An Anthology of Australian Verse Part 21

Evening.

Give over! All the valleys in sight Fill, fill with the rising tide of night; While the sunset with gold-dust bridges The black-ravined ridges, Whose mighty muscles curve in its light.

In our weary climb, while night dyes deep, Down the broken and stony steep, How our jaded bodies are shaken By each step in half-blindness taken -- One's thoughts lie heaped like brutes asleep.

Open the door of the dismal hut, Silence and darkness lone were shut In it, as a tidal pool, until returning Night drowns the land, -- no ember's burning, -- One is too weary the food to cut.

Body and soul with every blow, Wasted for ever, and who will know, Where, past this mountained night of toiling, Red life in its thousand veins is boiling, Of chips scattered on the mountain's brow?

Home-woe

The wreckage of some name-forgotten barque, Half-buried by the dolorous sh.o.r.e; Whereto the living waters never more Their urgent billows pour; But the salt spray can reach and cark --

So lies my spirit, lonely and forlorn, On Being's strange and perilous strand.

And rusted sword and fleshless hand Point from the smothering sand; And anchor chainless and out-worn.

But o'er what Deep, unconquered and uncharted, And steering by what vanished star; And where my dim-imagined consorts are, Or hidden harbour far, From whence my sails, unblessed, departed,

Can memory, nor still intuition teach.

And so I watch with alien eyes This World's remote and unremembered skies; While around me weary rise The babblings of a foreign speech.

A Ballad of the last King of Thule

There was a King of Thule Whom a Witch-wife stole at birth; In a country known but newly, All under the dumb, huge Earth.

That King's in a Forest toiling; And he never the green sward delves But he sees all his green waves boiling Over his sands and shelves;

In these sunsets vast and fiery, In these dawns divine he sees Hy-Brasil, Mannan and Eire, And the Isle of Appletrees;

He watches, heart-still and breathless, The clouds through the deep day trailing, As the white-winged vessels gathered, Into his harbours sailing;

Ranked Ibis and lazy Eagles In the great blue flame may rise, But ne'er Sea-mew or Solan beating Up through their grey low skies;

When the storm-led fires are breaking, Great waves of the molten night, Deep in his eyes comes aching The icy Boreal Light.

O, lost King, and O, people perished, Your Thule has grown one grave!

Unvisited as uncherished, Save by the wandering wave!

The billows burst in his doorways, The spray swoops over his walls! -- O, his banners that throb dishonoured O'er arms that hide in his halls --

Deserved is your desolation! -- Why could you not stir and save The last-born heir of your nation? -- Sold into the South, a slave

Till he dies, and is buried duly In the hot Australian earth -- The lorn, lost King of Thule, Whom a Witch-wife stole at birth.

A Fragment

But, under all, my heart believes the day Was not diviner over Athens, nor The West wind sweeter thro' the Cyclades Than here and now; and from the altar of To-day The eloquent, quick tongues of flame uprise As fervid, if not unfaltering as of old, And life atones with speed and plenitude For coa.r.s.er texture. Our poor present will, Far in the brooding future, make a past Full of the morning's music still, and starred With great tears s.h.i.+ning on the eyelids' eaves Of our immortal faces yearning t'wards the sun.

Andrew Barton Paterson (`Banjo').

The Daylight is Dying

The daylight is dying Away in the west, The wild birds are flying In silence to rest; In leaf.a.ge and frondage Where shadows are deep, They pa.s.s to their bondage -- The kingdom of sleep.

And watched in their sleeping By stars in the height, They rest in your keeping, Oh, wonderful night.

When night doth her glories Of stars.h.i.+ne unfold, 'Tis then that the stories Of bushland are told.

Unnumbered I hold them In memories bright, But who could unfold them, Or read them aright?

Beyond all denials The stars in their glories The breeze in the myalls Are part of these stories.

The waving of gra.s.ses, The song of the river That sings as it pa.s.ses For ever and ever, The hobble-chains' rattle, The calling of birds, The lowing of cattle Must blend with the words.

Without these, indeed, you Would find it ere long, As though I should read you The words of a song That lamely would linger When lacking the rune, The voice of the singer, The lilt of the tune.

But, as one half-hearing An old-time refrain, With memory clearing, Recalls it again, These tales, roughly wrought of The bush and its ways, May call back a thought of The wandering days.

And, blending with each In the mem'ries that throng, There haply shall reach You some echo of song.

Clancy of the Overflow

I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago, He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him, Just "on spec", addressed as follows, "Clancy, of The Overflow".

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected, (And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar) 'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: "Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are."

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the Western drovers go; As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars, And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.