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Coogee

Sing the song of wave-worn Coogee, Coogee in the distance white,
With its jags and points disrupted, gaps and fractures fringed with light;
Haunt of gledes, and restless plovers of the melancholy wail
Ever lending deeper pathos to the melancholy gale.
There, my brothers, down the fissures, chasms deep and wan and wild,
Grows the sea-bloom, one that blushes like a shrinking, fair, blind child;
And amongst the oozing forelands many a glad, green rock-vine runs,
Getting ease on earthy ledges, sheltered from December suns.
Often, when a gusty morning, rising cold and grey and strange,
Lifts its face from watery spaces, vistas full with cloudy change,
Bearing up a gloomy burden which anon begins to wane,
Fading in the sudden shadow of a dark, determined rain,
Do I seek an eastern window, so to watch the breakers beat
Round the steadfast crags of Coogee, dim with drifts of driving sleet:
Hearing hollow mournful noises sweeping down a solemn shore,
While the grim sea-caves are tideless, and the storm strives at their core.

Often when the floating vapours fill the silent autumn leas,
Dreaming mem’ries fall like moonlight over silver sleeping seas.
Youth and I and Love together! Other times and other themes
Come to me unsung, unwept for, through the faded evening gleams:
Come to me and touch me mutely — I that looked and longed so well,
Shall I look and yet forget them? — who may know or who foretell?
Though the southern wind roams, shadowed with its immemorial grief,
Where the frosty wings of Winter leave their whiteness on the leaf.

Friend of mine beyond the waters, here and here these perished days
Haunt me with their sweet dead faces and their old divided ways.
You that helped and you that loved me, take this song, and when you read,
Let the lost things come about you, set your thoughts and hear and heed.
Time has laid his burden on us — we who wear our manhood now,
We would be the boys we have been, free of heart and bright of brow —
Be the boys for just an hour, with the splendour and the speech
Of thy lights and thunders, Coogee, flying up thy gleaming beach.

Heart’s desire and heart’s division! who would come and say to me,
With the eyes of far-off friendship, “You are as you used to be”?
Something glad and good has left me here with sickening discontent,
Tired of looking, neither knowing what it was or where it went.
So it is this sight of Coogee, shining in the morning dew,
Sets me stumbling through dim summers once on fire with youth and you —
Summers pale as southern evenings when the year has lost its power
And the wasted face of April weeps above the withered flower.

Not that seasons bring no solace, not that time lacks light and rest;
But the old things were the dearest and the old loves seem the best.
We that start at songs familiar, we that tremble at a tone
Floating down the ways of music, like a sigh of sweetness flown,
We can never feel the freshness, never find again the mood
Left among fair-featured places, brightened of our brotherhood.
This and this we have to think of when the night is over all,
And the woods begin to perish and the rains begin to fall

poem by Henry Kendall
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In Memory of Edward Butler

A voice of grave, deep emphasis
Is in the woods to-night;
No sound of radiant day is this,
No cadence of the light.
Here in the fall and flights of leaves
Against grey widths of sea,
The spirit of the forests grieves
For lost Persephone.
The fair divinity that roves
Where many waters sing
Doth miss her daughter of the groves —
The golden-headed Spring.
She cannot find the shining hand
That once the rose caressed;
There is no blossom on the land,
No bird in last year’s nest.

Here, where this strange Demeter weeps —
This large, sad life unseen —
Where July’s strong, wild torrent leaps
The wet hill-heads between,
I sit and listen to the grief,
The high, supreme distress,
Which sobs above the fallen leaf
Like human tenderness!

Where sighs the sedge and moans the marsh,
The hermit plover calls;
The voice of straitened streams is harsh
By windy mountain walls;
There is no gleam upon the hills
Of last October’s wings;
The shining lady of the rills
Is with forgotten things.

Now where the land’s worn face is grey
And storm is on the wave,
What flower is left to bear away
To Edward Butler’s grave?
What tender rose of song is here
That I may pluck and send
Across the hills and seas austere
To my lamented friend?

There is no blossom left at all;
But this white winter leaf,
Whose glad green life is past recall,
Is token of my grief.
Where love is tending growths of grace,
The first-born of the Spring,
Perhaps there may be found a place
For my pale offering.

For this heroic Irish heart
We miss so much to-day,
Whose life was of our lives a part,
What words have I to say?
Because I know the noble woe
That shrinks beneath the touch —
The pain of brothers stricken low —
I will not say too much.

But often in the lonely space
When night is on the land,
I dream of a departed face —
A gracious, vanished hand.
And when the solemn waters roll
Against the outer steep,
I see a great, benignant soul
Beside me in my sleep.

Yea, while the frost is on the ways
With barren banks austere,
The friend I knew in other days
Is often very near.
I do not hear a single tone;
But where this brother gleams,
The elders of the seasons flown
Are with me in my dreams.

The saintly face of Stenhouse turns —
His kind old eyes I see;
And Pell and Ridley from their urns
Arise and look at me.
By Butler’s side the lights reveal
The father of his fold,
I start from sleep in tears, and feel
That I am growing old.

Where Edward Butler sleeps, the wave
Is hardly ever heard;
But now the leaves above his grave
By August’s songs are stirred.
The slope beyond is green and still,
And in my dreams I dream
The hill is like an Irish hill
Beside an Irish stream.

poem by Henry Kendall
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The Voice in the Wild Oak

Twelve years ago, when I could face
High heaven’s dome with different eyes—
In days full-flowered with hours of grace,
And nights not sad with sighs—
I wrote a song in which I strove
To shadow forth thy strain of woe,
Dark widowed sister of the grove!—
Twelve wasted years ago.
But youth was then too young to find
Those high authentic syllables,
Whose voice is like the wintering wind
By sunless mountain fells;
Nor had I sinned and suffered then
To that superlative degree
That I would rather seek, than men,
Wild fellowship with thee!

But he who hears this autumn day
Thy more than deep autumnal rhyme,
Is one whose hair was shot with grey
By Grief instead of Time.
He has no need, like many a bard,
To sing imaginary pain,
Because he bears, and finds it hard,
The punishment of Cain.

No more he sees the affluence
Which makes the heart of Nature glad;
For he has lost the fine, first sense
Of Beauty that he had.
The old delight God’s happy breeze
Was wont to give, to Grief has grown;
And therefore, Niobe of trees,
His song is like thine own!

But I, who am that perished soul,
Have wasted so these powers of mine,
That I can never write that whole,
Pure, perfect speech of thine.
Some lord of words august, supreme,
The grave, grand melody demands;
The dark translation of thy theme
I leave to other hands.

Yet here, where plovers nightly call
Across dim, melancholy leas—
Where comes by whistling fen and fall
The moan of far-off seas—
A grey, old Fancy often sits
And fills thy strong, strange rhyme by fits
With awful utterings.

Then times there are when all the words
Are like the sentences of one
Shut in by Fate from wind and birds
And light of stars and sun,
No dazzling dryad, but a dark
Dream-haunted spirit doomed to be
Imprisoned, crampt in bands of bark,
For all eternity.

Yea, like the speech of one aghast
At Immortality in chains,
What time the lordly storm rides past
With flames and arrowy rains:
Some wan Tithonus of the wood,
White with immeasurable years—
An awful ghost in solitude
With moaning moors and meres.

And when high thunder smites the hill
And hunts the wild dog to his den,
Thy cries, like maledictions, shrill
And shriek from glen to glen,
As if a frightful memory whipped
Thy soul for some infernal crime
That left it blasted, blind, and stript—
A dread to Death and Time!

But when the fair-haired August dies,
And flowers wax strong and beautiful,
Thy songs are stately harmonies
By wood-lights green and cool—
Most like the voice of one who shows
Through sufferings fierce, in fine relief,
A noble patience and repose—
A dignity in grief.

But, ah! conceptions fade away,
And still the life that lives in thee—
The soul of thy majestic lay—
Remains a mystery!
And he must speak the speech divine—
The language of the high-throned lords—
Who’d give that grand old theme of thine
Its sense in faultless words.

By hollow lands and sea-tracts harsh,
With ruin of the fourfold gale,
Where sighs the sedge and sobs the marsh,
Still wail thy lonely wail;
And, year by year, one step will break
The sleep of far hill-folded streams,
And seek, if only for thy sake
Thy home of many dreams.

poem by Henry Kendall
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Wamberal

Just a shell, to which the seaweed glittering yet with greenness clings,
Like the song that once I loved so, softly of the old time sings -
Softly of the old time speaketh - bringing ever back to me
Sights of far-off lordly forelands - glimpses of the sounding sea!
Now the cliffs are all before me - now, indeed, do I behold
Shining growths on wild wet hillheads, quiet pools of green and gold.
And, across the gleaming beaches, lo! the mighty flow and fall
Of the great ingathering waters thundering under Wamberal!

Back there are the pondering mountains; there the dim, dumb ranges loom -
Ghostly shapes in dead grey vapour - half-seen peaks august with gloom.
There the voice of troubled torrents, hidden in unfathomed deeps,
Known to moss and faint green sunlight, wanders down the oozy steeps.
There the lake of many runnels nestles in a windless wild
Far amongst thick-folded forests, like a radiant human child.
And beyond surf-smitten uplands - high above the highest spur -
Lo! the clouds like tents of tempest on the crags of Kincumber!

Wamberal, the home of echoes! Hard against a streaming strand,
Sits the hill of blind black caverns, at the limits of the land.
Here the haughty water marches - here the flights of straitened sea
Make a noise like that of trumpets, breaking wide across the lea!
But behold, in yonder crescent that a ring of island locks
Are the gold and emerald cisterns shining moonlike in the rocks!
Clear, bright cisterns, zoned by mosses, where the faint wet blossoms dwell
With the leaf of many colours - down beside the starry shell.

Friend of mine beyond the mountains, here and here the perished days
Come like sad reproachful phantoms, in the deep grey evening haze -
Come like ghosts, and sit beside me when the noise of day is still,
And the rain is on the window, and the wind is on the hill.
Then they linger, but they speak not, while my memory roams and roams
Over scenes by death made sacred - other lands and other homes!
Places sanctified by sorrow - sweetened by the face of yore -
Face that you and I may look on (friend and brother) nevermore!

Seasons come with tender solace - time lacks neither light nor rest;
But the old thoughts were such ~dear~ ones, and the old days seem the best.
And to those who've loved and suffered, every pulse of wind or rain -
Every song with sadness in it, brings the peopled Past again.
Therefore, just this shell yet dripping, with this weed of green and grey,
Sets me thinking - sets me dreaming of the places far away;
Dreaming of the golden rockpools - of the foreland and the fall;
And the home behind the mountains looming over Wamberal.

poem by Henry Kendall
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A Ballad of Burdens

A Ballad of Burdens

The burden of fair women. Vain delight,
And love self-slain in some sweet shameful way,
And sorrowful old age that comes by night
As a thief comes that has no heart by day,
And change that finds fair cheeks and leaves them grey,
And weariness that keeps awake for hire,
And grief that says what pleasure used to say;
This is the end of every man's desire.

The burden of bought kisses. This is sore,
A burden without fruit in childbearing;
Between the nightfall and the dawn threescore,
Threescore between the dawn and evening.
The shuddering in thy lips, the shuddering
In thy sad eyelids tremulous like fire,
Makes love seem shameful and a wretched thing.
This is the end of every man's desire.

The burden of sweet speeches. Nay, kneel down,
Cover thy head, and weep; for verily
These market-men that buy thy white and brown
In the last days shall take no thought for thee.
In the last days like earth thy face shall be,
Yea, like sea-marsh made thick with brine and mire,
Sad with sick leavings of the sterile sea.
This is the end of every man's desire.

The burden of long living. Thou shalt fear
Waking, and sleeping mourn upon thy bed;
And say at night "Would God the day were here,"
And say at dawn "Would God the day were dead."
With weary days thou shalt be clothed and fed,
And wear remorse of heart for thine attire,
Pain for thy girdle and sorrow upon thine head;
This is the end of every man's desire.

The burden of bright colours. Thou shalt see
Gold tarnished, and the grey above the green;
And as the thing thou seest thy face shall be,
And no more as the thing beforetime seen.
And thou shalt say of mercy "It hath been,"
And living, watch the old lips and loves expire,
And talking, tears shall take thy breath between;
This is the end of every man's desire.

The burden of sad sayings. In that day
Thou shalt tell all thy days and hours, and tell
Thy times and ways and words of love, and say
How one was dear and one desirable,
And sweet was life to hear and sweet to smell,
But now with lights reverse the old hours retire
And the last hour is shod with fire from hell;
This is the end of every man's desire.

The burden of four seasons. Rain in spring,
White rain and wind among the tender trees;
A summer of green sorrows gathering,
Rank autumn in a mist of miseries,
With sad face set towards the year, that sees
The charred ash drop out of the dropping pyre,
And winter wan with many maladies;
This is the end of every man's desire.

The burden of dead faces. Out of sight
And out of love, beyond the reach of hands,
Changed in the changing of the dark and light,
They walk and weep about the barren lands
Where no seed is nor any garner stands,
Where in short breaths the doubtful days respire,
And time's turned glass lets through the sighing sands;
This is the end of every man's desire.

The burden of much gladness. Life and lust
Forsake thee, and the face of thy delight;
And underfoot the heavy hour strews dust,
And overhead strange weathers burn and bite;
And where the red was, lo the bloodless white,
And where the truth was, the likeness of a liar,
And where the day was, the likeness of the night;
This is the end of every man's desire.

L'ENVOY

Princes, and ye whom pleasure quickeneth,
Heed well this rhyme before your pleasure tire;
For life is sweet, but after life is death.
This is the end of every man's desire.

poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne
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The Austral Months

January

The first fair month! In singing Summer’s sphere
She glows, the eldest daughter of the year.
All light, all warmth, all passion, breaths of myrrh,
And subtle hints of rose-lands, come with her.
She is the warm, live month of lustre—she
Makes glad the land and lulls the strong, sad sea.
The highest hope comes with her. In her face
Of pure, clear colour lives exalted grace;
Her speech is beauty, and her radiant eyes
Are eloquent with splendid prophecies.

February

The bright-haired, blue-eyed last of Summer. Lo,
Her clear song lives in all the winds that blow;
The upland torrent and the lowland rill,
The stream of valley and the spring of hill,
The pools that slumber and the brooks that run
Where dense the leaves are, green the light of sun,
Take all her grace of voice and colour. She,
With rich warm vine-blood splashed from heel to knee,
Comes radiant through the yellow woodlands. Far
And near her sweet gifts shine like star by star.
She is the true Demeter. Life of root
Glows under her in gardens flushed with fruit;
She fills the fields with strength and passion—makes
A fire of lustre on the lawn-ringed lakes;
Her beauty awes the great wild sea; the height
Of grey magnificence takes strange delight
And softens at her presence, at the dear
Sweet face whose memory beams through all the year.

March

Clear upland voices, full of wind and stream,
Greet March, the sister of the flying beam
And speedy shadow. She, with rainbow crowned,
Lives in a sphere of songs of mazy sound.
The hymn of waters and the gale’s high tone,
With anthems from the thunder’s mountain throne,
Are with her ever. This, behold, is she
Who draws its great cry from the strong, sad sea;
She is the month of majesty. Her force
Is power that moves along a stately course,
Within the lines of order, like no wild
And lawless strength of winter’s fiercest child.
About her are the wind-whipped torrents; far
Above her gleams and flies the stormy star,
And round her, through the highlands and their rocks,
Rings loud the grand speech from the equinox.

April

The darling of Australia’s Autumn—now
Down dewy dells the strong, swift torrents flow!
This is the month of singing waters—here
A tender radiance fills the Southern year;
No bitter winter sets on herb and root,
Within these gracious glades, a frosty foot;
The spears of sleet, the arrows of the hail,
Are here unknown. But down the dark green dale
Of moss and myrtle, and the herby streams,
This April wanders in a home of dreams;
Her flower-soft name makes language falter. All
Her paths are soft and cool, and runnels fall
In music round her; and the woodlands sing
For evermore, with voice of wind and wing,
Because this is the month of beauty—this
The crowning grace of all the grace that is.

May

Now sings a cool, bland wind, where falls and flows
The runnel by the grave of last year’s rose;
Now, underneath the strong perennial leaves,
The first slow voice of wintering torrent grieves.
Now in a light like English August’s day,
Is seen the fair, sweet, chastened face of May;
She is the daughter of the year who stands
With Autumn’s last rich offerings in her hands;
Behind her gleams the ghost of April’s noon,
Before her is the far, faint dawn of June;
She lingers where the dells and dewy leas
Catch stormy sayings from the great bold seas;
Her nightly raiment is the misty fold
That zones her round with moonlight-coloured gold;
And in the day she sheds, from shining wings,
A tender heat that keeps the life in things.

June

Not like that month when, in imperial space,
The high, strong sun stares at the white world’s face;
Not like that haughty daughter of the year
Who moves, a splendour, in a splendid sphere;
But rather like a nymph of afternoon,
With cool, soft sunshine, comes Australian June.
She is the calm, sweet lady, from whose lips
No breath of living passion ever slips;
The wind that on her virgin forehead blows
Was born too late to speak of last year’s rose;
She never saw a blossom, but her eyes
Of tender beauty see blue, gracious skies;
She loves the mosses, and her feet have been
In woodlands where the leaves are always green;
Her days pass on with sea-songs, and her nights
Shine, full of stars, on lands of frosty lights.

July

High travelling winds, filled with the strong storm’s soul,
Are here, with dark, strange sayings from the Pole;
Now is the time when every great cave rings
With sharp, clear echoes caught from mountain springs;
This is the season when all torrents run
Beneath no bright, glad beauty of the sun.
Here, where the trace of last year’s green is lost,
Are haughty gales, and lordships of the frost.
Far down, by fields forlorn and forelands bleak,
Are wings that fly not, birds that never speak;
But in the deep hearts of the glens, unseen,
Stand grave, mute forests of eternal green;
And here the lady, born in wind and rain,
Comes oft to moan and clap her palms with pain.
This is our wild-faced July, in whose breast
Is never faultless light or perfect rest.

August

Across the range, by every scarred black fell,
Strong Winter blows his horn of wild farewell;
And in the glens, where yet there moves no wing,
A slow, sweet voice is singing of the Spring.
Yea, where the bright, quick woodland torrents run,
A music trembles under rain and sun.
The lips that breathe it are the lips of her
At whose dear touch the wan world’s pulses stir—
The nymph who sets the bow of promise high
And fills with warm life-light the bleak grey sky.
She is the fair-haired August. Ere she leaves
She brings the woodbine blossom round the eaves;
And where the bitter barbs of frost have been
She makes a beauty with her gold and green;
And, while a sea-song floats from bay and beach,
She sheds a mist of blossoms on the peach.

September
*

October

Where fountains sing and many waters meet,
October comes with blossom-trammelled feet.
She sheds green glory by the wayside rills
And clothes with grace the haughty-featured hills.
This is the queen of all the year. She brings
The pure chief beauty of our southern springs.
Fair lady of the yellow hair! Her breath
Starts flowers to life, and shames the storm to death;
Through tender nights and days of generous sun
By prospering woods her clear strong torrents run;
In far deep forests, where all life is mute,
Of leaf and bough she makes a touching lute.
Her life is lovely. Stream, and wind, and bird
Have seen her face—her marvellous voice have heard;
And, in strange tracts of wildwood, all day long,
They tell the story in surpassing song.

November

Now beats the first warm pulse of Summer—now
There shines great glory on the mountain’s brow.
The face of heaven in the western sky,
When falls the sun, is filled with Deity!
And while the first light floods the lake and lea,
The morning makes a marvel of the sea;
The strong leaves sing; and in the deep green zones
Of rock-bound glens the streams have many tones;
And where the evening-coloured waters pass,
Now glides November down fair falls of grass.
She is the wonder with the golden wings,
Who lays one hand in Summer’s—one in Spring’s;
About her hair a sunset radiance glows;
Her mouth is sister of the dewy rose;
And all the beauty of the pure blue skies
Has lent its lustre to her soft bright eyes.

December

The month whose face is holiness! She brings
With her the glory of majestic things.
What words of light, what high resplendent phrase
Have I for all the lustre of her days?
She comes, and carries in her shining sphere
August traditions of the world’s great year;
The noble tale which lifts the human race
Has made a morning of her sacred face.
Now in the emerald home of flower and wing
Clear summer streams their sweet hosannas sing;
The winds are full of anthems, and a lute
Speaks in the listening hills when night is mute
And through dim tracks where talks the royal tree
There floats a grand hymn from the mighty sea;
And where the grey, grave, pondering mountains stand
High music lives—the place is holy land!

poem by Henry Kendall
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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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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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I'm Growing Old

I’M growing old — ‘t is surely so;
And yet how short it seems
Since I was but a sportive child,
Enjoying childish dreams!

I cannot see the change that comes
With such an even pace;
I mark not when the wrinkles fall
Upon my fading face.

I know I’m old; and yet my heart
Is just as young and gay
As e’er it was before my locks
Of bright brown turned to gray.

I know these eyes to other eyes
Look not so bright and glad
As once they looked; and yet ‘tis nor
Because my heart’s more sad.

I never watched with purer joy
The floating clouds and glowing skies,
While glistening tears of rapture fill
These old and fading eyes.

And when I mark the cheek, wkere once
The bright rose used to glow,
It grieves me not to see instead
The almond crown my brow.

I’ve seen the flower grow old and pale,
And withered more than I;
I’ve seen it lose its every charm,
Then droop away and die.

And then I’ve seen it rise again,
Bright as the beaming sky,
And young and pure and beautiful—
And felt that so shall I.

Then what if I am growing old?
My heart is changeless still,
And God has given me enough
This loving heart to fill.

I love to see the sun go down,
And lengthening shadows throw
Along the ground, while o’er my head
The clouds in crimson glow.

I see, beyond those gorgeous clouds,
A country bright and fair,
Which needs no sun: God and the Lamb
Its light and beauty are.

I seem to hear the wondrous song
Redeemed sinners sing;
And my heart leaps to join the throng
To praise the Heavenly King.

I seem to see three cherub boys,
As hand in hand they go,
With golden curls and snowy wings,
Whose eyes with rapture glow.

When I was young I called them mine —
Now Heaven’s sweet ones are they;
But I shall claim my own again,
When I am called away.

Perhaps, when heaven’s bright gate I’ve passed,
They’ll know from every other
The one who gave them back to God,
And haste to call me mother.

0! 1 am glad I’m growing old!
For every day I spend
Shall bring me one day nearer that
Bright day that has no end.

poem by Anonymous Americas
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To Henry Halloran

YOU KNOW I left my forest home full loth,
And those weird ways I knew so well and long,
Dishevelled with their sloping sidelong growth
Of twisted thorn and kurrajong.

It seems to me, my friend (and this wild thought
Of all wild thoughts, doth chiefly make me bleed),
That in those hills and valleys wonder-fraught,
I loved and lost a noble creed.

A splendid creed! But let me even turn
And hide myself from what I’ve seen, and try
To fathom certain truths you know, and learn
The Beauty shining in your sky:

Remembering you in ardent autumn nights,
And Stenhouse near you, like a fine stray guest
Of other days, with all his lore of lights
So manifold and manifest!

Then hold me firm. I cannot choose but long
For that which lies and burns beyond my reach,
Suggested in your steadfast, subtle song
And his most marvellous speech!

For now my soul goes drifting back again,
Ay, drifting, drifting, like the silent snow
While scattered sheddings, in a fall of rain,
Revive the dear lost Long Ago!

The time I, loitering by untrodden fens,
Intent upon low-hanging lustrous skies,
Heard mellowed psalms from sounding southern glens—
Euroma, dear to dreaming eyes!

And caught seductive tokens of a voice
Half maddened with the dim, delirious themes
Of perfect Love, and the immortal choice
Of starry faces—Astral dreams!

That last was yours! And if you sometimes find
An alien darkness on the front of things,
Sing none the less for Life, nor fall behind,
Like me, with trailing, tired wings!

Yea, though the heavy Earth wears sackcloth now
Because she hath the great prophetic grief
Which makes me set my face one way, and bow
And falter for a far belief,

Be faithful yet for all, my brave bright peer,
In that rare light you hold so true and good;
And find me something clearer than the clear
White spaces of Infinitude.

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
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Charles Harpur

Where Harpur lies, the rainy streams,
And wet hill-heads, and hollows weeping,
Are swift with wind, and white with gleams,
And hoarse with sounds of storms unsleeping.
Fit grave it is for one whose song
Was tuned by tones he caught from torrents,
And filled with mountain breaths, and strong,
Wild notes of falling forest currents.

So let him sleep, the rugged hymns
And broken lights of woods above him!
And let me sing how sorrow dims
The eyes of those that used to love him.

As April in the wilted wold
Turns faded eyes on splendours waning,
What time the latter leaves are old,
And ruin strikes the strays remaining;

So we that knew this singer dead,
Whose hands attuned the harp Australian,
May set the face and bow the head,
And mourn his fate and fortunes alien.

The burden of a perished faith
Went sighing through his speech of sweetness,
With human hints of time and death,
And subtle notes of incompleteness.

But when the fiery power of youth
Had passed away and left him nameless,
Serene as light, and strong as truth,
He lived his life, untired and tameless.

And, far and free, this man of men,
With wintry hair and wasted feature,
Had fellowship with gorge and glen,
And learned the loves and runes of Nature.

Strange words of wind, and rhymes of rain,
And whispers from the inland fountains
Are mingled, in his various strain,
With leafy breaths of piny mountains.

But as the undercurrents sigh
Beneath the surface of a river,
The music of humanity
Dwells in his forest-psalms for ever.

No soul was he to sit on heights
And live with rocks apart and scornful:
Delights of men were his delights,
And common troubles made him mournful.

The flying forms of unknown powers
With lofty wonder caught and filled him;
But there were days of gracious hours
When sights and sounds familiar thrilled him.

The pathos worn by wayside things,
The passion found in simple faces,
Struck deeper than the life of springs
Or strength of storms and sea-swept places.

But now he sleeps, the tired bard,
The deepest sleep; and, lo! I proffer
These tender leaves of my regard,
With hands that falter as they offer.

poem by Henry Kendall
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My Lost Youth

Often I think of the beautiful town
That is seated by the sea;
Often in thought go up and down
The pleasant streets of that dear old town,
And my youth comes back to me.
And a verse of a Lapland song
Is haunting my memory still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I can see the shadowy lines of its trees,
And catch, in sudden gleams,
The sheen of the far-surrounding seas,
And islands that were the Hesperides
Of all my boyish dreams.
And the burden of that old song,
It murmurs and whispers still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I remember the black wharves and the ships,
And the sea-tides tossing free;
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.
And the voice of that wayward song
Is singing and saying still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I remember the bulwarks by the shore,
And the fort upon the hill;
The sunrise gun, with its hollow roar,
The drum-beat repeated o'er and o'er,
And the bugle wild and shrill.
And the music of that old song
Throbs in my memory still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I remember the sea-fight far away,
How it thundered o'er the tide!
And the dead captains, as they lay
In their graves, o'erlooking the tranquil bay
Where they in battle died.
And the sound of that mournful song
Goes through me with a thrill:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I can see the breezy dome of groves,
The shadows of Deering's Woods;
And the friendships old and the early loves
Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves
In quiet neighborhoods.
And the verse of that sweet old song,
It flutters and murmurs still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I remember the gleams and glooms that dart
Across the school-boy's brain;
The song and the silence in the heart,
That in part are prophecies, and in part
Are longings wild and vain.
And the voice of that fitful song
Sings on, and is never still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

There are things of which I may not speak;
There are dreams that cannot die;
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,
And bring a pallor into the cheek,
And a mist before the eye.
And the words of that fatal song
Come over me like a chill:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

Strange to me now are the forms I meet
When I visit the dear old town;
But the native air is pure and sweet,
And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street,
As they balance up and down,
Are singing the beautiful song,
Are sighing and whispering still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

And Deering's Woods are fresh and fair,
And with joy that is almost pain
My heart goes back to wander there,
And among the dreams of the days that were,
I find my lost youth again.
And the strange and beautiful song,
The groves are repeating it still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Mary Rivers

Path beside the silver waters, flashing in October’s sun—
Walk, by green and golden margins where the sister streamlets run—
Twenty shining springs have vanished, full of flower, and leaf, and bird,
Since the step of Mary Rivers in your lawny dell was heard!
Twenty white-haired Junes have left us—grey with frost and bleak with gale—
Since the hand of her we loved so plucked the blossoms in your dale.
Twenty summers, twenty autumns, from the grand old hills have passed,
With their robes of royal colour, since we saw the darling last.
Morning comes—the blessed morning! and the slow song of the sea,
Like a psalm from radiant altars, floats across a rose-red lea;
Then the fair, strong noonday blossoms, and the reaper seeks the cool
Valley of the moss and myrtle, and the glimmering water-pool.
Noonday flames and evening follows; and the lordly mountains rest
Heads arrayed with tenfold splendour on the rich heart of the West.
Evening walks with moon and music where the higher life has been;
But the face of Mary Rivers there will nevermore be seen.

Ah! when autumn dells are dewy, and the wave is very still,
And that grey ghost called the Twilight passes from the distant hill—
Even in the hallowed nightfall, when the fathers sit and dream,
And the splendid rose of heaven sees a sister in the stream—
Often do I watch the waters gleaming in a starry bay,
Thinking of a bygone beauty, and a season far away;
Musing on the grace that left us in a time of singing rain,
On the lady who will never walk amongst these heaths again.

Four there were, but two were taken; and this darling we deplore,
She was sweetest of the circle—she was dearest of the four!
In the daytime and the dewtime comes the phantom of her face:
None will ever sit where she did—none will ever fill her place.
With the passing of our Mary, like a sunset out of sight,
Passed away our pure first passion—all its life and all its light!
All that made the world a dreamland—all the glory and the glow
Of the fine, fresh, morning feeling vanished twenty years ago.

Girl, whose strange, unearthly beauty haunts us ever in our sleep,
Many griefs have worn our hearts out—we are now too tired to weep!
Time has tried us, years have changed us; but the sweetness shed by you
Falls upon our spirits daily, like divine, immortal dew.
Shining are our thoughts about you—of the blossoms past recall,
You are still the rose of lustre—still the fairest of them all;
In the sleep that brings the garland gathered from the bygone hours,
You are still our Mary Rivers—still the queen of all the flowers.

Let me ask, where none can hear me—When you passed into the shine,
And you heard a great love calling, did you know that it was mine?
In your life of light and music, tell me did you ever see,
Shining in a holy silence, what was as a flame in me?
Ah, my darling! no one saw it. Purer than untrodden dew
Was that first unhappy passion buried in the grave with you.
Bird and leaf will keep the secret—wind and wood will never tell
Men the thing that I have whispered. Mary Rivers, fare you well!

poem by Henry Kendall
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Memories

A beautiful and happy girl,
With step as light as summer air,
Eyes glad with smiles, and brow of pearl,
Shadowed by many a careless curl
Of unconfined and flowing hair;
A seeming child in everything,
Save thoughtful brow and ripening charms,
As Nature wears the smile of Spring
When sinking into Summer's arms.

A mind rejoicing in the light
Which melted through its graceful bower,
Leaf after leaf, dew-moist and bright,
And stainless in its holy white,
Unfolding like a morning flower
A heart, which, like a fine-toned lute,
With every breath of feeling woke,
And, even when the tongue was mute,
From eye and lip in music spoke.

How thrills once more the lengthening chain
Of memory, at the thought of thee!
Old hopes which long in dust have lain
Old dreams, come thronging back again,
And boyhood lives again in me;
I feel its glow upon my cheek,
Its fulness of the heart is mine,
As when I leaned to hear thee speak,
Or raised my doubtful eye to thine.

I hear again thy low replies,
I feel thy arm within my own,
And timidly again uprise
The fringed lids of hazel eyes,
With soft brown tresses overblown.
Ah! memories of sweet summer eves,
Of moonlit wave and willowy way,
Of stars and flowers, and dewy leaves,
And smiles and tones more dear than they!

Ere this, thy quiet eye hath smiled
My picture of thy youth to see,
When, half a woman, half a child,
Thy very artlessness beguiled,
And folly's self seemed wise in thee;
I too can smile, when o'er that hour
The lights of memory backward stream,
Yet feel the while that manhood's power
Is vainer than my boyhood's dream.

Years have passed on, and left their trace,
Of graver care and deeper thought;
And unto me the calm, cold face
Of manhood, and to thee the grace
Of woman's pensive beauty brought.
More wide, perchance, for blame than praise,
The school-boy's humble name has flown;
Thine, in the green and quiet ways
Of unobtrusive goodness known.

And wider yet in thought and deed
Diverge our pathways, one in youth;
Thine the Genevan's sternest creed,
While answers to my spirit's need
The Derby dalesman's simple truth.
For thee, the priestly rite and prayer,
And holy day, and solemn psalm;
For me, the silent reverence where
My brethren gather, slow and calm.

Yet hath thy spirit left on me
An impress Time has worn not out,
And something of myself in thee,
A shadow from the past, I see,
Lingering, even yet, thy way about;
Not wholly can the heart unlearn
That lesson of its better hours,
Not yet has Time's dull footstep worn
To common dust that path of flowers.

Thus, while at times before our eyes
The shadows melt, and fall apart,
And, smiling through them, round us lies
The warm light of our morning skies,--
The Indian Summer of the heart!
In secret sympathies of mind,
In founts of feeling which retain
Their pure, fresh flow, we yet may find
Our early dreams not wholly vain

poem by John Greenleaf Whittier
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Orara

THE STRONG sob of the chafing stream
That seaward fights its way
Down crags of glitter, dells of gleam,
Is in the hills to-day.

But far and faint, a grey-winged form
Hangs where the wild lights wane—
The phantom of a bygone storm,
A ghost of wind and rain.

The soft white feet of afternoon
Are on the shining meads,
The breeze is as a pleasant tune
Amongst the happy reeds.

The fierce, disastrous, flying fire,
That made the great caves ring,
And scarred the slope, and broke the spire,
Is a forgotten thing.

The air is full of mellow sounds,
The wet hill-heads are bright,
And down the fall of fragrant grounds
The deep ways flame with light.

A rose-red space of stream I see,
Past banks of tender fern;
A radiant brook, unknown to me
Beyond its upper turn:

The singing silver life I hear,
Whose home is in the green,
Far-folded woods of fountains clear,
Where I have never been.

Ah, brook above the upper bend,
I often long to stand
Where you in soft, cool shades descend
From the untrodden land!

Ah, folded woods, that hide the grace
Of moss and torrents strong,
I often wish to know the face
Of that which sings your song!

But I may linger, long, and look
Till night is over all:
My eyes will never see the brook,
Or sweet, strange waterfall.

The world is round me with its heat,
And toil, and cares that tire;
I cannot with my feeble feet
Climb after my desire.

But, on the lap of lands unseen,
Within a secret zone,
There shine diviner gold and green
Than man has ever known.

And where the silver waters sing
Down hushed and holy dells,
The flower of a celestial Spring,
A tenfold splendour, dwells.

Yea, in my dream of fall and brook
By far sweet forests furled,
I see that light for which I look
In vain through all the world—

The glory of a larger sky
On slopes of hills sublime,
That speak with God and morning, high
Above the ways of Time!

Ah! haply, in this sphere of change
Where shadows spoil the beam,
It would not do to climb that range
And test my radiant Dream.

The slightest glimpse of yonder place,
Untrodden and alone,
Might wholly kill that nameless grace
The charm of the unknown.

And therefore, though I look and long,
Perhaps the lot is bright
Which keeps the river of the song
A beauty out of sight

poem by Henry Kendall
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Leaves from Australian Forests (12 Sonnets)

I
A Mountain Spring

Peace hath an altar there. The sounding feet
Of thunder and the ’wildering wings of rain
Against fire-rifted summits flash and beat,
And through grey upper gorges swoop and strain;
But round that hallowed mountain-spring remain,
Year after year, the days of tender heat,
And gracious nights, whose lips with flowers are sweet,
And filtered lights, and lutes of soft refrain.
A still, bright pool. To men I may not tell
The secret that its heart of water knows,
The story of a loved and lost repose;
Yet this I say to cliff and close-leaved dell:
A fitful spirit haunts yon limpid well,
Whose likeness is the faithless face of Rose.

II
Laura

If Laura—lady of the flower-soft face—
Should light upon these verses, she may take
The tenderest line, and through its pulses trace
What man can suffer for a woman’s sake.
For in the nights that burn, the days that break,
A thin pale figure stands in Passion’s place,
And peace comes not, nor yet the perished grace
Of youth, to keep old faiths and fires awake.
Ah! marvellous maid. Life sobs, and sighing saith,
“She left me, fleeting like a fluttered dove;
But I would have a moment of her breath,
So I might taste the sweetest sense thereof,
And catch from blossoming, honeyed lips of love
Some faint, some fair, some dim, delicious death.”

III
By a River

By red-ripe mouth and brown, luxurious eyes
Of her I love, by all your sweetness shed
In far, fair days, on one whose memory flies
To faithless lights, and gracious speech gainsaid,
I pray you, when yon river-path I tread,
Make with the woodlands some soft compromise,
Lest they should vex me into fruitless sighs
With visions of a woman’s gleaming head!
For every green and golden-hearted thing
That gathers beauty in that shining place,
Beloved of beams and wooed by wind and wing,
Is rife with glimpses of her marvellous face;
And in the whispers of the lips of Spring
The music of her lute-like voice I trace.

IV
Attila

What though his feet were shod with sharp, fierce flame,
And death and ruin were his daily squires,
The Scythian, helped by Heaven’s thunders, came:
The time was ripe for God’s avenging fires.
Lo! loose, lewd trulls, and lean, luxurious liars
Had brought the fair, fine face of Rome to shame,
And made her one with sins beyond a name—
That queenly daughter of imperial sires!
The blood of elders like the blood of sheep,
Was dashed across the circus. Once while din
And dust and lightnings, and a draggled heap
Of beast-slain men made lords with laughter leap,
Night fell, with rain. The earth, so sick of sin,
Had turned her face into the dark to weep.

V
A Reward

Because a steadfast flame of clear intent
Gave force and beauty to full-actioned life;
Because his way was one of firm ascent,
Whose stepping-stones were hewn of change and strife;
Because as husband loveth noble wife
He loved fair Truth; because the thing he meant
To do, that thing he did, nor paused, nor bent
In face of poor and pale conclusions; yea!
Because of this, how fares the Leader dead?
What kind of mourners weep for him to-day?
What golden shroud is at his funeral spread?
Upon his brow what leaves of laurel, say?
About his breast is tied a sackcloth grey,
And knots of thorns deface his lordly head.

VI To ——
A handmaid to the genius of thy song
Is sweet, fair Scholarship. ’Tis she supplies
The fiery spirit of the passioned eyes
With subtle syllables, whose notes belong
To some chief source of perfect melodies;
And glancing through a laurelled, lordly throng
Of shining singers, lo! my vision flies
To William Shakespeare! He it is whose strong,
Full, flute-like music haunts thy stately verse.
A worthy Levite of his court thou art!
One sent among us to defeat the curse
That binds us to the Actual. Yea, thy part,
Oh, lute-voiced lover! is to lull the heart
Of love repelled, its darkness to disperse.

VII
The Stanza of Childe Harold

Who framed the stanza of Childe Harold? He
It was who, halting on a stormy shore,
Knew well the lofty voice which evermore,
In grand distress, doth haunt the sleepless sea
With solemn sounds. And as each wave did roll
Till one came up, the mightiest of the whole,
To sweep and surge across the vacant lea,
Wild words were wedded to wild melody.
This poet must have had a speechless sense
Of some dead summer’s boundless affluence;
Else, whither can we trace the passioned lore
Of Beauty, steeping to the very core
His royal verse, and that rare light which lies
About it, like a sunset in the skies?

VIII
A Living Poet

He knows the sweet vexation in the strife
Of Love with Time, this bard who fain would stray
To fairer place beyond the storms of life,
With astral faces near him day by day.
In deep-mossed dells the mellow waters flow
Which best he loves; for there the echoes, rife
With rich suggestions of his long ago,
Astarte, pass with thee! And, far away,
Dear southern seasons haunt the dreamy eye:
Spring, flower-zoned, and Summer, warbling low
In tasselled corn, alternate come and go,
While gypsy Autumn, splashed from heel to thigh
With vine-blood, treads the leaves; and, halting nigh,
Wild Winter bends across a beard of snow.

IX
Dante and Virgil

When lost Francesca sobbed her broken tale
Of love and sin and boundless agony,
While that wan spirit by her side did wail
And bite his lips for utter misery—
The grief which could not speak, nor hear, nor see—
So tender grew the superhuman face
Of one who listened, that a mighty trace
Of superhuman woe gave way, and pale
The sudden light up-struggled to its place;
While all his limbs began to faint and fail
With such excess of pity. But, behind,
The Roman Virgil stood—the calm, the wise—
With not a shadow in his regal eyes,
A stately type of all his stately kind.

X
Rest

Sometimes we feel so spent for want of rest,
We have no thought beyond. I know to-day,
When tired of bitter lips and dull delay
With faithless words, I cast mine eyes upon
The shadows of a distant mountain-crest,
And said “That hill must hide within its breast
Some secret glen secluded from the sun.
Oh, mother Nature! would that I could run
Outside to thee; and, like a wearied guest,
Half blind with lamps, and sick of feasting, lay
An aching head on thee. Then down the streams
The moon might swim, and I should feel her grace,
While soft winds blew the sorrows from my face,
So quiet in the fellowship of dreams.”

XI
After Parting

I cannot tell what change hath come to you
To vex your splendid hair. I only know
One grief. The passion left betwixt us two,
Like some forsaken watchfire, burneth low.
’Tis sad to turn and find it dying so,
Without a hope of resurrection! Yet,
O radiant face that found me tired and lone!
I shall not for the dear, dead past forget
The sweetest looks of all the summers gone.
Ah! time hath made familiar wild regret;
For now the leaves are white in last year’s bowers,
And now doth sob along the ruined leas
The homeless storm from saddened southern seas,
While March sits weeping over withered flowers.

XII
Alfred Tennyson

The silvery dimness of a happy dream
I’ve known of late. Methought where Byron moans,
Like some wild gulf in melancholy zones,
I passed tear-blinded. Once a lurid gleam
Of stormy sunset loitered on the sea,
While, travelling troubled like a straitened stream,
The voice of Shelley died away from me.
Still sore at heart, I reached a lake-lit lea.
And then the green-mossed glades with many a grove,
Where lies the calm which Wordsworth used to love,
And, lastly, Locksley Hall, from whence did rise
A haunting song that blew and breathed and blew
With rare delights. ’Twas there I woke and knew
The sumptuous comfort left in drowsy eyes.

poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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The Year of the Rose

From the depths of the green garden-closes
Where the summer in darkness dozes
Till autumn pluck from his hand
An hour-glass that holds not a sand;
From the maze that a flower-belt encloses
To the stones and sea-grass on the strand
How red was the reign of the roses
Over the rose-crowned land!

The year of the rose is brief;
From the first blade blown to the sheaf,
From the thin green leaf to the gold,
It has time to be sweet and grow old,
To triumph and leave not a leaf
For witness in winter's sight
How lovers once in the light
Would mix their breath with its breath,
And its spirit was quenched not of night,
As love is subdued not of death.

In the red-rose land not a mile
Of the meadows from stile to stile,
Of the valleys from stream to stream,
But the air was a long sweet dream
And the earth was a sweet wide smile
Red-mouthed of a goddess, returned
From the sea which had borne her and burned,
That with one swift smile of her mouth
Looked full on the north as it yearned,
And the north was more than the south.

For the north, when winter was long,
In his heart had made him a song,
And clothed it with wings of desire,
And shod it with shoon as of fire,
To carry the tale of his wrong
To the south-west wind by the sea,
That none might bear it but he
To the ear of the goddess unknown
Who waits till her time shall be
To take the world for a throne.

In the earth beneath, and above
In the heaven where her name is love,
She warms with light from her eyes
The seasons of life as they rise,
And her eyes are as eyes of a dove,
But the wings that lift her and bear
As an eagle's, and all her hair
As fire by the wind's breath curled,
And her passage is song through the air,
And her presence is spring through the world.

So turned she northward and came,
And the white-thorn land was aflame
With the fires that were shed from her feet,
That the north, by her love made sweet,
Should be called by a rose-red name;
And a murmur was heard as of doves,
And a music beginning of loves
In the light that the roses made,
Such light as the music loves,
The music of man with maid.

But the days drop one upon one,
And a chill soft wind is begun
In the heart of the rose-red maze
That weeps for the roseleaf days
And the reign of the rose undone
That ruled so long in the light,
And by spirit, and not by sight,
Through the darkness thrilled with its breath,
Still ruled in the viewless night,
As love might rule over death.

The time of lovers is brief;
From the fair first joy to the grief
That tells when love is grown old,
From the warm wild kiss to the cold,
From the red to the white-rose leaf,
They have but a season to seem
As rose-leaves lost on a stream
That part not and pass not apart
As a spirit from dream to dream,
As a sorrow from heart to heart.

From the bloom and the gloom that encloses
The death-bed of Love where he dozes
Till a relic be left not of sand
To the hour-glass that breaks in his hand;
From the change in the grey garden-closes
To the last stray grass of the strand,
A rain and ruin of roses
Over the red-rose land.

poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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St. Andrew's Bay

NIGHT.

Ah, listen through the music, from the shore,
The 'melancholy long-withdrawing roar';
Beneath the Minster, and the windy caves,
The wide North Ocean, marshalling his waves
Even so forlorn--in worlds beyond our ken -
May sigh the seas that are not heard of men;
Even so forlorn, prophetic of man's fate,
Sounded the cold sea-wave disconsolate,
When none but God might hear the boding tone,
As God shall hear the long lament alone,
When all is done, when all the tale is told,
And the gray sea-wave echoes as of old!

MORNING.

This was the burden of the Night,
The saying of the sea,
But lo! the hours have brought the light,
The laughter of the waves, the flight
Of dipping sea-birds, foamy white,
That are so glad to be!
'Forget!' the happy creatures cry,
'Forget Night's monotone,
With us be glad in sea and sky,
The days are thine, the days that fly,
The days God gives to know him by,
And not the Night alone!'

poem by Andrew Lang
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Summer By The Lakeside: Lake Winnipesaukee

I. NOON.
White clouds, whose shadows haunt the deep,
Light mists, whose soft embraces keep
The sunshine on the hills asleep!

O isles of calm! O dark, still wood!
And stiller skies that overbrood
Your rest with deeper quietude!

O shapes and hues, dim beckoning, through
Yon mountain gaps, my longing view
Beyond the purple and the blue,

To stiller sea and greener land,
And softer lights and airs more bland,
And skies,--the hollow of God's hand!

Transfused through you, O mountain friends!
With mine your solemn spirit blends,
And life no more hath separate ends.

I read each misty mountain sign,
I know the voice of wave and pine,
And I am yours, and ye are mine.

Life's burdens fall, its discords cease,
I lapse into the glad release
Of Nature's own exceeding peace.

O welcome calm of heart and mind!
As falls yon fir-tree's loosened rind
To leave a tenderer growth behind,

So fall the weary years away;
A child again, my head I lay
Upon the lap of this sweet day.

This western wind hath Lethean powers,
Yon noonday cloud nepenthe showers,
The lake is white with lotus-flowers!

Even Duty's voice is faint and low,
And slumberous Conscience, waking slow,
Forgets her blotted scroll to show.

The Shadow which pursues us all,
Whose ever-nearing steps appall,
Whose voice we hear behind us call,--

That Shadow blends with mountain gray,
It speaks but what the light waves say,--
Death walks apart from Fear to-day!

Rocked on her breast, these pines and I
Alike on Nature's love rely;
And equal seems to live or die.

Assured that He whose presence fills
With light the spaces of these hills
No evil to His creatures wills,

The simple faith remains, that He
Will do, whatever that may be,
The best alike for man and tree.

What mosses over one shall grow,
What light and life the other know,
Unanxious, leaving Him to show.

II. EVENING.
Yon mountain's side is black with night,
While, broad-orhed, o'er its gleaming crown
The moon, slow-rounding into sight,
On the hushed inland sea looks down.

How start to light the clustering isles,
Each silver-hemmed! How sharply show
The shadows of their rocky piles,
And tree-tops in the wave below!

How far and strange the mountains seem,
Dim-looming through the pale, still light
The vague, vast grouping of a dream,
They stretch into the solemn night.

Beneath, lake, wood, and peopled vale,
Hushed by that presence grand and grave,
Are silent, save the cricket's wail,
And low response of leaf and wave.

Fair scenes! whereto the Day and Night
Make rival love, I leave ye soon,
What time before the eastern light
The pale ghost of the setting moon

Shall hide behind yon rocky spines,
And the young archer, Morn, shall break
His arrows on the mountain pines,
And, golden-sandalled, walk the lake!

Farewell! around this smiling bay
Gay-hearted Health, and Life in bloom,
With lighter steps than mine, may stray
In radiant summers yet to come.

But none shall more regretful leave
These waters and these hills than I
Or, distant, fonder dream how eve
Or dawn is painting wave and sky;

How rising moons shine sad and mild
On wooded isle and silvering bay;
Or setting suns beyond the piled
And purple mountains lead the day;

Nor laughing girl, nor bearding boy,
Nor full-pulsed manhood, lingering here,
Shall add, to life's abounding joy,
The charmed repose to suffering dear.

Still waits kind Nature to impart
Her choicest gifts to such as gain
An entrance to her loving heart
Through the sharp discipline of pain.

Forever from the Hand that takes
One blessing from us others fall;
And, soon or late, our Father makes
His perfect recompense to all!

Oh, watched by Silence and the Night,
And folded in the strong embrace
Of the great mountains, with the light
Of the sweet heavens upon thy face,

Lake of the Northland! keep thy dower
Of beauty still, and while above
Thy solemn mountains speak of power,
Be thou the mirror of God's love.

poem by John Greenleaf Whittier
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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