon was the son of an officer in the English army, and was educated at Woolwich, in order that he might follow the profession of his family. At the time when he was a cadet there was no sign of either of the two great wars which were about to call forth the strength of English arms, and, like many other men of his day, he quitted his prospects of service and emigrated. He went to South Australia and started as a sheep farmer. His efforts were attended with failure. He lost his capital, and, owning nothing but a love for horsemans.h.i.+p and a head full of Browning and Sh.e.l.ley, plunged into the varied life which gold-mining, "overlanding", and cattle-driving affords. From this experience he emerged to light in Melbourne as the best amateur steeplechase rider in the colonies. The victory he won for Major Baker in 1868, when he rode Babbler for the Cup Steeplechase, made him popular, and the almost simultaneous publication of his last volume of poems gave him welcome entrance to the houses of all who had pretensions to literary taste. The reputation of the book spread to England, and Major Whyte Melville did not disdain to place the lines of the das.h.i.+ng Australian author at the head of his own das.h.i.+ng descriptions of sporting scenery. Unhappily, the melancholy which Gordon's friends had with pain observed increased daily, and in the full flood of his success, with congratulations pouring upon him from every side, he was found dead in the heather near his home with a bullet from his own rifle in his brain.

I do not propose to criticise the volumes which these few lines of preface introduce to the reader. The influence of Browning and of Swinburne upon the writer's taste is plain. There is plainly visible also, however, a keen sense for natural beauty and a manly admiration for healthy living. If in "Ashtaroth" and "Bellona" we recognise the swing of a familiar metre, in such poems as "The Sick Stockrider" we perceive the genuine poetic instinct united to a very clear perception of the loveliness of duty and of labour.

"'Twas merry in the glowing morn, among the gleaming gra.s.s, To wander as we've wandered many a mile, And blow the cool tobacco cloud, and watch the white wreaths pa.s.s, Sitting loosely in the saddle all the while; 'Twas merry 'mid the blackwoods, when we spied the station roofs, To wheel the wild scrub cattle at the yard, With a running fire of stockwhips and a fiery run of hoofs, Oh! the hardest day was never then too hard!

"Aye! we had a glorious gallop after 'Starlight' and his gang, When they bolted from Sylvester's on the flat; How the sun-dried reed-beds crackled, how the flint-strewn ranges rang To the strokes of 'Mountaineer' and 'Acrobat'; Hard behind them in the timber, harder still across the heath, Close behind them through the tea-tree scrub we dashed; And the golden-tinted fern leaves, how they rustled underneath!

And the honeysuckle osiers, how they crash'd!"

This is genuine. There is no "poetic evolution from the depths of internal consciousness" here. The writer has ridden his ride as well as written it.

The student of these unpretending volumes will be repaid for his labour.

He will find in them something very like the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry. In historic Europe, where every rood of ground is hallowed in legend and in song, the least imaginative can find food for sad and sweet reflection. When strolling at noon down an English country lane, lounging at sunset by some ruined chapel on the margin of an Irish lake, or watching the mists of morning unveil Ben Lomond, we feel all the charm which springs from a.s.sociation with the past. Soothed, saddened, and cheered by turns, we partake of the varied moods which belong not so much to ourselves as to the dead men who, in old days, sung, suffered, or conquered in the scenes which we survey.

But this our native or adopted land has no past, no story. No poet speaks to us. Do we need a poet to interpret Nature's teachings, we must look into our own hearts, if perchance we may find a poet there.

What is the dominant note of Australian scenery? That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry--Weird Melancholy. A poem like "L'Allegro" could never be written by an Australian. It is too airy, too sweet, too freshly happy. The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying year is mourned, the falling leaves drop lightly on his bier. In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts.

From the melancholy gums strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly.

Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s. Flights of white c.o.c.katoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, from out the bottomless depth of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in form like monstrous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from out the ooze. From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons. All is fear-inspiring and gloomy.

No bright fancies are linked with the memories of the mountains.

Hopeless explorers have named them out of their sufferings--Mount Misery, Mount Dreadful, Mount Despair. As when among sylvan scenes in places

"Made green with the running of rivers, And gracious with temperate air,"

the soul is soothed and satisfied, so, placed before the frightful grandeur of these barren hills, it drinks in their sentiment of defiant ferocity, and is steeped in bitterness.

Australia has rightly been named the Land of the Dawning. Wrapped in the midst of early morning, her history looms vague and gigantic. The lonely horseman riding between the moonlight and the day sees vast shadows creeping across the shelterless and silent plains, hears strange noises in the primeval forest, where flourishes a vegetation long dead in other lands, and feels, despite his fortune, that the trim utilitarian civilisation which bred him shrinks into insignificance beside the contemptuous grandeur of forest and ranges coeval with an age in which European scientists have cradled his own race.

There is a poem in every form of tree or flower, but the poetry which lives in the trees and flowers of Australia differs from those of other countries. Europe is the home of knightly song, of bright deeds and clear morning thought. Asia sinks beneath the weighty recollections of her past magnificence, as the Suttee sinks, jewel burdened, upon the corpse of dread grandeur, destructive even in its death. America swiftly hurries on her way, rapid, glittering, insatiable even as one of her own giant waterfalls. From the jungles of Africa, and the creeper-tangled groves of the Islands of the South, arise, from the glowing hearts of a thousand flowers, heavy and intoxicating odours--the Upas-poison which dwells in barbaric sensuality. In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land of monstrosities.

He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness. Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness, he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the hieroglyphics of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue. The phantasmagoria of that wild dreamland termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand better than all the bountiful richness of Egypt.

Marcus Clarke.

GENERAL CONTENTS.

[The poems are listed by alphabetical order.]

In Memoriam. By Henry Kendall.

Preface. By Marcus Clarke.

A Basket of Flowers A Dedication A Fragment "After the Quarrel"

A Hunting Song A Legend of Madrid An Exile's Farewell Ars Longa Ashtaroth: A Dramatic Lyric A Song of Autumn Banker's Dream Bellona Borrow'd Plumes By Flood and Field By Wood and Wold Cito Pede Preterit Aetas Confiteor Credat Judaeus Apella Cui Bono Delilah De Te "Discontent"

Doubtful Dreams "Early Adieux"

"Exeunt"

Ex Fumo Dare Lucem Fauconshawe Finis Exoptatus Fragmentary Scenes from the Road to Avernus From Lightning and Tempest From the Wreck Gone Hippodromania; or, Whiffs from the Pipe How we Beat the Favourite "In the Garden"

In Utrumque Paratus Laudamus Lex Talionis No Name Pastor c.u.m Podas Okus Potters' Clay Quare Fatigasti Rippling Water Sunlight on the Sea "Ten Paces Off"

The Fields of Coleraine The Last Leap "The Old Leaven"

The Rhyme of Joyous Garde The Roll of the Kettledrum; or, The Lay of the Last Charger The Romance of Britomarte The Sick Stockrider The Song of the Surf The Swimmer The Three Friends Thick-headed Thoughts Thora's Song To a Proud Beauty To My Sister "Two Exhortations"

Unshriven Visions in the Smoke Whisperings in Wattle-Boughs Wolf and Hound Wormwood and Nightshade Ye Wearie Wayfarer, hys Ballad Zu der edlen Yagd

SEA SPRAY AND SMOKE DRIFT

Podas Okus

Am I waking? Was I sleeping?

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