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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=408406" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Glen of Arrawatta</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">A SKY of wind! And while these fitful gusts<br>Are beating round the windows in the cold,<br>With sullen sobs of rain, behold I shape<br>A settler’s story of the wild old times:<br>One told by camp-fires when the station drays<br>Were housed and hidden, forty years ago;<br>While swarthy drivers smoked their pipes, and drew,<br>And crowded round the friendly gleaming flame<br>That lured the dingo, howling, from his caves,<br>And brought sharp sudden feet about the brakes.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A tale of Love and Death. And shall I say<br>A tale of love in death—for all the patient eyes<br>That gathered darkness, watching for a son<br>And brother, never dreaming of the fate—<br>The fearful fate he met alone, unknown,<br>Within the ruthless Australasian wastes?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">For in a far-off, sultry summer, rimmed<br>With thundercloud and red with forest fires,<br>All day, by ways uncouth and ledges rude,<br>The wild men held upon a stranger’s trail,<br>Which ran against the rivers and athwart<br>The gorges of the deep blue western hills.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And when a cloudy sunset, like the flame<br>In windy evenings on the Plains of Thirst<br>Beyond the dead banks of the far Barcoo,<br>Lay heavy down the topmost peaks, they came,<br>With pent-in breath and stealthy steps, and crouched,<br>Like snakes, amongst the grasses, till the night<br>Had covered face from face, and thrown the gloom<br>Of many shadows on the front of things.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">There, in the shelter of a nameless glen,<br>Fenced round by cedars and the tangled growths<br>Of blackwood, stained with brown and shot with grey,<br>The jaded white man built his fire, and turned<br>His horse adrift amongst the water-pools<br>That trickled underneath the yellow leaves<br>And made a pleasant murmur, like the brooks<br>Of England through the sweet autumnal noons.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then, after he had slaked his thirst and used<br>The forest fare, for which a healthful day<br>Of mountain life had brought a zest, he took<br>His axe, and shaped with boughs and wattle-forks<br>A wurley, fashioned like a bushman’s roof:<br>The door brought out athwart the strenuous flame<br>The back thatched in against a rising wind.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And while the sturdy hatchet filled the clifts<br>With sounds unknown, the immemorial haunts<br>Of echoes sent their lonely dwellers forth,<br>Who lived a life of wonder: flying round<br>And round the glen—what time the kangaroo<br>Leapt from his lair and huddled with the bats—<br>Far scattering down the wildly startled fells.<br>Then came the doleful owl; and evermore<br>The bleak morass gave out the bittern’s call,<br>The plover’s cry, and many a fitful wail<br>Of chilly omen, falling on the ear<br>Like those cold flaws of wind that come and go<br>An hour before the break of day.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Anon<br>The stranger held from toil, and, settling down,<br>He drew rough solace from his well-filled pipe,<br>And smoked into the night, revolving there<br>The primal questions of a squatter’s life;<br>For in the flats, a short day’s journey past<br>His present camp, his station yards were kept,<br>With many a lodge and paddock jutting forth<br>Across the heart of unnamed prairie-lands,<br>Now loud with bleating and the cattle bells,<br>And misty with the hut-fire’s daily smoke.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Wide spreading flats, and western spurs of hills<br>That dipped to plains of dim perpetual blue;<br>Bold summits set against the thunder heaps;<br>And slopes behacked and crushed by battling kine,<br>Where now the furious tumult of their feet<br>Gives back the dust, and up from glen and brake<br>Evokes fierce clamour, and becomes indeed<br>A token of the squatter’s daring life,<br>Which, growing inland—growing year by year—<br>Doth set us thinking in these latter days,<br>And makes one ponder of the lonely lands<br>Beyond the lonely tracks of Burke and Wills,<br>Where, when the wandering Stuart fixed his camps<br>In central wastes, afar from any home<br>Or haunt of man, and in the changeless midst<br>Of sullen deserts and the footless miles<br>Of sultry silence, all the ways about<br>Grew strangely vocal, and a marvellous noise<br>Became the wonder of the waxing glooms.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Now, after darkness, like a mighty spell<br>Amongst the hills and dim, dispeopled dells,<br>Had brought a stillness to the soul of things,<br>It came to pass that, from the secret depths<br>Of dripping gorges, many a runnel-voice<br>Came, mellowed with the silence, and remained<br>About the caves, a sweet though alien sound;<br>Now rising ever, like a fervent flute<br>In moony evenings, when the theme is love;<br>Now falling, as ye hear the Sunday bells<br>While hastening fieldward from the gleaming town.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then fell a softer mood, and memory paused<br>With faithful love, amidst the sainted shrines<br>Of youth and passion in the valleys past<br>Of dear delights which never grow again.<br>And if the stranger (who had left behind<br>Far anxious homesteads in a wave-swept isle,<br>To face a fierce sea-circle day by day,<br>And hear at night the dark Atlantic’s moan)<br>Now took a hope and planned a swift return,<br>With wealth and health and with a youth unspent,<br>To those sweet ones that stayed with want at home,<br>Say who shall blame him—though the years are long,<br>And life is hard, and waiting makes the heart grow old?</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Thus passed the time, until the moon serene<br>Stood over high dominion like a dream<br>Of peace: within the white, transfigured woods;<br>And o’er the vast dew-dripping wilderness<br>Of slopes illumined with her silent fires.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Then, far beyond the home of pale red leaves<br>And silver sluices, and the shining stems<br>Of runnel blooms, the dreamy wanderer saw,<br>The wilder for the vision of the moon,<br>Stark desolations and a waste of plain,<br>All smit by flame and broken with the storms;<br>Black ghosts of trees, and sapless trunks that stood<br>Harsh hollow channels of the fiery noise,<br>Which ran from bole to bole a year before,<br>And grew with ruin, and was like, indeed,<br>The roar of mighty winds with wintering streams<br>That foam about the limits of the land<br>And mix their swiftness with the flying seas.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Now, when the man had turned his face about<br>To take his rest, behold the gem-like eyes<br>Of ambushed wild things stared from bole and brake<br>With dumb amaze and faint-recurring glance,<br>And fear anon that drove them down the brush;<br>While from his den the dingo, like a scout<br>In sheltered ways, crept out and cowered near<br>To sniff the tokens of the stranger’s feast<br>And marvel at the shadows of the flame.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Thereafter grew the wind; and chafing depths<br>In distant waters sent a troubled cry<br>Across the slumb’rous forest; and the chill<br>Of coming rain was on the sleeper’s brow,<br>When, flat as reptiles hutted in the scrub,<br>A deadly crescent crawled to where he lay—<br>A band of fierce, fantastic savages<br>That, starting naked round the faded fire,<br>With sudden spears and swift terrific yells,<br>Came bounding wildly at the white man’s head,<br>And faced him, staring like a dream of Hell!</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Here let me pass! I would not stay to tell<br>Of hopeless struggles under crushing blows;<br>Of how the surging fiends, with thickening strokes,<br>Howled round the stranger till they drained his strength;<br>How Love and Life stood face to face with Hate<br>And Death; and then how Death was left alone<br>With Night and Silence in the sobbing rains.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">So, after many moons, the searchers found<br>The body mouldering in the mouldering dell<br>Amidst the fungi and the bleaching leaves,<br>And buried it, and raised a stony mound<br>Which took the mosses. Then the place became<br>The haunt of fearful legends and the lair<br>Of bats and adders.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">There he lies and sleeps<br>From year to year—in soft Australian nights,<br>And through the furnaced noons, and in the times<br>Of wind and wet! Yet never mourner comes<br>To drop upon that grave the Christian’s tear<br>Or pluck the foul, dank weeds of death away.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">But while the English autumn filled her lap<br>With faded gold, and while the reapers cooled<br>Their flame-red faces in the clover grass,<br>They looked for him at home: and when the frost<br>Had made a silence in the mourning lanes<br>And cooped the farmers by December fires,<br>They looked for him at home: and through the days<br>Which brought about the million-coloured Spring,<br>With moon-like splendours, in the garden plots,<br>They looked for him at home: while Summer danced,<br>A shining singer, through the tasselled corn,<br>They looked for him at home. From sun to sun<br>They waited. Season after season went,<br>And Memory wept upon the lonely moors,<br>And hope grew voiceless, and the watchers passed,<br>Like shadows, one by one away.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And he<br>Whose fate was hidden under forest leaves<br>And in the darkness of untrodden dells<br>Became a marvel. Often by the hearths<br>In winter nights, and when the wind was wild<br>Outside the casements, children heard the tale<br>Of how he left their native vales behind<br>(Where he had been a child himself) to shape<br>New fortunes for his father’s fallen house;<br>Of how he struggled—how his name became,<br>By fine devotion and unselfish zeal,<br>A name of beauty in a selfish land;<br>And then of how the aching hours went by,<br>With patient listeners praying for the step<br>Which never crossed the floor again. So passed<br>The tale to children; but the bitter end<br>Remained a wonder, like the unknown grave,<br>Alone with God and Silence in the hills.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Henry+Kendall">Henry Kendall</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=408406" data-title="The Glen of Arrawatta de Henry Kendall" data-description="A SKY of wind! And while these fitful gusts
Are beating round the windows in the cold,
With sullen sobs of rain, behold I shape
A settler’s story of the wild old times:
One told by camp-fires when the station drays
Were housed and hidden, forty ..."></div>
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