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A Death in the Bush

The hut was built of bark and shrunken slabs,
That wore the marks of many rains, and showed
Dry flaws wherein had crept and nestled rot.
Moreover, round the bases of the bark
Were left the tracks of flying forest fires,
As you may see them on the lower bole
Of every elder of the native woods.

For, ere the early settlers came and stocked
These wilds with sheep and kine, the grasses grew
So that they took the passing pilgrim in
And whelmed him, like a running sea, from sight.

And therefore, through the fiercer summer months,
While all the swamps were rotten; while the flats
Were baked and broken; when the clayey rifts
Yawned wide, half-choked with drifted herbage past,
Spontaneous flames would burst from thence and race
Across the prairies all day long.

At night
The winds were up, and then, with four-fold speed
A harsh gigantic growth of smoke and fire
Would roar along the bottoms, in the wake
Of fainting flocks of parrots, wallaroos,
And 'wildered wild things, scattering right and left,
For safety vague, throughout the general gloom.

Anon the nearer hillside-growing trees
Would take the surges; thus from bough to bough
Was borne the flaming terror! Bole and spire,
Rank after rank, now pillared, ringed, and rolled
In blinding blaze, stood out against the dead,
Down-smothered dark, for fifty leagues away.

For fifty leagues; and when the winds were strong
For fifty more! But in the olden time
These fires were counted as the harbingers
Of life-essential storms, since out of smoke
And heat there came across the midnight ways
Abundant comfort, with upgathered clouds
And runnels babbling of a plenteous fall.

So comes the southern gale at evenfall
(The swift brick-fielder of the local folk),
About the streets of Sydney, when the dust
Lies burnt on glaring windows, and the men
Look forth from doors of drouth and drink the change
With thirsty haste, and that most thankful cry
Of 'Here it is - the cool, bright, blessed rain!'

The hut, I say, was built of bark and slabs,
And stood, the centre of a clearing, hemmed
By hurdle-yards, and ancients of the blacks;
These moped about their lazy fires, and sang
Wild ditties of the old days, with a sound
Of sorrow, like an everlasting wind
Which mingled with the echoes of the noon
And moaned amongst the noises of the night.

From thence a cattle track, with link to link,
Ran off against the fish-pools to the gap
Which sets you face to face with gleaming miles
Of broad Orara*, winding in amongst
Black, barren ridges, where the nether spurs
Are fenced about by cotton scrub, and grass
Blue-bitten with the salt of many droughts.

'Twas here the shepherd housed him every night,
And faced the prospect like a patient soul,
Borne up by some vague hope of better days,
And God's fine blessing in his faithful wife,
Until the humour of his malady
Took cunning changes from the good to bad,
And laid him lastly on a bed of death.

Two months thereafter, when the summer heat
Had roused the serpent from his rotten lair,
And made a noise of locusts in the boughs,
It came to this, that as the blood-red sun
Of one fierce day of many slanted down
Obliquely past the nether jags of peaks
And gulfs of mist, the tardy night came vexed
By belted clouds and scuds that wheeled and whirled
To left and right about the brazen clifts
Of ridges, rigid with a leaden gloom.

Then took the cattle to the forest camps
With vacant terror, and the hustled sheep
Stood dumb against the hurdles, even like
A fallen patch of shadowed mountain snow;
And ever through the curlew's call afar,
The storm grew on, while round the stinted slabs
Sharp snaps and hisses came, and went, and came,
The huddled tokens of a mighty blast
Which ran with an exceeding bitter cry
Across the tumbled fragments of the hills,
And through the sluices of the gorge and glen.

So, therefore, all about the shepherd's hut
That space was mute, save when the fastened dog,
Without a kennel, caught a passing glimpse
Of firelight moving through the lighted chinks,
For then he knew the hints of warmth within,
And stood and set his great pathetic eyes,
In wind and wet, imploring to be loosed.

Not often now the watcher left the couch
Of him she watched, since in his fitful sleep
His lips would stir to wayward themes, and close
With bodeful catches. Once she moved away,
Half-deafened by terrific claps, and stooped
And looked without - to see a pillar dim
Of gathered gusts and fiery rain.

Anon
The sick man woke, and, startled by the noise,
Stared round the room with dull, delirious sight,
At this wild thing and that: for through his eyes
The place took fearful shapes, and fever showed
Strange crosswise lights about his pillow-head.
He, catching there at some phantasmic help,
Sat upright on the bolster with a cry
Of 'Where is Jesus? It is bitter cold!'
And then, because the thunder-calls outside
Were mixed for him with slanders of the past,
He called his weeping wife by name, and said,
'Come closer, darling! We shall speed away
Across the seas, and seek some mountain home
Shut in from liars and the wicked words
That track us day and night and night and day.'
So waned the sad refrain. And those poor lips,
Whose latest phrases were for peace, grew mute,
And into everlasting silence passed.

As fares a swimmer who hath lost his breath
In 'wildering seas afar from any help -
Who, fronting Death, can never realize
The dreadful Presence, but is prone to clutch
At every weed upon the weltering wave -
So fared the watcher, poring o'er the last
Of him she loved, with dazed and stupid stare;
Half conscious of the sudden loss and lack
Of all that bound her life, but yet without
The power to take her mighty sorrow in.

Then came a patch or two of starry sky,
And through a reef of cloven thunder-cloud
The soft moon looked: a patient face beyond
The fierce impatient shadows of the slopes
And the harsh voices of the broken hills!
A patient face, and one which came and wrought
A lovely silence, like a silver mist,
Across the rainy relics of the storm.

For in the breaks and pauses of her light
The gale died out in gusts: yet, evermore
About the roof-tree on the dripping eaves,
The damp wind loitered, and a fitful drift
Sloped through the silent curtains, and athwart
The dead.

There, when the glare had dropped behind
A mighty ridge of gloom, the woman turned
And sat in darkness, face to face with God,
And said, 'I know,' she said, 'that Thou art wise;
That when we build and hope, and hope and build,
And see our best things fall, it comes to pass
For evermore that we must turn to Thee!
And therefore, now, because I cannot find
The faintest token of Divinity
In this my latest sorrow, let Thy light
Inform mine eyes, so I may learn to look
On something past the sight which shuts and blinds
And seems to drive me wholly, Lord, from Thee.'

Now waned the moon beyond complaining depths,
And as the dawn looked forth from showery woods
(Whereon had dropped a hint of red and gold)
There went about the crooked cavern-eaves
Low flute-like echoes, with a noise of wings,
And waters flying down far-hidden fells.
Then might be seen the solitary owl
Perched in the clefts, scared at the coming light,
And staring outward (like a sea-shelled thing
Chased to his cover by some bright, fierce foe),
As at a monster in the middle waste.

At last the great kingfisher came, and called
Across the hollows, loud with early whips,
And lighted, laughing, on the shepherd's hut,
And roused the widow from a swoon like death.

This day, and after it was noised abroad
By blacks, and straggling horsemen on the roads,
That he was dead 'who had been sick so long',
There flocked a troop from far-surrounding runs,
To see their neighbour, and to bury him;
And men who had forgotten how to cry
(Rough, flinty fellows of the native bush)
Now learned the bitter way, beholding there
The wasted shadow of an iron frame,
Brought down so low by years of fearful pain,
And marking, too, the woman's gentle face,
And all the pathos in her moaned reply
Of 'Masters, we have lived in better days.'

One stooped - a stockman from the nearer hills -
To loose his wallet-strings, from whence he took
A bag of tea, and laid it on her lap;
Then sobbing, 'God will help you, missus, yet,'
He sought his horse, with most bewildered eyes,
And, spurring, swiftly galloped down the glen.

Where black Orara nightly chafes his brink,
Midway between lamenting lines of oak
And Warra's Gap, the shepherd's grave was built;
And there the wild dog pauses, in the midst
Of moonless watches, howling through the gloom
At hopeless shadows flitting to and fro,
What time the east wind hums his darkest hymn,
And rains beat heavy on the ruined leaf.

There, while the autumn in the cedar trees
Sat cooped about by cloudy evergreens
The widow sojourned on the silent road,
And mutely faced the barren mound, and plucked
A straggling shrub from thence, and passed away,
Heart-broken, on to Sydney, where she took
Her passage in an English vessel bound
To London, for her home of other years.

At rest! Not near, with Sorrow on his grave,
And roses quickened into beauty - wrapt
In all the pathos of perennial bloom;
But far from these, beneath the fretful clay
Of lands within the lone perpetual cry
Of hermit plovers and the night-like oaks,
All moaning for the peace which never comes.

At rest! And she who sits and waits behind
Is in the shadows; but her faith is sure,
And ~one~ fine promise of the coming days
Is breaking, like a blessed morning, far
On hills that 'slope through darkness up to God.'

poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Glen of Arrawatta

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 years ago;
While swarthy drivers smoked their pipes, and drew,
And crowded round the friendly gleaming flame
That lured the dingo, howling, from his caves,
And brought sharp sudden feet about the brakes.

A tale of Love and Death. And shall I say
A tale of love in death—for all the patient eyes
That gathered darkness, watching for a son
And brother, never dreaming of the fate—
The fearful fate he met alone, unknown,
Within the ruthless Australasian wastes?

For in a far-off, sultry summer, rimmed
With thundercloud and red with forest fires,
All day, by ways uncouth and ledges rude,
The wild men held upon a stranger’s trail,
Which ran against the rivers and athwart
The gorges of the deep blue western hills.

And when a cloudy sunset, like the flame
In windy evenings on the Plains of Thirst
Beyond the dead banks of the far Barcoo,
Lay heavy down the topmost peaks, they came,
With pent-in breath and stealthy steps, and crouched,
Like snakes, amongst the grasses, till the night
Had covered face from face, and thrown the gloom
Of many shadows on the front of things.

There, in the shelter of a nameless glen,
Fenced round by cedars and the tangled growths
Of blackwood, stained with brown and shot with grey,
The jaded white man built his fire, and turned
His horse adrift amongst the water-pools
That trickled underneath the yellow leaves
And made a pleasant murmur, like the brooks
Of England through the sweet autumnal noons.

Then, after he had slaked his thirst and used
The forest fare, for which a healthful day
Of mountain life had brought a zest, he took
His axe, and shaped with boughs and wattle-forks
A wurley, fashioned like a bushman’s roof:
The door brought out athwart the strenuous flame
The back thatched in against a rising wind.

And while the sturdy hatchet filled the clifts
With sounds unknown, the immemorial haunts
Of echoes sent their lonely dwellers forth,
Who lived a life of wonder: flying round
And round the glen—what time the kangaroo
Leapt from his lair and huddled with the bats—
Far scattering down the wildly startled fells.
Then came the doleful owl; and evermore
The bleak morass gave out the bittern’s call,
The plover’s cry, and many a fitful wail
Of chilly omen, falling on the ear
Like those cold flaws of wind that come and go
An hour before the break of day.

Anon
The stranger held from toil, and, settling down,
He drew rough solace from his well-filled pipe,
And smoked into the night, revolving there
The primal questions of a squatter’s life;
For in the flats, a short day’s journey past
His present camp, his station yards were kept,
With many a lodge and paddock jutting forth
Across the heart of unnamed prairie-lands,
Now loud with bleating and the cattle bells,
And misty with the hut-fire’s daily smoke.

Wide spreading flats, and western spurs of hills
That dipped to plains of dim perpetual blue;
Bold summits set against the thunder heaps;
And slopes behacked and crushed by battling kine,
Where now the furious tumult of their feet
Gives back the dust, and up from glen and brake
Evokes fierce clamour, and becomes indeed
A token of the squatter’s daring life,
Which, growing inland—growing year by year—
Doth set us thinking in these latter days,
And makes one ponder of the lonely lands
Beyond the lonely tracks of Burke and Wills,
Where, when the wandering Stuart fixed his camps
In central wastes, afar from any home
Or haunt of man, and in the changeless midst
Of sullen deserts and the footless miles
Of sultry silence, all the ways about
Grew strangely vocal, and a marvellous noise
Became the wonder of the waxing glooms.

Now, after darkness, like a mighty spell
Amongst the hills and dim, dispeopled dells,
Had brought a stillness to the soul of things,
It came to pass that, from the secret depths
Of dripping gorges, many a runnel-voice
Came, mellowed with the silence, and remained
About the caves, a sweet though alien sound;
Now rising ever, like a fervent flute
In moony evenings, when the theme is love;
Now falling, as ye hear the Sunday bells
While hastening fieldward from the gleaming town.

Then fell a softer mood, and memory paused
With faithful love, amidst the sainted shrines
Of youth and passion in the valleys past
Of dear delights which never grow again.
And if the stranger (who had left behind
Far anxious homesteads in a wave-swept isle,
To face a fierce sea-circle day by day,
And hear at night the dark Atlantic’s moan)
Now took a hope and planned a swift return,
With wealth and health and with a youth unspent,
To those sweet ones that stayed with want at home,
Say who shall blame him—though the years are long,
And life is hard, and waiting makes the heart grow old?

Thus passed the time, until the moon serene
Stood over high dominion like a dream
Of peace: within the white, transfigured woods;
And o’er the vast dew-dripping wilderness
Of slopes illumined with her silent fires.

Then, far beyond the home of pale red leaves
And silver sluices, and the shining stems
Of runnel blooms, the dreamy wanderer saw,
The wilder for the vision of the moon,
Stark desolations and a waste of plain,
All smit by flame and broken with the storms;
Black ghosts of trees, and sapless trunks that stood
Harsh hollow channels of the fiery noise,
Which ran from bole to bole a year before,
And grew with ruin, and was like, indeed,
The roar of mighty winds with wintering streams
That foam about the limits of the land
And mix their swiftness with the flying seas.

Now, when the man had turned his face about
To take his rest, behold the gem-like eyes
Of ambushed wild things stared from bole and brake
With dumb amaze and faint-recurring glance,
And fear anon that drove them down the brush;
While from his den the dingo, like a scout
In sheltered ways, crept out and cowered near
To sniff the tokens of the stranger’s feast
And marvel at the shadows of the flame.

Thereafter grew the wind; and chafing depths
In distant waters sent a troubled cry
Across the slumb’rous forest; and the chill
Of coming rain was on the sleeper’s brow,
When, flat as reptiles hutted in the scrub,
A deadly crescent crawled to where he lay—
A band of fierce, fantastic savages
That, starting naked round the faded fire,
With sudden spears and swift terrific yells,
Came bounding wildly at the white man’s head,
And faced him, staring like a dream of Hell!

Here let me pass! I would not stay to tell
Of hopeless struggles under crushing blows;
Of how the surging fiends, with thickening strokes,
Howled round the stranger till they drained his strength;
How Love and Life stood face to face with Hate
And Death; and then how Death was left alone
With Night and Silence in the sobbing rains.

So, after many moons, the searchers found
The body mouldering in the mouldering dell
Amidst the fungi and the bleaching leaves,
And buried it, and raised a stony mound
Which took the mosses. Then the place became
The haunt of fearful legends and the lair
Of bats and adders.

There he lies and sleeps
From year to year—in soft Australian nights,
And through the furnaced noons, and in the times
Of wind and wet! Yet never mourner comes
To drop upon that grave the Christian’s tear
Or pluck the foul, dank weeds of death away.

But while the English autumn filled her lap
With faded gold, and while the reapers cooled
Their flame-red faces in the clover grass,
They looked for him at home: and when the frost
Had made a silence in the mourning lanes
And cooped the farmers by December fires,
They looked for him at home: and through the days
Which brought about the million-coloured Spring,
With moon-like splendours, in the garden plots,
They looked for him at home: while Summer danced,
A shining singer, through the tasselled corn,
They looked for him at home. From sun to sun
They waited. Season after season went,
And Memory wept upon the lonely moors,
And hope grew voiceless, and the watchers passed,
Like shadows, one by one away.

And he
Whose fate was hidden under forest leaves
And in the darkness of untrodden dells
Became a marvel. Often by the hearths
In winter nights, and when the wind was wild
Outside the casements, children heard the tale
Of how he left their native vales behind
(Where he had been a child himself) to shape
New fortunes for his father’s fallen house;
Of how he struggled—how his name became,
By fine devotion and unselfish zeal,
A name of beauty in a selfish land;
And then of how the aching hours went by,
With patient listeners praying for the step
Which never crossed the floor again. So passed
The tale to children; but the bitter end
Remained a wonder, like the unknown grave,
Alone with God and Silence in the hills.

poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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On the Paroo

AS WHEN the strong stream of a wintering sea
Rolls round our coast, with bodeful breaks of storm,
And swift salt rain, and bitter wind that saith
Wild things and woeful of the White South Land
Alone with God and silence in the cold—
As when this cometh, men from dripping doors
Look forth, and shudder for the mariners
Abroad, so we for absent brothers looked
In days of drought, and when the flying floods
Swept boundless; roaring down the bald, black plains
Beyond the farthest spur of western hills.

For where the Barwon cuts a rotten land,
Or lies unshaken, like a great blind creek,
Between hot mouldering banks, it came to this,
All in a time of short and thirsty sighs,
That thirty rainless months had left the pools
And grass as dry as ashes: then it was
Our kinsmen started for the lone Paroo,
From point to point, with patient strivings, sheer
Across the horrors of the windless downs,
Blue gleaming like a sea of molten steel.

But never drought had broke them: never flood
Had quenched them: they with mighty youth and health,
And thews and sinews knotted like the trees—
They, like the children of the native woods,
Could stem the strenuous waters, or outlive
The crimson days and dull, dead nights of thirst
Like camels: yet of what avail was strength
Alone to them—though it was like the rocks
On stormy mountains—in the bloody time
When fierce sleep caught them in the camps at rest,
And violent darkness gripped the life in them
And whelmed them, as an eagle unawares
Is whelmed and slaughtered in a sudden snare.

All murdered by the blacks; smit while they lay
In silver dreams, and with the far, faint fall
Of many waters breaking on their sleep!
Yea, in the tracts unknown of any man
Save savages—the dim-discovered ways
Of footless silence or unhappy winds—
The wild men came upon them, like a fire
Of desert thunder; and the fine, firm lips
That touched a mother’s lips a year before,
And hands that knew a dearer hand than life,
Were hewn—a sacrifice before the stars,
And left with hooting owls and blowing clouds,
And falling leaves and solitary wings!

Aye, you may see their graves—you who have toiled
And tripped and thirsted, like these men of ours;
For, verily, I say that not so deep
Their bones are that the scattered drift and dust
Of gusty days will never leave them bare.
O dear, dead, bleaching bones! I know of those
Who have the wild, strong will to go and sit
Outside all things with you, and keep the ways
Aloof from bats, and snakes, and trampling feet
That smite your peace and theirs—who have the heart,
Without the lusty limbs, to face the fire
And moonless midnights, and to be, indeed,
For very sorrow, like a moaning wind
In wintry forests with perpetual rain.

Because of this—because of sisters left
With desperate purpose and dishevelled hair,
And broken breath, and sweetness quenched in tears—
Because of swifter silver for the head,
And furrows for the face—because of these
That should have come with age, that come with pain—
O Master! Father! sitting where our eyes
Are tired of looking, say for once are we—
Are we to set our lips with weary smiles
Before the bitterness of Life and Death,
And call it honey, while we bear away
A taste like wormwood?

Turn thyself, and sing—
Sing, Son of Sorrow! Is there any gain
For breaking of the loins, for melting eyes,
And knees as weak as water?—any peace,
Or hope for casual breath and labouring lips,
For clapping of the palms, and sharper sighs
Than frost; or any light to come for those
Who stand and mumble in the alien streets
With heads as grey as Winter?—any balm
For pleading women, and the love that knows
Of nothing left to love?

They sleep a sleep
Unknown of dreams, these darling friends of ours.
And we who taste the core of many tales
Of tribulation—we whose lives are salt
With tears indeed—we therefore hide our eyes
And weep in secret, lest our grief should risk
The rest that hath no hurt from daily racks
Of fiery clouds and immemorial rains.

poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Euroclydon

On the storm-cloven Cape
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!

When the fruits of the year
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 wilted thyme,
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!

On the wrinkled hills,
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!

From ridge to ridge
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!

The dead, dry lips
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!

And all thro' the year,
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!

Like one who sees
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 -

So I, that stand
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 -

Of the Beauty that grows
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!

poem by Henry Kendall
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The Hut by the Black Swamp

Now comes the fierce north-easter, bound
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.

Now twilight, with a shadowy hand
Of wild dominionship, doth keep
Strong hold of hollow straits of land,
And watery sounds are loud and deep
By gap and steep.

Keen, fitful gusts, that fly before
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.

And, ringed and girt with lurid pomp,
Far eastern cliffs start up, and take
Thick steaming vapours from a swamp
That lieth like a great blind lake,
Of face opaque.

The moss that, like a tender grief,
About an English ruin clings -
What time the wan autumnal leaf
Faints, after many wanderings
On windy wings -

That gracious growth, whose quiet green
Is as a love in days austere,
Was never seen - hath never been -
On slab or roof, deserted here
For many a year.

Nor comes the bird whose speech is song -
Whose songs are silvery syllables
That unto glimmering woods belong,
And deep, meandering mountain dells
By yellow wells.

But rather here the wild-dog halts,
And lifts the paw, and looks, and howls;
And here, in ruined forest vaults,
Abide dim, dark, death-featured owls,
Like monks in cowls.

Across this hut the nettle runs,
And livid adders make their lair
In corners dank from lack of suns,
And out of foetid furrows stare
The growths that scare.

Here Summer's grasp of fire is laid
On bark and slabs that rot, and breed
Squat ugly things of deadly shade,
The scorpion, and the spiteful seed
Of centipede.

Unhallowed thunders, harsh and dry,
And flaming noontides, mute with heat,
Beneath the breathless, brazen sky,
Upon these rifted rafters beat
With torrid feet.

And night by night the fitful gale
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.

No sign of grace - no hope of green,
Cool-blossomed seasons marks the spot;
But chained to iron doom, I ween,
'Tis left, like skeleton, to rot
Where ruth is not.

For on this hut hath murder writ,
With bloody fingers, hellish things;
And God will never visit it
With flower or leaf of sweet-faced Springs,
Or gentle wings.

poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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On A Cattle Track

Where the strength of dry thunder splits hill-rocks asunder,
And the shouts of the desert-wind break,
By the gullies of deepness and ridges of steepness,
Lo, the cattle track twists like a snake!
Like a sea of dead embers, burnt white by Decembers,
A plain to the left of it lies;
And six fleeting horses dash down the creek courses
With the terror of thirst in their eyes.

The false strength of fever, that deadly deceiver,
Gives foot to each famishing beast;
And over lands rotten, by rain-winds forgotten,
The mirage gleams out in the east.
Ah! the waters are hidden from riders and ridden
In a stream where the cattle track dips;
And Death on their faces is scoring fierce traces,
And the drought is a fire on their lips.

It is far to the station, and gaunt Desolation
Is a spectre that glooms in the way;
Like a red smoke the air is, like a hell-light its glare is,
And as flame are the feet of the day.
The wastes are like metal that forges unsettle
When the heat of the furnace is white;
And the cool breeze that bloweth when an English sun goeth,
Is unknown to the wild desert night.

A cry of distress there! a horseman the less there!
The mock-waters shine like a moon!
It is 'Speed, and speed faster from this hole of disaster!
And hurrah for yon God-sent lagoon!'
Doth a devil deceive them? Ah, now let us leave them -
We are burdened in life with the sad;
Our portion is trouble, our joy is a bubble,
And the gladdest is never too glad.

From the pale tracts of peril, past mountain heads sterile,
To a sweet river shadowed with reeds,
Where Summer steps lightly, and Winter beams brightly,
The hoof-rutted cattle track leads.
There soft is the moonlight, and tender the noon-light;
There fiery things falter and fall;
And there may be seen, now, the gold and the green, now,
And the wings of a peace over all.

Hush, bittern and plover! Go, wind, to thy cover
Away by the snow-smitten Pole!
The rotten leaf falleth, the forest rain calleth;
And what is the end of the whole?
Some men are successful after seasons distressful
[Now, masters, the drift of my tale];
But the brink of salvation is a lair of damnation
For others who struggle, yet fail.

poem by Henry Kendall
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Robert Buchanan

’T WAS the body of Judas Iscariot
Lay in the Field of Blood;
’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot
Beside the body stood.

Black was the earth by night
And black was the sky;
Black, black were the broken clouds,
Tho’ the red Moon went by.

’T was the body of Judas Iscariot
Strangled and dead lay there;
’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot
Look’d on it in despair.

The breath of the World came and went
Like a sick man’s in rest;
Drop by drop on the World’s eyes
The dews fell cool and blest.

Then the soul of Judas Iscariot
Did make a gentle moan—
“I will bury underneath the ground
My flesh and blood and bone.

“I will bury deep beneath the soil,
Lest mortals look thereon,
And when the wolf and raven come
The body will be gone!

“The stones of the field are sharp as steel,
And hard and bold, God wot;
And I must bear my body hence
Until I find a spot!”

’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot
So grim, and gaunt, and gray,
Rais’d the body of Judas Iscariot,
And carried it away.

And as he bare it from the field
Its touch was cold as ice,
And the ivory teeth within the jaw
Rattled aloud, like dice.

As the soul of Judas Iscariot
Carried its load with pain,
The Eye of Heaven, like a lanthorn’s eye,
Open’d and shut again.

Half he walk’d, and half he seem’d
Lifted on the cold wind;
He did not turn, for chilly hands
Were pushing from behind.

The first place that he came unto
It was the open wold,
And underneath were prickly whins,
And a wind that blew so cold.

The next place that he came unto
It was a stagnant pool,
And when he threw the body in
It floated light as wool.

He drew the body on his back,
And it was dripping chill,
And the next place that he came unto
Was a Cross upon a hill.

A Cross upon the windy hill,
And a Cross on either side,
Three skeletons that swing thereon,
Who had been crucified.

And on the middle crossbar sat
A white Dove slumbering;
Dim it sat in the dim light,
With its head beneath its wing.

And underneath the middle Cross
A grave yawn’d wide and vast,
But the soul of Judas Iscariot
Shiver’d, and glided past.

The fourth place that he came unto
It was the Brig of Dread,
And the great torrents rushing down
Were deep, and swift, and red.

He dar’d not fling the body in
For fear of faces dim,
And arms were wav’d in the wild water
To thrust it back to him.

’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot
Turn’d from the Brig of Dread,
And the dreadful foam of the wild water
Had splash’d the body red.

For days and nights he wander’d on
Upon an open plain,
And the days went by like blinding mist,
And the nights like rushing rain.

For days and nights he wander’d on,
All thro’ the Wood of Woe;
And the nights went by like moaning wind,
And the days like drifting snow.

’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot
Came with a weary face—
Alone, alone, and all alone,
Alone in a lonely place!

He wander’d east, he wander’d west,
And heard no human sound;
For months and years, in grief and tears,
He wander’d round and round.

For months and years, in grief and tears,
He walk’d the silent night;
Then the soul of Judas Iscariot
Perceiv’d a far-off light.

A far-off light across the waste,
As dim as dim might be,
That came and went like a lighthouse gleam
On a black night at sea.

’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot
Crawl’d to the distant gleam;
And the rain came down, and the rain was blown
Against him with a scream.

For days and nights he wander’d on,
Push’d on by hands behind;
And the days went by like black, black rain,
And the nights like rushing wind.

’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot,
Strange, and sad, and tall,
Stood all alone at dead of night
Before a lighted hall.

And the wold was white with snow,
And his footmarks black and damp,
And the ghost of the silver Moon arose,
Holding her yellow lamp.

And the icicles were on the eaves,
And the walls were deep with white,
And the shadows of the guests within
Pass’d on the window light.

The shadows of the wedding guests
Did strangely come and go,
And the body of Judas Iscariot
Lay stretch’d along the snow.

The body of Judas Iscariot
Lay stretch’d along the snow;
’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot
Ran swiftly to and fro.

To and fro, and up and down,
He ran so swiftly there,
As round and round the frozen Pole
Glideth the lean white bear.

’T was the Bridegroom sat at the tablehead,
And the lights burn’d bright and clear—
“Oh, who is that,” the Bridegroom said,
“Whose weary feet I hear?”

’T was one look’d from the lighted hall,
And answer’d soft and slow,
“It is a wolf runs up and down
With a black track in the snow.”

The Bridegroom in his robe of white
Sat at the tablehead—
“Oh, who is that who moans without?”
The blessed Bridegroom said.

’T was one look’d from the lighted hall,
And answer’d fierce and low,
“’T is the soul of Judas Iscariot
Gliding to and fro.”

’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot
Did hush itself and stand,
And saw the Bridegroom at the door
With a light in his hand.

The Bridegroom stood in the open door,
And he was clad in white,
And far within the Lord’s Supper
Was spread so long and bright.

The Bridegroom shaded his eyes and look’d,
And his face was bright to see—
“What dost thou here at the Lord’s Supper
With thy body’s sins?” said he.

’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot
Stood black, and sad, and bare—
“I have wander’d many nights and days;
There is no light elsewhere.”

’T was the wedding guests cried out within,
And their eyes were fierce and bright—
“Scourge the soul of Judas Iscariot
Away into the night!”

The Bridegroom stood in the open door,
And he wav’d hands still and slow,
And the third time that he wav’d his hands
The air was thick with snow.

And of every flake of falling snow,
Before it touch’d the ground,
There came a dove, and a thousand doves
Made sweet sound.

’T was the body of Judas Iscariot
Floated away full fleet,
And the wings of the doves that bare it off
Were like its winding-sheet.

’T was the Bridegroom stood at the open door,
And beckon’d, smiling sweet;
’T was the soul of Judas Iscariot
Stole in, and fell at his feet.

“The Holy Supper is spread within,
And the many candles shine,
And I have waited long for thee
Before I pour’d the wine!”

The supper wine is pour’d at last,
The lights burn bright and fair,
Iscariot washes the Bridegroom’s feet,
And dries them with his hair.

poem by William Cosmo Monkhouse
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At Long Bay

FIVE years ago! you cannot choose
But know the face of change,
Though July sleeps and Spring renews
The gloss in gorge and range.

Five years ago! I hardly know
How they have slipped away,
Since here we watched at ebb and flow
The waters of the Bay;

And saw, with eyes of little faith,
From cumbered summits fade
The rainbow and the rainbow wraith,
That shadow of a shade.

For Love and Youth were vext with doubt,
Like ships on driving seas,
And in those days the heart gave out
Unthankful similes.

But let it be! I’ve often said
His lot was hardly cast
Who never turned a happy head
To an unhappy Past—

Who never turned a face of light
To cares beyond recall:
He only fares in sorer plight
Who hath no Past at all!

So take my faith, and let it stand
Between us for a sign
That five bright years have known the land
Since yonder tumbled line

Of seacliff took our troubled talk—
The words at random thrown,
And Echo lived about this walk
Of gap and slimy stone.

Here first we learned the Love which leaves
No lack or loss behind,
The dark, sweet Love which woos the eves
And haunts the morning wind.

And roves with runnels in the dell,
And houses by the wave
What time the storm hath struck the fell
And Terror fills the cave—

A Love, you know, that lives and lies
For moments past control,
And mellows through the Poet’s eyes
And sweetens in his soul.

Here first we faced a briny breeze,
What time the middle gale
Went shrilling over whitened seas
With flying towers of sail.

And here we heard the plovers call
As shattered pauses came,
When Heaven showed a fiery wall
With sheets of wasted flame.

Here grebe and gull and heavy glede
Passed eastward far away,
The while the wind, with slackened speed,
Drooped with the dying Day.

And here our friendship, like a tree,
Perennial grew and grew,
Till you were glad to live for me,
And I to live for you.

poem by Henry Kendall
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Cui Bono?

A CLAMOUR by day and a whisper by night,
And the Summer comes—with the shining noons,
With the ripple of leaves, and the passionate light
Of the falling suns and the rising moons.

And the ripple of leaves and the purple and red
Die for the grapes and the gleam of the wheat,
And then you may pause with the splendours, or tread
On the yellow of Autumn with lingering feet.

You may halt with the face to a flying sea,
Or stand like a gloom in the gloom of things,
When the moon drops down and the desolate lea
Is troubled with thunder and desolate wings.

But alas for the grey of the wintering eves,
And the pondering storms and the ruin of rains;
And alas for the Spring like a flame in the leaves,
And the green of the woods and the gold of the lanes!

For, seeing all pathos is mixed with our past,
And knowing all sadness of storm and of surge
Is salt with our tears for the faith that was cast
Away like a weed o’er a bottomless verge,

I am lost for these tokens, and wearied of ways
Wedded with ways that are waning amain,
Like those that are filled with the trouble that slays;
Having drunk of their life to the lees that are pain.

And yet I would write to you! I who have turned
Away with a bitter disguise in the eyes,
And bitten the lips that have trembled and burned
Alone for you, darling, and breaking with sighs.

Because I have touched with my fingers a dress
That was Beauty’s; because that the breath of thy mouth
Is sweetness that lingers; because of each tress
Showered down on thy shoulders; because of the drouth

That came in thy absence; because of the lights
In the Passion that grew to a level with thee—
Is it well that our lives have been filled with the nights
And the days which have made it a sorrow to be?

Yea, thus having tasted all love with thy lips,
And having the warmth of thy hand in mine own,
Is it well that we wander, like parallel ships,
With the silence between us, aloof and alone?

With my face to the wall shall I sleep and forget
The shadow, the sweet sense of slumber denies,
If even I marvel at kindness, and fret,
And start while the tears are all wet in mine eyes?

Oh, darling of mine, standing here with the Past,
Trampled under our feet in the bitterest ways,
Is this speech like a ghost that it keeps us aghast
On the track of the thorns and in alien days?

When I know of you, love, how you break with our pain,
And sob for the sorrow of sorrowful dreams,
Like a stranger who stands in the wind and the rain
And watches and wails by impassable streams:

Like a stranger who droops on a brink and deplores,
With famishing hands and frost in the feet,
For the laughter alive on the opposite shores
With the fervour of fire and the wind of the wheat.

poem by Henry Kendall
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In Memoriam~ -- Alice Fane Gunn Stenhouse

The grand, authentic songs that roll
Across grey widths of wild-faced sea,
The lordly anthems of the Pole,
Are loud upon the lea.

Yea, deep and full the South Wind sings
The mighty symphonies that make
A thunder at the mountain springs -
A whiteness on the lake.

And where the hermit hornet hums,
When Summer fires his wings with gold,
The hollow voice of August comes,
Across the rain and cold.

Now on the misty mountain tops,
Where gleams the crag and glares the fell,
Wild Winter, like one hunted, stops
And shouts a fierce farewell.

Keen fitful gusts shoot past the shore
And hiss by moor and moody mere -
The heralds bleak that come before
The turning of the year.

A sobbing spirit wanders where
By fits and starts the wild-fire shines;
Like one who walks in deep despair,
With Death amongst the pines.

And ah! the fine, majestic grief
Which fills the heart of forests lone,
And makes a lute of limb and leaf
Is human in its tone.

Too human for the thought to slip -
How every song that sorrow sings
Betrays the broad relationship
Of all created things.

Man's mournful speech, the wail of tree,
The words the winds and waters say,
Make up that general elegy,
Whose burden is decay.

To-night my soul looks back and sees,
Across wind-broken wastes of wave,
A widow on her bended knees
Beside a new-made grave.

A sufferer with a touching face
By love and grief made beautiful;
Whose rapt religion lights the place
Where death holds awful rule.

The fair, tired soul whose twofold grief
For child and father lends a tone
Of pathos to the pallid leaf
That sighs above the stone.

The large beloved heart whereon
She used to lean, lies still and cold,
Where, like a seraph, shines the sun
On flowerful green and gold.

I knew him well - the grand, the sweet,
Pure nature past all human praise;
The dear Gamaliel at whose feet
I sat in other days.

He, glorified by god-like lore,
First showed my soul Life's highest aim;
When, like one winged, I breathed - before
The years of sin and shame.

God called him Home. And, in the calm
Beyond our best possessions priced,
He passed, as floats a faultless psalm,
To his fair Father, Christ.

But left as solace for the hours
Of sorrow and the loss thereof;
A sister of the birds and flowers,
The daughter of his love.

She, like a stray sweet seraph, shed
A healing spirit, that flamed and flowed
As if about her bright young head
A crown of saintship glowed.

Suppressing, with sublime self-slight,
The awful face of that distress
Which fell upon her youth like blight,
She shone like happiness.

And, in the home so sanctified
By death in its most noble guise,
She kissed the lips of love, and dried
The tears in sorrow's eyes.

And helped the widowed heart to lean,
So broken up with human cares,
On one who must be felt and seen
By such pure souls as hers.

Moreover, having lived, and learned
The taste of Life's most bitter spring,
For all the sick this sister yearned -
The poor and suffering.

But though she had for every one
The phrase of comfort and the smile,
This shining daughter of the sun
Was dying all the while.

Yet self-withdrawn - held out of reach
Was grief; except when music blent
Its deep, divine, prophetic speech
With voice and instrument.

Then sometimes would escape a cry
From that dark other life of hers -
The half of her humanity -
And sob through sound and verse.

At last there came the holy touch,
With psalms from higher homes and hours;
And she who loved the flowers so much
Now sleeps amongst the flowers.

By hearse-like yews and grey-haired moss,
Where wails the wind in starts and fits,
Twice bowed and broken down with loss,
The wife, the mother sits.

God help her soul! She cannot see,
For very trouble, anything
Beyond this wild Gethsemane
Of swift, black suffering;

Except it be that faltering faith
Which leads the lips of life to say:
'There must be something past this death -
Lord, teach me how to pray!'

Ah, teach her, Lord! And shed through grief
The clear full light, the undefiled,
The blessing of the bright belief
Which sanctified her child.

Let me, a son of sin and doubt,
Whose feet are set in ways amiss -
Who cannot read Thy riddle out,
Just plead, and ask Thee this;

Give her the eyes to see the things -
The Life and Love I cannot see;
And lift her with the helping wings
Thou hast denied to me.

Yea, shining from the highest blue
On those that sing by Beulah's streams,
Shake on her thirsty soul the dew
Which brings immortal dreams.

So that her heart may find the great,
Pure faith for which it looks so long;
And learn the noble way to wait,
To suffer, and be strong.

poem by Henry Kendall
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Manasseh

Manasseh, lord of Judah, and the son
Of him who, favoured of Jehovah, saw
At midnight, when the skies were flushed with fire,
The splendid mystery of the shining air,
That flamed above the black Assyrian camps,
And breathed upon the evil hosts at rest,
And shed swift violent sleep into their eyes;
Manasseh, lord of Judah, when he came
To fortify himself upon his throne,
And saw great strength was gathered unto him,
Let slip satanic passions he had nursed
For years and years; and lo! the land that He
Who thundered on the Oriental Mount
Girt round with awful light, had set apart
For Jacob’s seed — the land that Moses strained
On Nebo’s topmost cone to see, grew black
Beneath the shadow of despotic Sin
That stalked on foot-ways dashed with human blood,
And mocked high Heaven by audacious fires;
And as when Storm, that voice of God, is loud
Within the mountained Syrian wilderness,
There flits a wailing through the wilted pines,
So in the city of the wicked king
A voice, like Abel’s crying from the ground,
Made sorrow of the broken evening winds,
And darkness of the fair young morning lights,
And silence in the homes of hunted men.
But in a time when grey-winged Autumn fogs
Shut off the sun from Carmel’s seaward side,
And fitful gusts did speak within the trees
Of rain beyond the waters, while the priests
In Hinnom’s echoing valley offered up
Unhallowed sacrifices unto gods
Of brass and stone, there came a trumpet’s voice
Along the bald, bleak northern flats; and then
A harnessed horseman, riding furiously,
Dashed down the ridge with an exceeding cry
Of “Esarhaddon, Esarhaddon! haste
Away, ye elders, lo, the swarthy foe
Six leagues from hence hath made the land a fire,
And all the dwellers of the hollowed hills
Are flying hitherwards before a flame
Of fifty thousand swords!” At this the men
Of Baal turned about, set face, and fled
Towards the thickets, where the impious king,
Ringed round by grey, gaunt wizards with the brand
Of Belial on their features, cowered low,
And hid himself amongst the tangled thorns
And shivered in a bitter seaborn wind,
And caught the whiteness of a deathly fear.

There where the ash-pale forest-leaves were touched
By Morning’s shining fingers, and the inland depths
Sent out rain-plenished voices west and south,
The steel-clad scouts of Esarhaddon came
And searched, and found Manasseh whom they bound
And dragged before the swart Assyrian king;
And Esarhaddon, scourge of Heaven, sent
To strange Evil at its chiefest fanes,
And so fulfil a dread divine decree,
Took Judah’s despot, fettered hand and foot,
And cast him bleeding on a dungeon floor
Hard by where swift Euphrates chafes his brink
And gleams from cataract to cataract,
And gives the gale a deep midwinter tone.

So fared Manasseh for the sins which brought
Pale-featured Desolation to the tents
Of alienated Judah; but one night,
When ninety moons of wild unrest had passed,
The humbled son of Hezekiah turned
Himself towards the wall, and prayed and wept;
And in an awful darkness face to face
With God, he said — “I know, O Lord of Hosts,
That Thou art wise and just and kind, and I
Am shapen in iniquity; but by
The years of black captivity, whose days
And nights have marked my spirit passing through
Fierce furnaces of suffering, and seen
It groping in blind shadows with a hope
To reach Thy Hand — by these, O Father, these
That brought the swift, sad silver to my head
Which should have come with Age — which came with Pain,
I pray Thee hear these supplications now,
And stoop and lift me from my low estate,
And lend me this once my dominionship,
So I may strive to live the bad Past down,
And lead henceforth a white and wholesome life,
And be thy contrite servant, Lord, indeed!”

The prayer was not in vain: for while the storm
Sang high above the dim Chaldean domes —
While, in the pines, the spirit of the rain
Sobbed fitfully, Jehovah’s angel came
And made a splendour of the dungeon walls,
And smote the bars, and led Manasseh forth
And caught him up, nor set him down again
Until the turrets of Jerusalem
Sprang white before the flying travellers
Against the congregated morning hills.

And he, the broken man made whole again,
Was faithful to his promise. Every day
Thereafter passing, bore upon its wings
Some shining record of his faultless life,
Some brightness of a high resolve fulfilled;
And in good time, when all the land had rest,
He found that he had lived the bad Past down,
And gave God praise, and with his fathers slept.

Thus ends the story of Manasseh. If
This verse should catch the eyes of one whose sin
Lies heavy on his soul; who finds himself
A shame-faced alien when he walks abroad,
A moping shadow when he sits at home;
Who has no human friends; who, day by day,
Is smitten down by icy level looks
From that cold Virtue which is merciless
Because it knoweth not what wrestling with
A fierce temptation means; if such a one
Should read my tale of Hezekiah’s son,
Let him take heart, and gather up his strength,
And step above men’s scorn, and find his way
By paths of fire, as brave Manasseh did,
Up to the white heights of a blameless life;
And it will come to pass that in the face
Of grey old enmities, whose partial eyes
Are blind to reformation, he will taste
A sweetness in his thoughts, and live his time
Arrayed with the efficient armour of
That noble power which grows of self-respect,
And makes a man a pillar in the world.

poem by Henry Kendall
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The Curse of Mother Flood

Wizened the wood is, and wan is the way through it;
White as a corpse is the face of the fen;
Only blue adders abide in and stray through it—
Adders and venom and horrors to men.
Here is the “ghost of a garden” whose minister
Fosters strange blossoms that startle and scare.
Red as man’s blood is the sun that, with sinister
Flame, is a menace of hell in the air.
Wrinkled and haggard the hills are—the jags of them
Gape like to living and ominous things:
Storm and dry thunder cry out in the crags of them—
Fire, and the wind with a woe in its wings.
Never a moon without clammy-cold shroud on it
Hitherward comes, or a flower-like star!
Only the hiss of the tempest is loud on it—
Hiss, and the moan of a bitter sea bar.
Here on this waste, and to left and to right of it,
Never is lisp or the ripple of rain:
Fierce is the daytime and wild is the night of it,
Flame without limit and frost without wane!
Trees half alive, with the sense of a curse on them,
Shudder and shrink from the black heavy gale;
Ghastly, with boughs like the plumes of a hearse on them:
Barren of blossom and blasted with bale.

Under the cliff that stares down to the south of it—
Back by the horns of a hazardous hill,
Dumb is the gorge with a grave in the mouth of it
Still, as a corpse in a coffin is still.
Never there hovers a hope of the Spring by it—
Never a glimmer of yellow and green:
Only the bat with a whisper of wing by it
Flits like a life out of flesh and unseen.
Here are the growths that are livid and glutinous,
Speckled, and bloated with poisonous blood:
This is the haunt of the viper-breed mutinous:
Cursed with the curse of weird Catherine Flood.

He that hath looked on it—hurried aghast from it,
Hair of him frozen with horror straightway,
Chased by a sudden strange pestilent blast from it—
Where is the speech of him—what can he say?
Hath he not seen the fierce ghost of a hag in it?
Heard maledictions that startle the stars?
Dumb is his mouth as a mouth with a gag in it—
Mute is his life as a life within bars.
Just the one glimpse of that grey, shrieking woman there
Ringed by a circle of furnace and fiend!
He that went happy and healthy and human there—
Where shall the white leper fly to be cleaned?

Here, in a pit with indefinite doom on it,
Here, in the fumes of a feculent moat,
Under an alp with inscrutable gloom on it,
Squats the wild witch with a ghoul at her throat!
Black execration that cannot be spoken of—
Speech of red hell that would suffocate Song,
Starts from this terror with never a token of
Day and its loveliness all the year long.
Sin without name to it—man never heard of it—
Crime that would startle a fiend from his lair,
Blasted this Glen, and the leaf and the bird of it—
Where is there hope for it, Father, O where?

Far in the days of our fathers, the life in it
Blossomed and beamed in the sight of the sun:
Yellow and green and the purple were rife in it,
Singers of morning and waters that run.
Storm of the equinox shed no distress on it,
Thunder spoke softly, and summer-time left
Sunset’s forsaken bright beautiful dress on it—
Blessing that shone half the night in the cleft.
Hymns of the highlands—hosannas from hills by it,
Psalms of great forests made holy the spot:
Cool were the mosses and clear were the rills by it—
Far in the days when the Horror was not.

Twenty miles south is the strong, shining Hawkesbury—
Spacious and splendid, and lordly with blooms.
There, between mountains magnificent, walks bury
Miles of their beauty in green myrtle glooms.
There, in the dell, is the fountain with falls by it—
Falls, and a torrent of summering stream:
There is the cave with the hyaline halls by it—
Haunt of the echo and home of the dream.
Over the hill, by the marvellous base of it,
Wanders the wind with a song in its breath
Out to the sea with the gold on the face of it—
Twenty miles south of the Valley of Death.

poem by Henry Kendall
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Kiama Revisited

WE STOOD by the window and hearkened
To the voice of the runnels sea-driven,
While, northward, the mountain-heads darkened,
Girt round with the clamours of heaven.
One peak with the storm at his portal
Loomed out to the left of his brothers:
Sustained, and sublime, and immortal,
A king, and the lord of the others!
Beneath him a cry from the surges
Rang shrill, like a clarion calling;
And about him, the wind of the gorges
Went falling, and rising, and falling.
But I, as the roofs of the thunder
Were cloven with manifold fires,
Turned back from the wail and the wonder,
And dreamed of old days and desires.
A song that was made, I remembered—
A song that was made in the gloaming
Of suns which are sunken and numbered
With times that my heart hath no home in.
But I said to my Dream, “I am calmer
Than waters asleep on the river.
I can look at the hills of Kiama
And bury that dead Past for ever.”
“Past sight, out of mind, alienated,”
Said the Dream to me, wearily sighing,
“Ah, where is the Winter you mated
To Love, its decline and its dying?
Here, five years ago, there were places
That knew of her cunning to grieve you,
But alas! for her eyes and her graces;
And wherefore and how did she leave you!
Have you hidden the ways of this Woman,
Her whispers, her glances, her power
To hold you, as demon holds human,
Chained back to the day and the hour?
Say, where have you buried her sweetness,
Her coldness for youth and its yearning?
Is the sleep of your Sorrow a witness
She is passed all the roads of returning?
Was she left with her beauty, O lover,
And the shreds of your passion about her,
Beyond reach and where none can discover?
Ah! what is the wide world without her?”

I answered, “Behold, I was broken,
Because of this bright, bitter maiden,
Who helped me with never a token
To beat down the dark I had strayed in.
She knew that my soul was entangled
By what was too fiery to bear then;
Nor cared how she withered and strangled
My life with her eyes and her hair then.
But I have not leapt to the level
Where light and the shadows dissever?
She is fair, but a beautiful devil
That I have forgotten for ever!”
“She is sweeter than music or singing,”
Said the Dream to me, heavily moaning,
“Her voice in your slumber is ringing;
And where is the end—the atoning?
Can you look at the red of the roses;
Are you friend of the fields and the flowers?
Can you bear the faint day as it closes
And dies into twilighted hours?
Do you love the low notes of the ballad
She sang in her darling old fashion?”
And I whispered, “O Dream, I am pallid
And perished because of my passion.”
But the Wraith withered out, and the rifted
Gray hills gleaming over the granges,
Stood robed with moon-rainbows that shifted
And shimmered resplendent with changes!
While, for the dim ocean ledges,
The storm and the surges were blended,
Sheer down the bluff sides of the ridges
Spent winds and the waters descended.
The forests, the crags, and the forelands,
Grew sweet with the stars after raining;
But out in the north-lying moorlands,
I heard the lone plover complaining.
From these to Kiama, half-hidden
In a yellow sea-mist on the slopings
Of hills, by the torrents be-ridden,
I turned with my aches and my hopings,
Saying this—“There are those that are taken
By Fate to wear Love as a raiment
Whose texture is trouble with breaking
Of youth and no hope of repayment.”

poem by Henry Kendall
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God Help our Men at Sea

The wild night comes like an owl to its lair,
The black clouds follow fast,
And the sun-gleams die, and the lightnings glare,
And the ships go heaving past, past, past -
The ships go heaving past!
Bar the doors, and higher, higher
Pile the faggots on the fire:
Now abroad, by many a light,
Empty seats there are to-night -
Empty seats that none may fill,
For the storm grows louder still:
How it surges and swells through the gorges and dells,
Under the ledges and over the lea,
Where a watery sound goeth moaning around -
God help our men at sea!

Oh! never a tempest blew on the shore
But that some heart did moan
For a darling voice it would hear no more
And a face that had left it lone, lone, lone -
A face that had left it lone!
I am watching by a pane
Darkened with the gusty rain,
Watching, through a mist of tears,
Sad with thoughts of other years,
For a brother I did miss
In a stormy time like this.
Ah! the torrent howls past, like a fiend on the blast,
Under the ledges and over the lea;
And the pent waters gleam, and the wild surges scream -
God help our men at sea!

Ah, Lord! they may grope through the dark to find
Thy hand within the gale;
And cries may rise on the wings of the wind
From mariners weary and pale, pale, pale -
From mariners weary and pale!
'Tis a fearful thing to know,
While the storm-winds loudly blow,
That a man can sometimes come
Too near to his father's home;
So that he shall kneel and say,
'Lord, I would be far away!'
Ho! the hurricanes roar round a dangerous shore,
Under the ledges and over the lea;
And there twinkles a light on the billows so white -
God help our men at sea!

poem by Henry Kendall
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The Dead To The Living

Work while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.

IN the childhood of April, while purple woods
With the young year's blood in them smiled,
I passed through the lanes and the wakened fields,
And stood by the grave of the child.
And the pain awoke that is never dead
Though it sometimes sleeps, and again
It set its teeth in this heart of mine,
And fastened its claws in my brain:
For it seemed so hard that the little hands
And the little well-loved head
Should be out of reach of my living lips,
And be side by side with the dead--
Not side by side with us who had loved,
But with these who had never seen
The grace of the smile, the gold of the hair,
And the eyes of my baby-queen.
Yet with trees about where the brown birds build,
And with long green grass above,

She lies in the cold sweet breast of earth
Beyond the reach of our love;
Whatever befalls in the coarse loud world,
We know she will never wake.
When I thought of the sorrow she might have known,
I was almost glad for her sake. . . .
Tears might have tired those kiss-closed eyes,
Grief hardened the mouth I kissed;
I was almost glad that my dear was dead
Because of the pain she had missed.
Oh, if I could but have died a child
With a white child-soul like hers,
As pure as the wind-flowers down in the copse,
Where the soul of the spring's self stirs;
Or if I had only done with it all,
And might lie by her side unmoved!
I envied the very clods of earth
Their place near the child I loved!

And my soul rose up in revolt at life,
As I stood dry-eyed by her grave,
When sudden the grass of the churchyard sod
Rolled back like a green smooth wave;
The brown earth looked like the brown sea rocks,
The tombstones were white like spray,
And white like surf were the curling folds
Of the shrouds where the dead men lay;
For each in his place with his quiet face
I saw the dead lie low,
Who had worked and suffered and found life sad,
So many sad years ago.
Unchanged by time I saw them lie
As when first they were laid to rest,
The tired eyes closed, the sad lips still,
And the work-worn hands on the breast.
There were some who had found the green world so grey,
They had left it before their time,
And some were little ones like my dear,
And some had died in their prime;
And some were old, they had had their fill
Of bitter unfruitful hours,
And knew that none of them, none, had known
A flower of a hope like ours!

Through their shut eyelids the dead looked up,
And without a voice they said:
'We lived without hope, without hope we died,
And hopeless we lie here dead;
And death is better than life that draws
Pain in, as it draws in breath,
If life never dreams of a coming day
When life shall not envy death.
Through the dark of our hours and our times we lived,
Uncheered by a single ray
Of such hope as lightens the lives of you
Who are finding life hard to-day;
With our little lanterns of human love
We lighted our dark warm night--
But you in the chill of the dawn are set
With your face to the eastern light.
Freedom is waiting with hands held out
Till you tear the veil from her face--
And when once men have seen the light of her eyes,
And felt her divine embrace,
The light of the world will be risen indeed,
And will shine in the eyes of men,
And those who come after will find life fair,
And their lives worth living then!
Will you strive to the light in your loud rough world,
That these things may come to pass,
Or lie in the shadow beside the child,
And strive to the sun through the grass?'

'My world while I may,' I cried; 'but you
Whose lives were as dark as your grave?'
'We too are a part of the coming light,'
They called through the smooth green wave.
Their white shrouds gleamed as the flood of green
Rolled over and hid them from me--
Hid all but the little hands and the hair,
And the face that I always see.

poem by Edith Nesbit
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Sydney Harbour

Where Hornby, like a mighty fallen star,
Burns through the darkness with a splendid ring
Of tenfold light, and where the awful face
Of Sydney’s northern headland stares all night
O’er dark, determined waters from the east,
From year to year a wild, Titanic voice
Of fierce aggressive sea shoots up and makes, —
When storm sails high through drifts of driving sleet,
And in the days when limpid waters glass
December’s sunny hair and forest face, —
A roaring down by immemorial caves,
A thunder in the everlasting hills.
But calm and lucid as an English lake,
Beloved by beams and wooed by wind and wing,
Shut in from tempest-trampled wastes of wave,
And sheltered from white wraths of surge by walls —
Grand ramparts founded by the hand of God,
The lordly Harbour gleams. Yea, like a shield
Of marvellous gold dropped in his fiery flight
By some lost angel in the elder days,
When Satan faced and fought Omnipotence,
It shines amongst fair, flowering hills, and flows
By dells of glimmering greenness manifold.
And all day long, when soft-eyed Spring comes round
With gracious gifts of bird and leaf and grass —
And through the noon, when sumptuous Summer sleeps
By yellowing runnels under beetling cliffs,
This royal water blossoms far and wide
With ships from all the corners of the world.

And while sweet Autumn with her gipsy face
Stands in the gardens, splashed from heel to thigh
With spinning vine-blood — yea, and when the mild,
Wan face of our Australian Winter looks
Across the congregated southern fens,
Then low, melodious, shell-like songs are heard
Beneath proud hulls and pompous clouds of sail,
By yellow beaches under lisping leaves
And hidden nooks to Youth and Beauty dear,
And where the ear may catch the counter-voice
Of Ocean travelling over far, blue tracts.

Moreover, when the moon is gazing down
Upon her lovely reflex in the wave,
(What time she, sitting in the zenith, makes
A silver silence over stirless woods),
Then, where its echoes start at sudden bells,
And where its waters gleam with flying lights,
The haven lies, in all its beauty clad,
More lovely even than the golden lakes
The poet saw, while dreaming splendid dreams
Which showed his soul the far Hesperides.

poem by Henry Kendall
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By the Cliffs of the Sea

In a far-away glen of the hills,
Where the bird of the night is at rest,
Shut in from the thunder that fills
The fog-hidden caves of the west—
In a sound of the leaf, and the lute
Of the wind on the quiet lagoon,
I stand, like a worshipper, mute
In the flow of a marvellous tune!
And the song that is sweet to my sense
Is, “Nearer, my God, unto Thee”;
But it carries me sorrowing hence,
To a grave by the cliffs of the sea.
So many have gone that I loved—
So few of the fathers remain,
That where in old seasons I moved
I could never be happy again.
In the breaks of this beautiful psalm,
With its deep, its devotional tone,
And hints of ineffable calm,
I feel like a stranger, alone.
No wonder my eyes are so dim—
Your trouble is heavy on me,
O widow and daughter of him
Who sleeps in the grave by the sea!

The years have been hard that have pressed
On a head full of premature grey,
Since Stenhouse went down to his rest,
And Harpur was taken away.
In the soft yellow evening-ends,
The wind of the water is faint
By the home of the last of my friends—
The shrine of the father and saint.
The tenderness touching—the grace
Of Ridley no more is for me;
And flowers have hidden the face
Of the brother who sleeps by the sea.

The vehement voice of the South
Is loud where the journalist lies;
But calm hath encompassed his mouth,
And sweet is the peace in his eyes.
Called hence by the Power who knows
When the work of a hero is done,
He turned at the message, and rose
With the harness of diligence on.
In the midst of magnificent toil,
He bowed at the holy decree;
And green is the grass on the soil
Of the grave by the cliffs of the sea.

I knew him, indeed; and I knew,
Having suffered so much in his day,
What a beautiful nature and true
In Bennett was hidden away.
In the folds of a shame without end,
When the lips of the scorner were curled,
I found in this brother a friend—
The last that was left in the world.
Ah! under the surface austere
Compassion was native to thee;
I send from my solitude here
This rose for the grave by the sea.

To the high, the heroic intent
Of a life that was never at rest,
He held, with a courage unspent,
Through the worst of his days and the best.
Far back in the years that are dead
He knew of the bitterness cold
That saddens with silver the head
And makes a man suddenly old.
The dignity gracing his grief
Was ever a lesson to me;
He lies under blossom and leaf
In a grave by the cliffs of the sea.

Above him the wandering face
Of the moon is a loveliness now,
And anthems encompass the place
From lutes of the luminous bough.
The forelands are fiery with foam
Where often and often he roved;
He sleeps in the sight of the home
That he built by the waters he loved.
The wave is his fellow at night,
And the sun, shining over the lea,
Sheds out an unspeakable light
On this grave by the cliffs of the sea.

poem by Henry Kendall
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Dungog

HERE, pent about by office walls
And barren eyes all day,
’Tis sweet to think of waterfalls
Two hundred miles away!

I would not ask you, friends, to brook
An old, old truth from me,
If I could shut a Poet’s book
Which haunts me like the Sea!

He saith to me, this Poet saith,
So many things of light,
That I have found a fourfold faith,
And gained a twofold sight.

He telleth me, this Poet tells,
How much of God is seen
Amongst the deep-mossed English dells,
And miles of gleaming green.

From many a black Gethsemane,
He leads my bleeding feet
To where I hear the Morning Sea
Round shining spaces beat!

To where I feel the wind, which brings
A sound of running creeks,
And blows those dark, unpleasant things,
The sorrows, from my cheeks.

I’ll shut mine eyes, my Poet choice,
And spend the day with thee;
I’ll dream thou art a fountain voice
Which God hath sent to me!

And far beyond these office walls
My thoughts shall even stray,
And watch the wilful waterfalls,
Two hundred miles away.

For, if I know not of thy deeds,
And darling Kentish downs,
I’ve seen the deep, wild Dungog fells,
And hate the heart of towns!

Then, ho! for beaming bank and brake,
Far-folded hills among,
Where Williams, like a silver snake,
Draws winding lengths along!

And ho! for stormy mountain cones,
Where headlong Winter leaps,
What time the gloomy swamp-oak groans,
And weeps and wails and weeps.

There, friends, are spots of sleepy green,
Where one may hear afar,
O’er fifteen leagues of waste, I ween,
A moaning harbour bar!

(The sea that breaks, and beats and shakes
The caverns, howling loud,
Beyond the midnight Myall Lakes,
And half-awakened Stroud!)

There, through the fretful autumn days,
Beneath a cloudy sun,
Comes rolling down rain-rutted ways,
The wind, Euroclydon!

While rattles over riven rocks
The thunder, harsh and dry;
And blustering gum and brooding box
Are threshing at the sky!

And then the gloom doth vex the sight
With crude, unshapely forms
Which hold throughout the yelling night
A fellowship with storms!

But here are shady tufts and turns,
Where sumptuous Summer lies
(By reaches brave with flags and ferns)
With large, luxuriant eyes.

And here, another getteth ease—
Our Spring, so rarely seen,
Who shows us in the cedar trees
A glimpse of golden green.

What time the flapping bats have trooped
Away like ghosts to graves,
And darker growths than Night are cooped
In silent, hillside caves.

Ah, Dungog, dream of darling days,
’Tis better thou should’st be
A far-off thing to love and praise—
A boon from Heaven to me!

For, let me say that when I look
With wearied eyes on men,
I think of one unchanging nook,
And find my faith again.

poem by Henry Kendall
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Our Jack

Twelve years ago our Jack was lost. All night,
Twelve years ago, the Spirit of the Storm
Sobbed round our camp. A wind of northern hills
That hold a cold companionship with clouds
Came down, and wrestled like a giant with
The iron-featured woods; and fall and ford,
The night our Jack was lost, sent forth a cry
Of baffled waters, where the Murray sucked
The rain-replenished torrents at his source,
And gathered strength, and started for the sea.
We took our Jack from Melbourne just two weeks
Before this day twelve years ago. He left
A home where Love upon the threshold paused,
And wept across the shoulder of the lad,
And blest us when we said we’d take good care
To keep the idol of the house from harm.
We were a band of three. We started thence
To look for watered lands and pastures new,
With faces set towards the down beyond
Where cool Monaro’s topmost mountain breaks
The wings of many a seaward-going storm,
And shapes them into wreaths of subtle fire.
We were, I say, a band of three in all,
With brother Tom for leader. Bright-eyed Jack,
Who thought himself as big a man as Tom,
Was self-elected second in command,
And I was cook and groom. A week slipt by,
Brimful of life — of health, and happiness;
For though our progress northward had been slow,
Because the country on the track was rough,
No one amongst us let his spirits flag;
Moreover, being young, and at the stage
When all things novel wear a fine romance,
We found in ridge and glen, and wood and rock
And waterfall, and everything that dwells
Outside with nature, pleasure of that kind
Which only lives for those whose hearts are tired
Of noisy cities, and are fain to feel
The peace and power of the mighty hills.

The second week we crossed the upper fork
Where Murray meets a river from the east;
And there one evening dark with coming storm,
We camped a furlong from the bank. Our Jack,
The little man that used to sing and shout
And start the merry echoes of the cliffs,
And gravely help me to put up the tent,
And try a thousand tricks and offices,
That made me scold and laugh by turns — the pet
Of sisters, and the youngest hope of one
Who grew years older in a single night —
Our Jack, I say, strayed off into the dusk,
Lured by the noises of a waterfall;
And though we hunted, shouting right and left,
The whole night long, through wind and rain, and searched
For five days afterwards, we never saw
The lad again.

I turned to Tom and said,
That wild fifth evening, “Which of us has heart
Enough to put the saddle on our swiftest horse,
And post away to Melbourne, there to meet
And tell his mother we have lost her son?
Or which of us can bear to stand and see
The white affliction of a faded face,
Made old by you and me? O, Tom, my boy,
Her heart will break!” Tom moaned, but did not speak
A word. He saddled horse, and galloped off.
O, Jack! Jack! Jack! When bright-haired Benjamin
Was sent to Egypt with his father’s sons,
Those rough half-brothers took more care of him
Than we of you! But shall we never see
Your happy face, my brave lad, any more?
Nor hear you whistling in the fields at eve?
Nor catch you up to mischief with your knife
Amongst the apple trees? Nor find you out
A truant playing on the road to school?
Nor meet you, boy, in any other guise
You used to take? Is this worn cap I hold
The only thing you’ve left us of yourself?
Are we to sit from night to night deceived
Through rainy seasons by presentiments
That make us start at shadows on the pane,
And fancy that we hear you in the dark,
And wonder that your step has grown so slow,
And listen for your hand upon the door?

poem by Henry Kendall
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Beyond Kerguelen

DOWN in the South, by the waste without sail on it—
Far from the zone of the blossom and tree—
Lieth, with winter and whirlwind and wail on it,
Ghost of a land by the ghost of a sea.
Weird is the mist from the summit to base of it;
Sun of its heaven is wizened and grey;
Phantom of light is the light on the face of it—
Never is night on it, never is day!
Here is the shore without flower or bird on it;
Here is no litany sweet of the springs—
Only the haughty, harsh thunder is heard on it,
Only the storm, with a roar in its wings!

Shadow of moon is the moon in the sky of it—
Wan as the face of a wizard, and far!
Never there shines from the firmament high of it
Grace of the planet or glory of star.
All the year round, in the place of white days on it—
All the year round where there never is night—
Lies a great sinister, bitter, blind haze on it:
Growth that is neither of darkness nor light!
Wild is the cry of the sea in the caves by it—
Sea that is smitten by spears of the snow;
Desolate songs are the songs of the waves by it—
Down in the South, where the ships never go.

Storm from the Pole is the singer that sings to it
Hymns of the land at the planet’s grey verge.
Thunder discloses dark, wonderful things to it—
Thunder, and rain, and the dolorous surge.
Hills with no hope of a wing or a leaf on them,
Scarred with the chronicles written by flame,
Stare through the gloom of inscrutable grief on them,
Down on the horns of the gulfs without name.
Cliffs with the records of fierce flying fires on them—
Loom over perilous pits of eclipse;
Alps, with anathema stamped in the spires on them—
Out by the wave with a curse on its lips.

Never is sign of soft, beautiful green on it—
Never the colour, the glory of rose!
Neither the fountain nor river is seen on it,
Naked its crags are, and barren its snows!
Blue as the face of the drowned is the shore of it—
Shore, with the capes of indefinite cave.
Strange is the voice of its wind, and the roar of it
Startles the mountain and hushes the wave.
Out to the South and away to the north of it,
Spectral and sad are the spaces untold!
All the year round a great cry goeth forth of it—
Sob of this leper of lands in the cold.

No man hath stood, all its bleak, bitter years on it—
Fall of a foot on its wastes is unknown:
Only the sound of the hurricane’s spears on it
Breaks with the shout from the uttermost zone.
Blind are its bays with the shadow of bale on them;
Storms of the nadir their rocks have uphurled;
Earthquake hath registered deeply its tale on them—
Tale of distress from the dawn of the world!
There are the gaps, with the surges that seethe in them—
Gaps in whose jaws is a menace that glares!
There the wan reefs, with the merciless teeth in them,
Gleam on a chaos that startles and scares!

Back in the dawn of this beautiful sphere, on it—
Land of the dolorous, desolate face—
Beamed the blue day; and the bountiful year on it
Fostered the leaf and the blossom of grace.
Grand were the lights of its midsummer noon on it—
Mornings of majesty shone on its seas:
Glitter of star and the glory of moon on it
Fell, in the march of the musical breeze.
Valleys and hills, with the whisper of wing in them,
Dells of the daffodil—spaces impearled,
Flowered and flashed with the splendour of Spring in them—
Back in the morn of this wonderful world.

Soft were the words that the thunder then said to it—
Said to this lustre of emerald plain;
Sun brought the yellow, the green, and the red to it—
Sweet were the songs of its silvery rain.
Voices of water and wind in the bays of it
Lingered, and lulled like the psalm of a dream.
Fair were the nights and effulgent the days of it—
Moon was in shadow and shade in the beam.
Summer’s chief throne was the marvellous coast of it,
Home of the Spring was its luminous lea:
Garden of glitter! but only the ghost of it
Moans in the South by the ghost of a sea.

poem by Henry Kendall
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The Curlew Song

The viewless blast flies moaning past,
Away to the forest trees,
Where giant pines and leafless vines
Bend 'neath the wandering breeze!
From ferny streams, unearthly screams
Are heard in the midnight blue;
As afar they roam to the shepherd's home,
The shrieks of the wild Curlew!
As afar they roam
To the shepherd's home,
The shrieks of the wild Curlew!

The mists are curled o'er a dark-faced world,
And the shadows sleep around,
Where the clear lagoon reflects the moon
In her hazy glory crowned;
While dingoes howl, and wake the growl
Of the watchdog brave and true;
Whose loud, rough bark shoots up in the dark,
With the song of the lone Curlew!
Whose loud, rough bark
Shoots up in the dark,
With the song of the lone Curlew!

Near herby banks the dark green ranks
Of the rushes stoop to drink;
And the ripples chime, in a measured time,
On the smooth and mossy brink;
As wind-breaths sigh, and pass, and die,
To start from the swamps anew,
And join again o'er ridge and plain
With the wails of the sad Curlew!
And join again
O'er ridge and plain
With the wails of the sad Curlew!

The clouds are thrown around the cone
Of the mountain bare and high,
(Whose craggy peak uprears to the cheek -
To the face of the sombre sky)
When down beneath the foggy wreath,
Full many a gully through,
They rend the air, like cries of despair,
The screams of the wild Curlew!
They rend the air,
Like cries of despair,
The screams of the wild Curlew!

The viewless blast flies moaning past,
Away to the forest trees;
Where giant pines and leafless vines
Bend 'neath the wandering breeze!
From ferny streams, unearthly screams
Are heard in the midnight blue;
As afar they roam to the shepherd's home,
The shrieks of the wild Curlew!
As afar they roam
To the shepherd's home,
The shrieks of the wild Curlew!

poem by Henry Kendall
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