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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Related quotes
Robert Parkes
High travelling winds by royal hill
Their awful anthem sing,
And songs exalted flow and fill
The caverns of the spring.
To-night across a wild wet plain
A shadow sobs and strays;
The trees are whispering in the rain
Of long departed days.
I cannot say what forest saith —
Its words are strange to me:
I only know that in its breath
Are tones that used to be.
Yea, in these deep dim solitudes
I hear a sound I know —
The voice that lived in Penrith woods
Twelve weary years ago.
And while the hymn of other years
Is on a listening land,
The Angel of the Past appears
And leads me by the hand;
And takes me over moaning wave,
And tracts of sleepless change,
To set me by a lonely grave
Within a lonely range.
The halo of the beautiful
Is round the quiet spot;
The grass is deep and green and cool,
Where sound of life is not.
Here in this lovely lap of bloom,
The grace of glen and glade,
That tender days and nights illume,
My gentle friend was laid.
I do not mark the shell that lies
Beneath the touching flowers;
I only see the radiant eyes
Of other scenes and hours.
I only turn, by grief inspired,
Like some forsaken thing,
To look upon a life retired
As hushed Bethesda’s spring.
The glory of unblemished days
Is on the silent mound —
The light of years, too pure for praise;
I kneel on holy ground!
Here is the clay of one whose mind
Was fairer than the dew,
The sweetest nature of his kind
I haply ever knew.
This Christian, walking on the white
Clear paths apart from strife,
Kept far from all the heat and light
That fills his father’s life.
The clamour and exceeding flame
Were never in his days:
A higher object was his aim
Than thrones of shine and praise.
Ah! like an English April psalm,
That floats by sea and strand,
He passed away into the calm
Of the Eternal Land.
The chair he filled is set aside
Upon his father’s floor;
In morning hours, at eventide,
His step is heard no more.
No more his face the forest knows;
His voice is of the past;
But from his life of beauty flows
A radiance that will last.
Yea, from the hours that heard his speech
High shining mem’ries give
That fine example which will teach
Our children how to live.
Here, kneeling in the body, far
From grave of flower and dew,
My friend beyond the path of star,
I say these words to you.
Though you were as a fleeting flame
Across my road austere,
The memory of your face became
A thing for ever dear.
I never have forgotten yet
The Christian’s gentle touch;
And, since the time when last we met,
You know I’ve suffered much.
I feel that I have given pain
By certain words and deeds,
But stricken here with Sorrow’s rain,
My contrite spirit bleeds.
For your sole sake I rue the blow,
But this assurance send:
I smote, in noon, the public foe,
But not the private friend.
I know that once I wronged your sire,
But since that awful day
My soul has passed through blood and fire,
My head is very grey.
Here let me pause! From years like yours
There ever flows and thrives
The splendid blessing which endures
Beyond our little lives.
From lonely lands across the wave
Is sent to-night by me
This rose of reverence for the grave
Beside the mountain lea.
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Heath from the Highlands
Here, where the great hills fall away
To bays of silver sea,
I hold within my hand to-day
A wild thing, strange to me.
Behind me is the deep green dell
Where lives familiar light;
The leaves and flowers I know so well
Are gleaming in my sight.
And yonder is the mountain glen,
Where sings in trees unstirred
By breath of breeze or axe of men
The shining satin-bird.
The old weird cry of plover comes
Across the marshy ways,
And here the hermit hornet hums,
And here the wild bee strays.
No novel life or light I see,
On hill, in dale beneath:
All things around are known to me
Except this bit of heath.
This touching growth hath made me dream -
It sends my soul afar
To where the Scottish mountains gleam
Against the Northern star.
It droops - this plant - like one who grieves;
But, while my fancy glows,
There is that glory on its leaves
Which never robed the rose.
For near its wind-blown native spot
Were born, by crags uphurled,
The ringing songs of Walter Scott
That shook the whole wide world.
There haply by the sounding streams,
And where the fountains break,
He saw the darling of his dreams,
The Lady of the Lake.
And on the peaks where never leaf
Of lowland beauty grew,
Perhaps he met Clan Alpine's chief,
The rugged Roderick Dhu.
Not far, perchance, this heather throve
(Above fair banks of ferns),
From that green place of stream and grove
That knew the voice of Burns.
Against the radiant river ways
Still waves the noble wood,
Where in the old majestic days
The Scottish poet stood.
Perhaps my heather used to beam
In robes of morning frost,
By dells which saw that lovely dream -
The Mary that he lost.
I hope, indeed, the singer knew
The little spot of land
On which the mountain beauty grew
That withers in my hand.
A Highland sky my vision fills;
I feel the great, strong North -
The hard grey weather of the hills
That brings men-children forth.
The peaks of Scotland, where the din
And flame of thunders go,
Seem near me, with the masculine,
Hale sons of wind and snow.
So potent is this heather here,
That under skies of blue,
I seem to breathe the atmosphere
That William Wallace knew.
And under windy mountain wall,
Where breaks the torrent loose,
I fancy I can hear the call
Of grand old Robert Bruce.
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Names Upon a Stone: (Inscribed to G. L. Fagan, Esq.)
ACROSS bleak widths of broken sea
A fierce north-easter breaks,
And makes a thunder on the lea—
A whiteness of the lakes.
Here, while beyond the rainy stream
The wild winds sobbing blow,
I see the river of my dream
Four wasted years ago.
Narrara of the waterfalls,
The darling of the hills,
Whose home is under mountain walls
By many-luted rills!
Her bright green nooks and channels cool
I never more may see;
But, ah! the Past was beautiful—
The sights that used to be.
There was a rock-pool in a glen
Beyond Narrara’s sands;
The mountains shut it in from men
In flowerful fairy lands;
But once we found its dwelling-place—
The lovely and the lone—
And, in a dream, I stooped to trace
Our names upon a stone.
Above us, where the star-like moss
Shone on the wet, green wall
That spanned the straitened stream across,
We saw the waterfall—
A silver singer far away,
By folded hills and hoar;
Its voice is in the woods to-day—
A voice I hear no more.
I wonder if the leaves that screen
The rock-pool of the past
Are yet as soft and cool and green
As when we saw them last!
I wonder if that tender thing,
The moss, has overgrown
The letters by the limpid spring—
Our names upon the stone!
Across the face of scenes we know
There may have come a change—
The places seen four years ago
Perhaps would now look strange.
To you, indeed, they cannot be
What haply once they were:
A friend beloved by you and me
No more will greet us there.
Because I know the filial grief
That shrinks beneath the touch—
The noble love whose words are brief—
I will not say too much;
But often when the night-winds strike
Across the sighing rills,
I think of him whose life was like
The rock-pool’s in the hills.
A beauty like the light of song
Is in my dreams, that show
The grand old man who lived so long
As spotless as the snow.
A fitting garland for the dead
I cannot compass yet;
But many things he did and said
I never will forget.
In dells where once we used to rove
The slow, sad water grieves;
And ever comes from glimmering grove
The liturgy of leaves.
But time and toil have marked my face,
My heart has older grown
Since, in the woods, I stooped to trace
Our names upon the stone.
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Leichhardt
LORDLY harp, by lordly master wakened from majestic sleep,
Yet shall speak and yet shall sing the words which make the fathers weep!
Voice surpassing human voices—high, unearthly harmony—
Yet shall tell the tale of hero, in exalted years to be!
In the ranges, by the rivers, on the uplands, down the dells,
Where the sound of wind and wave is, where the mountain anthem swells,
Yet shall float the song of lustre, sweet with tears and fair with flame,
Shining with a theme of beauty, holy with our Leichhardt’s name!
Name of him who faced for science thirsty tracts of bitter glow,
Lurid lands that no one knows of—two-and-thirty years ago.
Born by hills of hard grey weather, far beyond the northern seas,
German mountains were his sponsors, and his mates were German trees;
Grandeur of the old-world forests passed into his radiant soul,
With the song of stormy crescents where the mighty waters roll.
Thus he came to be a brother of the river and the wood—
Thus the leaf, the bird, the blossom, grew a gracious sisterhood;
Nature led him to her children, in a space of light divine:
Kneeling down, he said—“My mother, let me be as one of thine!”
So she took him—thence she loved him—lodged him in her home of dreams,
Taught him what the trees were saying, schooled him in the speech of streams.
For her sake he crossed the waters—loving her, he left the place
Hallowed by his father’s ashes, and his human mother’s face—
Passed the seas and entered temples domed by skies of deathless beam,
Walled about by hills majestic, stately spires and peaks supreme!
Here he found a larger beauty—here the lovely lights were new
On the slopes of many flowers, down the gold-green dells of dew.
In the great august cathedral of his holy lady, he
Daily worshipped at her altars, nightly bent the reverent knee—
Heard the hymns of night and morning, learned the psalm of solitudes;
Knew that God was very near him—felt His presence in the woods!
But the starry angel, Science, from the home of glittering wings,
Came one day and talked to Nature by melodious mountain springs:
“Let thy son be mine,” she pleaded; “lend him for a space,” she said,
“So that he may earn the laurels I have woven for his head!”
And the lady, Nature, listened; and she took her loyal son
From the banks of moss and myrtle—led him to the Shining One!
Filled his lordly soul with gladness—told him of a spacious zone
Eye of man had never looked at, human foot had never known.
Then the angel, Science, beckoned, and he knelt and whispered low—
“I will follow where you lead me”—two-and-thirty years ago.
On the tracts of thirst and furnace—on the dumb, blind, burning plain,
Where the red earth gapes for moisture, and the wan leaves hiss for rain,
In a land of dry, fierce thunder, did he ever pause and dream
Of the cool green German valley and the singing German stream?
When the sun was as a menace, glaring from a sky of brass,
Did he ever rest, in visions, on a lap of German grass?
Past the waste of thorny terrors, did he reach a sphere of rills,
In a region yet untravelled, ringed by fair untrodden hills?
Was the spot where last he rested pleasant as an old-world lea?
Did the sweet winds come and lull him with the music of the sea?
Let us dream so—let us hope so! Haply in a cool green glade,
Far beyond the zone of furnace, Leichhardt’s sacred shell was laid!
Haply in some leafy valley, underneath blue, gracious skies,
In the sound of mountain water, the heroic traveller lies!
Down a dell of dewy myrtle, where the light is soft and green,
And a month like English April sits, an immemorial queen,
Let us think that he is resting—think that by a radiant grave
Ever come the songs of forest, and the voices of the wave!
Thus we want our sons to find him—find him under floral bowers,
Sleeping by the trees he loved so, covered with his darling flowers!
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
After Many Years
The song that once I dreamed about,
The tender, touching thing,
As radiant as the rose without,
The love of wind and wing:
The perfect verses, to the tune
Of woodland music set,
As beautiful as afternoon,
Remain unwritten yet.
It is too late to write them now --
The ancient fire is cold;
No ardent lights illume the brow,
As in the days of old.
I cannot dream the dream again;
But, when the happy birds
Are singing in the sunny rain,
I think I hear its words.
I think I hear the echo still
Of long-forgotten tones,
When evening winds are on the hill
And sunset fires the cones;
But only in the hours supreme,
With songs of land and sea,
The lyrics of the leaf and stream,
This echo comes to me.
No longer doth the earth reveal
Her gracious green and gold;
I sit where youth was once, and feel
That I am growing old.
The lustre from the face of things
Is wearing all away;
Like one who halts with tired wings,
I rest and muse to-day.
There is a river in the range
I love to think about;
Perhaps the searching feet of change
Have never found it out.
Ah! oftentimes I used to look
Upon its banks, and long
To steal the beauty of that brook
And put it in a song.
I wonder if the slopes of moss,
In dreams so dear to me --
The falls of flower, and flower-like floss --
Are as they used to be!
I wonder if the waterfalls,
The singers far and fair,
That gleamed between the wet, green walls,
Are still the marvels there!
Ah! let me hope that in that place
Those old familiar things
To which I turn a wistful face
Have never taken wings.
Let me retain the fancy still
That, past the lordly range,
There always shines, in folds of hill,
One spot secure from change!
I trust that yet the tender screen
That shades a certain nook
Remains, with all its gold and green,
The glory of the brook.
It hides a secret to the birds
And waters only known:
The letters of two lovely words --
A poem on a stone.
Perhaps the lady of the past
Upon these lines may light,
The purest verses, and the last,
That I may ever write:
She need not fear a word of blame:
Her tale the flowers keep --
The wind that heard me breathe her name
Has been for years asleep.
But in the night, and when the rain
The troubled torrent fills,
I often think I see again
The river in the hills;
And when the day is very near,
And birds are on the wing,
My spirit fancies it can hear
The song I cannot sing.
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
From the Forests
Where in a green, moist, myrtle dell
The torrent voice rings strong
And clear, above a star-bright well,
I write this woodland song.
The melodies of many leaves
Float in a fragrant zone;
And here are flowers by deep-mossed eaves
That day has never known.
I'll weave a garland out of these,
The darlings of the birds,
And send it over singing seas
With certain sunny words -
With certain words alive with light
Of welcome for a thing
Of promise, born beneath the white,
Soft afternoon of Spring.
The faithful few have waited long
A life like this to see;
And they will understand the song
That flows to-day from me.
May every page within this book
Be as a radiant hour;
Or like a bank of mountain brook,
All flower and leaf and flower.
May all the strength and all the grace
Of Letters make it beam
As beams a lawn whose lovely face
Is as a glorious dream.
And may that strange divinity
That men call Genius write
Some deathless thing in days to be,
To fill those days with light.
Here where the free, frank waters run,
I pray this book may grow
A sacred candour like the sun
Above the morning snow.
May noble thoughts in faultless words -
In clean white diction - make
It shine as shines the home of birds
And moss and leaf and lake.
This fair fresh life with joy I hail,
And this belief express,
Its days will be a brilliant tale
Of effort and success.
Here ends my song; I have a dream
Of beauty like the grace
Which lies upon the land of stream
In yonder mountain place.
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Pytheas
Gaul whose keel in far, dim ages ploughed wan widths of polar sea—
Gray old sailor of Massilia, who hath woven wreath for thee?
Who amongst the world’s high singers ever breathed the tale sublime
Of the man who coasted England in the misty dawn of time?
Leaves of laurel, lights of music—these and these have never shed
Glory on the name unheard of, lustre on the vanished head.
Lords of song, and these are many, never yet have raised the lay
For the white, wind-beaten seaman of a wild, forgotten day.
Harp of shining son of Godhead still is as a voice august;
But the man who first saw Britain sleeps beneath unnoticed dust.
From the fair, calm bays Hellenic, from the crescents and the bends,
Round the wall of crystal Athens, glowing in gold evening-ends,
Sailed abroad the grand, strong father, with his face towards the snow
Of the awful northern mountains, twenty centuries ago.
On the seas that none had heard of, by the shores where none had furled
Wing of canvas, passed this elder to the limits of the world.
Lurid limits, loud with thunder and the roar of flaming cone,
Ghastly tracts of ice and whirlwind lying in a dim, blind zone,
Bitter belts of naked region, girt about by cliffs of fear,
Where the Spirit of the Darkness dwells in heaven half the year.
Yea, against the wild, weird Thule, steered the stranger through the gates
Opened by a fire eternal, into tempest-trampled straits—
Thule, lying like a nightmare on the borders of the Pole:
Neither land, nor air, nor water, but a mixture of the whole!
Dumb, dead chaos, grey as spectre, now a mist and now a cloud,
Where the winds cry out for ever, and the wave is always loud.
Here the lord of many waters, in the great exalted years,
Saw the sight that no man knows of—heard the sound that no man hears—
Felt that God was in the Shadow ere he turned his prow and sped
To the sweet green fields of England with the sunshine overhead.
In the day when pallid Persia fled before the Thracian steel,
By the land that now is London passed the strange Hellenic keel.
Up the bends of quiet river, hard by banks of grove and flower,
Sailed the father through a silence in the old majestic hour.
Not a sound of fin or feather, not a note of wave or breeze,
Vext the face of sleeping streamlets, broke the rest of stirless trees.
Not a foot was in the forest, not a voice was in the wood,
When the elder from Massilia over English waters stood.
All was new, and hushed, and holy—all was pure untrodden space,
When the lord of many oceans turned to it a reverent face.
Man who knew resplendent Athens, set and framed in silver sea,
Did not dream a dream of England—England of the years to be!
Friend of fathers like to Plato—bards august and hallowed seers—
Did not see that tenfold glory, Britain of the future years!
Spirit filled with Grecian music, songs that charm the dark away,
On that large, supreme occasion, did not note diviner lay—
Did not hear the voice of Shakespeare—all the mighty life was still,
Down the slopes that dipped to seaward, on the shoulders of the hill;
But the gold and green were brighter than the bloom of Thracian springs,
And a strange, surpassing beauty shone upon the face of things.
In a grave that no man thinks of—back from far-forgotten bays—
Sleeps the grey, wind-beaten sailor of the old exalted days.
He that coasted Wales and Dover, he that first saw Sussex plains,
Passed away with head unlaurelled in the wild Thessalian rains.
In a space by hand untended, by a fen of vapours blind,
Lies the king of many waters—out of sight and out of mind!
No one brings the yearly blossom—no one culls the flower of grace,
For the shell of mighty father buried in that lonely place;
But the winds are low and holy, and the songs of sweetness flow,
Where he fell asleep for ever, twenty centuries ago.
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Araluen
Take this rose, and very gently place it on the tender, deep
Mosses where our little darling, Araluen, lies asleep.
Put the blossom close to baby -- kneel with me, my love, and pray;
We must leave the bird we've buried -- say good-bye to her to-day;
In the shadow of our trouble we must go to other lands,
And the flowers we have fostered will be left to other hands.
Other eyes will watch them growing -- other feet will softly tread
Where two hearts are nearly breaking, where so many tears are shed.
Bitter is the world we live in: life and love are mixed with pain;
We will never see these daisies -- never water them again.
. . . . .
Here the blue-eyed Spring will linger, here the shining month will stay,
Like a friend, by Araluen, when we two are far away;
But, beyond the wild, wide waters, we will tread another shore --
We will never watch this blossom, never see it any more.
Girl, whose hand at God's high altar in the dear, dead year I pressed,
Lean your stricken head upon me -- this is still your lover's breast!
She who sleeps was first and sweetest -- none we have to take her place!
Empty is the little cradle -- absent is the little face.
Other children may be given; but this rose beyond recall,
But this garland of your girlhood, will be dearest of them all.
None will ever, Araluen, nestle where you used to be,
In my heart of hearts, you darling, when the world was new to me;
We were young when you were with us, life and love were happy things
To your father and your mother ere the angels gave you wings.
You that sit and sob beside me -- you, upon whose golden head
Many rains of many sorrows have from day to day been shed;
Who, because your love was noble, faced with me the lot austere
Ever pressing with its hardship on the man of letters here --
Let me feel that you are near me, lay your hand within mine own;
You are all I have to live for, now that we are left alone.
Three there were, but one has vanished. Sins of mine have made you weep;
But forgive your baby's father now that baby is asleep.
Let us go, for night is falling, leave the darling with her flowers;
Other hands will come and tend them -- other friends in other hours.
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
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
Vote! | Copy!
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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Mooni
AH, to be by Mooni now!
Where the great dark hills of wonder,
Scarred with storm and cleft asunder
By the strong sword of the thunder,
Make a night on morning’s brow!
Just to stand where Nature’s face is
Flushed with power in forest places—
Where of God authentic trace is—
Ah, to be by Mooni now!
Just to be by Mooni’s springs!
There to stand, the shining sharer
Of that larger life, and rarer
Beauty caught from beauty fairer
Than the human face of things!
Soul of mine from sin abhorrent
Fain would hide by flashing current
Like a sister of the torrent,
Far away by Mooni’s springs.
He that is by Mooni now,
Sees the water-sapphires gleaming
Where the River Spirit, dreaming
Sleeps by fall and fountain streaming
Under lute of leaf and bough!
Hears, where stamp of storm with stress is,
Psalms from unseen wildernesses
Deep amongst far hill-recesses—
He that is by Mooni now.
Yea, for him by Mooni’s marge
Sings the yellow-haired September
With the face the gods remember
When the ridge is burnt to ember,
And the dumb sea chains the barge!
Where the mount like molten brass is,
Down beneath fern-feathered passes,
Noonday dew in cool green grasses
Gleams on him by Mooni’s marge.
Who that dwells by Mooni yet,
Feels, in flowerful forest arches,
Smiting wings and breath that parches
Where strong Summer’s path of march is
And the suns in thunder set?
Housed beneath the gracious kirtle
Of the shadowy water myrtle,
Winds may hiss with heat, and hurtle—
He is safe by Mooni yet!
Days there were when he who sings
(Dumb so long through passion’s losses)
Stood where Mooni’s water crosses
Shining tracts of green-haired mosses,
Like a soul with radiant wings;
Then the psalm the wind rehearses—
Then the song the stream disperses
Lent a beauty to his verses—
Who to-night of Mooni sings.
Ah, the theme—the sad, grey theme!
Certain days are not above me,
Certain hearts have ceased to love me,
Certain fancies fail to move me
Like the affluent morning dream.
Head whereon the white is stealing,
Heart whose hurts are past all healing,
Where is now the first pure feeling?
Ah, the theme—the sad, grey theme!
Sin and shame have left their trace!
He who mocks the mighty, gracious
Love of Christ, with eyes audacious,
Hunting after fires fallacious,
Wears the issue in his face.
Soul that flouted gift and Giver,
Like the broken Persian river,
Thou hast lost thy strength for ever!
Sin and shame have left their trace.
In the years that used to be,
When the large, supreme occasion
Brought the life of inspiration,
Like a god’s transfiguration
Was the shining change in me.
Then, where Mooni’s glory glances,
Clear diviner countenances
Beamed on me like blessed chances,
In the years that used to be.
Ah, the beauty of old ways!
Then the man who so resembled
Lords of light unstained, unhumbled,
Touched the skirts of Christ, nor trembled
At the grand benignant gaze!
Now he shrinks before the splendid
Face of Deity offended,
All the loveliness is ended!
All the beauty of old ways!
Still to be by Mooni cool—
Where the water-blossoms glister,
And, by gleaming vale and vista,
Sits the English April’s sister
Soft, and sweet, and wonderful.
Just to rest beyond the burning
Outer world—its sneers and spurning—
Ah! my heart—my heart is yearning
Still to be by Mooni cool:
Now, by Mooni’s fair hill heads,
Lo, the gold green lights are glowing,
Where, because no wind is blowing,
Fancy hears the flowers growing
In the herby watersheds!
Faint it is—the sound of thunder
From the torrents far thereunder,
Where the meeting mountains ponder—
Now, by Mooni’s fair hill heads:
Just to be where Mooni is,
Even where the fierce fall races
Down august unfathomed places,
Where of sun or moon no trace is,
And the streams of shadow hiss!
Have I not an ample reason
So to long for—sick of treason—
Something of the grand old season,
Just to be where Mooni is?
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Dedication
THE SEA gives her shells to the shingle,
The earth gives her streams to the sea;
They are many, but my gift is single,
My verses, the firstfruits of me.
Let the wind take the green and the grey leaf,
Cast forth without fruit upon air;
Take rose-leaf and vine-leaf and bay-leaf
Blown loose from the hair.
The night shakes them round me in legions,
Dawn drives them before her like dreams;
Time sheds them like snows on strange regions,
Swept shoreward on infinite streams;
Leaves pallid and sombre and ruddy,
Dead fruits of the fugitive years;
Some stained as with wine and made bloody,
And some as with tears.
Some scattered in seven years’ traces,
As they fell from the boy that was then;
Long left among idle green places,
Or gathered but now among men;
On seas full of wonder and peril,
Blown white round the capes of the north;
Or in islands where myrtles are sterile
And loves bring not forth.
O daughters of dreams and of stories
That life is not wearied of yet,
Faustine, Fragoletta, Dolores,
Félise and Yolande and Juliette,
Shall I find you not still, shall I miss you,
When sleep, that is true or that seems,
Comes back to me hopeless to kiss you,
O daughters of dreams?
They are past as a slumber that passes,
As the dew of a dawn of old time;
More frail than the shadows on glasses,
More fleet than a wave or a rhyme.
As the waves after ebb drawing seaward,
When their hollows are full of the night,
So the birds that flew singing to me-ward
Recede out of sight.
The songs of dead seasons, that wander
On wings of articulate words;
Lost leaves that the shore-wind may squander,
Light flocks of untameable birds;
Some sang to me dreaming in class-time
And truant in hand as in tongue;
For the youngest were born of boy’s pastime,
The eldest are young.
Is there shelter while life in them lingers,
Is there hearing for songs that recede,
Tunes touched from a harp with man’s fingers
Or blown with boy’s mouth in a reed?
Is there place in the land of your labour,
Is there room in your world of delight,
Where change has not sorrow for neighbour
And day has not night?
In their wings though the sea-wind yet quivers,
Will you spare not a space for them there
Made green with the running of rivers
And gracious with temperate air;
In the fields and the turreted cities,
That cover from sunshine and rain
Fair passions and bountiful pities
And loves without stain?
In a land of clear colours and stories,
In a region of shadowless hours,
Where earth has a garment of glories
And a murmur of musical flowers;
In woods where the spring half uncovers
The flush of her amorous face,
By the waters that listen for lovers,
For these is there place?
For the song-birds of sorrow, that muffle
Their music as clouds do their fire:
For the storm-birds of passion, that ruffle
Wild wings in a wind of desire;
In the stream of the storm as it settles
Blown seaward, borne far from the sun,
Shaken loose on the darkness like petals
Dropt one after one?
Though the world of your hands be more gracious
And lovelier in lordship of things
Clothed round by sweet art with the spacious
Warm heaven of her imminent wings,
Let them enter, unfledged and nigh fainting,
For the love of old loves and lost times;
And receive in your palace of painting
This revel of rhymes.
Though the seasons of man full of losses
Make empty the years full of youth,
If but one thing be constant in crosses,
Change lays not her hand upon truth;
Hopes die, and their tombs are for token
That the grief as the joy of them ends
Ere time that breaks all men has broken
The faith between friends.
Though the many lights dwindle to one light,
There is help if the heaven has one;
Though the skies be discrowned of the sunlight
And the earth dispossessed of the sun,
They have moonlight and sleep for repayment,
When, refreshed as a bride and set free,
With stars and sea-winds in her raiment,
Night sinks on the sea.
poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
Daniel Henry Deniehy
TAKE the harp, but very softly for our brother touch the strings:
Wind and wood shall help to wail him, waves and mournful mountain-springs.
Take the harp, but very softly, for the friend who grew so old
Through the hours we would not hear of—nights we would not fain behold!
Other voices, sweeter voices, shall lament him year by year,
Though the morning finds us lonely, though we sit and marvel here:
Marvel much while Summer cometh, trammelled with November wheat,
Gold about her forehead gleaming, green and gold about her feet;
Yea, and while the land is dark with plover, gull, and gloomy glede,
Where the cold, swift songs of Winter fill the interlucent reed.
Yet, my harp—and oh, my fathers! never look for Sorrow’s lay,
Making life a mighty darkness in the patient noon of day;
Since he resteth whom we loved so, out beyond these fleeting seas,
Blowing clouds and restless regions paved with old perplexities,
In a land where thunder breaks not, in a place unknown of snow,
Where the rain is mute for ever, where the wild winds never go:
Home of far-forgotten phantoms—genii of our peaceful prime,
Shining by perpetual waters past the ways of Change and Time:
Haven of the harried spirit, where it folds its wearied wings,
Turns its face and sleeps a sleep with deep forgetfulness of things.
His should be a grave by mountains, in a cool and thick-mossed lea,
With the lone creek falling past it—falling ever to the sea.
His should be a grave by waters, by a bright and broad lagoon,
Making steadfast splendours hallowed of the quiet, shining moon.
There the elves of many forests—wandering winds and flying lights—
Born of green, of happy mornings, dear to yellow summer nights,
Full of dole for him that loved them, then might halt and then might go,
Finding fathers of the people to their children speaking low—
Speaking low of one who, failing, suffered all the poet’s pain,
Dying with the dead leaves round him—hopes which never grow again.
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The Sydney International Exhibition
Now, while Orion, flaming south, doth set
A shining foot on hills of wind and wet—
Far haughty hills beyond the fountains cold
And dells of glimmering greenness manifold—
While August sings the advent of the Spring,
And in the calm is heard September’s wing,
The lordly voice of song I ask of thee,
High, deathless radiance—crowned Calliope!
What though we never hear the great god’s lays
Which made all music the Hellenic days—
What though the face of thy fair heaven beams
Still only on the crystal Grecian streams—
What though a sky of new, strange beauty shines
Where no white Dryad sings within the pines:
Here is a land whose large, imperial grace
Must tempt thee, goddess, in thine holy place!
Here are the dells of peace and plenilune,
The hills of morning and the slopes of noon;
Here are the waters dear to days of blue,
And dark-green hollows of the noontide dew;
Here lies the harp, by fragrant wood-winds fanned,
That waits the coming of thy quickening hand!
And shall Australia, framed and set in sea,
August with glory, wait in vain for thee?
Shall more than Tempe’s beauty be unsung
Because its shine is strange—its colours young?
No! by the full, live light which puts to shame
The far, fair splendours of Thessalian flame—
By yonder forest psalm which sinks and swells
Like that of Phocis, grave with oracles—
By deep prophetic winds that come and go
Where whispering springs of pondering mountains flow—
By lute-like leaves and many-languaged caves,
Where sounds the strong hosanna of the waves,
This great new majesty shall not remain
Unhonoured by the high immortal strain!
Soon, soon, the music of the southern lyre
Shall start and blossom with a speech like fire!
Soon, soon, shall flower and flow in flame divine
Thy songs, Apollo, and Euterpe, thine!
Strong, shining sons of Delphicus shall rise
With all their father’s glory in their eyes;
And then shall beam on yonder slopes and springs
The light that swims upon the light of things.
And therefore, lingering in a land of lawn,
I, standing here, a singer of the dawn,
With gaze upturned to where wan summits lie
Against the morning flowing up the sky—
Whose eyes in dreams of many colours see
A glittering vision of the years to be—
Do ask of thee, Calliope, one hour
Of life pre-eminent with perfect power,
That I may leave a song whose lonely rays
May shine hereafter from these songless days.
For now there breaks across the faint grey range
The rose-red dawning of a radiant change.
A soft, sweet voice is in the valleys deep,
Where darkness droops and sings itself to sleep.
The grave, mute woods, that yet the silence hold
Of dim, dead ages, gleam with hints of gold.
Yon eastern cape that meets the straitened wave—
A twofold tower above the whistling cave—
Whose strength in thunder shields the gentle lea,
And makes a white wrath of a league of sea,
Now wears the face of peace; and in the bay
The weak, spent voice of Winter dies away.
In every dell there is a whispering wing,
On every lawn a glimmer of the Spring;
By every hill are growths of tender green—
On every slope a fair, new life is seen;
And lo! beneath the morning’s blossoming fires,
The shining city of a hundred spires,
In mists of gold, by countless havens furled,
And glad with all the flags of all the world!
These are the shores, where, in a dream of fear,
Cathay saw darkness dwelling half the year!
These are the coasts that old fallacious tales
Chained down with ice and ringed with sleepless gales!
This is the land that, in the hour of awe,
From Indian peaks the rapt Venetian saw!
Here is the long grey line of strange sea wall
That checked the prow of the audacious Gaul,
What time he steered towards the southern snow,
From zone to zone, four hundred years ago!
By yonder gulf, whose marching waters meet
The wine-dark currents from the isles of heat,
Strong sons of Europe, in a far dim year,
Faced ghastly foes, and felt the alien spear!
There, in a later dawn, by shipless waves,
The tender grasses found forgotten graves.
Far in the west, beyond those hills sublime,
Dirk Hartog anchored in the olden time;
There, by a wild-faced bay, and in a cleft,
His shining name the fair-haired Northman left;
And, on those broad imperial waters, far
Beneath the lordly occidental star,
Sailed Tasman down a great and glowing space
Whose softer lights were like his lady’s face.
In dreams of her he roved from zone to zone,
And gave her lovely name to coasts unknown
And saw, in streaming sunset everywhere,
The curious beauty of her golden hair,
By flaming tracts of tropic afternoon,
Where in low heavens hangs a fourfold moon.
Here, on the tides of a resplendent year,
By capes of jasper, came the buccaneer.
Then, then, the wild men, flying from the beach,
First heard the clear, bold sounds of English speech;
And then first fell across a Southern plain
The broad, strong shadows of a Saxon train.
Near yonder wall of stately cliff, that braves
The arrogance of congregated waves,
The daring son of grey old Yorkshire stood
And dreamed in a majestic solitude,
What time a gentle April shed its showers,
Aflame with sunset, on the Bay of Flowers.
The noble seaman who withheld the hand,
And spared the Hector of his native land—
The single savage, yelling on the beach
The dark, strange curses of barbaric speech.
Exalted sailor! whose benignant phrase
Shines full of beauty in these latter days;
Who met the naked tribes of fiery skies
With great, divine compassion in his eyes;
Who died, like Him of hoary Nazareth,
That death august—the radiant martyr’s death;
Who in the last hour showed the Christian face
Whose crumbling beauty shamed the alien race.
In peace he sleeps where deep eternal calms
Lie round the land of heavy-fruited palms.
Lo! in that dell, behind a singing bar,
Where deep, pure pools of glittering waters are,
Beyond a mossy, yellow, gleaming glade,
The last of Forby Sutherland was laid—
The blue-eyed Saxon from the hills of snow
Who fell asleep a hundred years ago.
In flowerful shades, where gold and green are rife,
Still rests the shell of his forgotten life.
Far, far away, beneath some northern sky
The fathers of his humble household lie;
But by his lonely grave are sapphire streams,
And gracious woodlands, where the fire-fly gleams;
And ever comes across a silver lea
The hymn sublime of the eternal sea.
On that bold hill, against a broad blue stream,
Stood Arthur Phillip in a day of dream:
What time the mists of morning westward rolled,
And heaven flowered on a bay of gold!
Here, in the hour that shines and sounds afar,
Flamed first old England’s banner like a star;
Here, in a time august with prayer and praise,
Was born the nation of these splendid days;
And here this land’s majestic yesterday
Of immemorial silence died away.
Where are the woods that, ninety summers back,
Stood hoar with ages by the water-track?
Where are the valleys of the flashing wing,
The dim green margins and the glimmering spring?
Where now the warrior of the forest race,
His glaring war-paint and his fearless face?
The banks of April and the groves of bird,
The glades of silence and the pools unstirred,
The gleaming savage and the whistling spear,
Passed with the passing of a wild old year!
A single torrent singing by the wave,
A shadowy relic in a mountain cave,
A ghost of fire in immemorial hills,
The whittled tree by folded wayside rills,
The call of bird that hides in hollows far,
Where feet of thunder, wings of winter are—
Of all that Past, these wrecks of wind and rain,
These touching memories—these alone remain!
What sun is this that beams and broadens west?
What wonder this, in deathless glory dressed?
What strange, sweet harp of highest god took flame
And gave this Troy its life, its light, its name?
What awful lyre of marvellous power and range
Upraised this Ilion—wrought this dazzling change?
No shining singer of Hellenic dreams
Set yonder splendour by the morning streams!
No god who glimmers in a doubtful sphere
Shed glory there—created beauty here!
This is the city that our fathers framed—
These are the crescents by the elders named!
The human hands of strong, heroic men
Broke down the mountain, filled the gaping glen,
Ran streets through swamp, built banks against the foam,
And bent the arch and raised the lordly dome!
Here are the towers that the founders made!
Here are the temples where these Romans prayed!
Here stand the courts in which their leaders met!
Here are their homes, and here their altars yet!
Here sleep the grand old men whose lives sublime
Of thought and action shine and sound through time!
Who worked in darkness—onward fought their ways
To bring about these large majestic days—
Who left their sons the hearts and high desires
Which built this city of the hundred spires!
A stately Morning rises on the wing,
The hills take colour, and the valleys sing.
A strong September flames beyond the lea—
A silver vision on a silver sea.
A new Age, “cast in a diviner mould”,
Comes crowned with lustre, zoned and shod with gold!
What dream is this on lawny spaces set?
What miracle of dome and minaret?
What great mute majesty is this that takes
The first of morning ere the song-bird wakes?
Lo, this was built to honour gathering lands
By Celtic, Saxon, Australasian hands!
These are the halls where all the flags unfurled
Break into speech that welcomes all the world.
And lo, our friends are here from every zone—
From isles we dream of and from tracts unknown!
Here are the fathers from the stately space
Where Ireland is and England’s sacred face!
Here are the Norsemen from their strong sea-wall,
The grave, grand Teuton and the brilliant Gaul!
From green, sweet groves the dark-eyed Lusians sail,
And proud Iberia leaves the grape-flushed vale.
Here are the lords whose starry banner shines
From fierce Magellan to the Arctic pines.
Here come the strangers from the gates of day—
From hills of sunrise and from white Cathay.
The spicy islands send their swarthy sons,
The lofty North its mailed and mighty ones.
Venetian keels are floating on our sea;
Our eyes are glad with radiant Italy!
Yea, North and South, and glowing West and East,
Are gathering here to grace our splendid feast!
The chiefs from peaks august with Asian snow,
The elders born where regal roses grow,
Come hither, with the flower of that fair land
That blooms beyond the fiery tracts of sand
Where Syrian suns their angry lustres fling
Across blind channels of the bygone spring.
And on this great, auspicious day, the flowers
Of labour glorify majestic hours.
The singing angel from the starry sphere
Of dazzling Science shows his wonders here;
And Art, the dream-clad spirit, starts, and brings
From Fairyland her strange, sweet, glittering things.
Here are the works man did, what time his face
Was touched by God in some exalted place;
Here glows the splendour—here the marvel wrought
When Heaven flashed upon the maker’s thought!
Yea, here are all the miracles sublime—
The lights of Genius and the stars of Time!
And, being lifted by this noble noon,
Australia broadens like a tropic moon.
Her white, pure lustre beams across the zones;
The nations greet her from their awful thrones.
From hence the morning beauty of her name
Will shine afar, like an exceeding flame.
Her place will be with mighty lords, whose sway
Controls the thunder and the marching day.
Her crown will shine beside the crowns of kings
Who shape the seasons, rule the course of things,
The fame of her across the years to be
Will spread like light on a surpassing sea;
And graced with glory, girt with power august,
Her life will last till all things turn to dust.
To Thee the face of song is lifted now,
O Lord! to whom the awful mountains bow;
Whose hands, unseen, the tenfold storms control;
Whose thunders shake the spheres from pole to pole;
Who from Thy highest heaven lookest down,
The sea Thy footstool, and the sun Thy crown;
Around whose throne the deathless planets sing
Hosannas to their high, eternal King.
To Thee the soul of prayer this morning turns,
With faith that glitters, and with hope that burns!
And, in the moments of majestic calm
That fill the heart in pauses of the psalm,
She asks Thy blessing for this fair young land
That flowers within the hollow of Thine hand!
She seeks of Thee that boon, that gift sublime,
The Christian radiance, for this hope of Time!
And Thou wilt listen! and Thy face will bend
To smile upon us—Master, Father, Friend!
The Christ to whom pure pleading heart hath crept
Was human once, and in the darkness wept;
The gracious love that helped us long ago
Will on us like a summer sunrise flow,
And be a light to guide the nation’s feet
On holy paths—on sacred ways and sweet
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
The Melbourne International Exhibition
I
Brothers from far-away lands,
Sons of the fathers of fame,
Here are our hearts and our hands—
This is our song of acclaim.
Lords from magnificent zones,
Shores of superlative sway,
Awful with lustre of thrones,
This is our greeting to-day.
Europe and Asia are here—
Shining they enter our ports!
She that is half of the sphere
Beams like a sun in our courts.
Children of elders whose day
Shone to the planet’s white ends,
Meet, in the noble old way,
Sons of your forefather’s friends.
II
Dressed is the beautiful city—the spires of it
Burn in the firmament stately and still;
Forest has vanished—the wood and the lyres of it,
Lutes of the sea-wind and harps of the hill.
This is the region, and here is the bay by it,
Collins, the deathless, beheld in a dream:
Flinders and Fawkner, our forefathers grey, by it
Paused in the hush of a season supreme.
Here, on the waters of majesty near to us,
Lingered the leaders by towers of flame:
Elders who turn from the lordly old year to us
Crowned with the lights of ineffable fame.
III
Nine and seventy years ago,
Up the blaze of yonder bay,
On a great exalted day,
Came from seas august with snow—
Waters where the whirlwinds blow—
First of England’s sons who stood
By the deep green, bygone wood
Where the wild song used to flow
Nine and seventy years ago.
Five and forty years ago,
On a grand auspicious morn
When the South Wind blew his horn,
Where the splendid mountains glow—
Peaks that God and Sunrise know—
Came the fearless, famous band,
Founders of our radiant land,
From the lawns where roses grow,
Five and forty years ago.
IV
By gracious slopes of fair green hills,
In shadows cool and deep,
Where floats the psalm of many rills,
The noble elders sleep.
But while their children’s children last,
While seed from seedling springs,
The print and perfume of their past
Will be as deathless things.
Their voices are with vanished years,
With other days and hours;
Their homes are sanctified by tears—
They sleep amongst the flowers.
They do not walk by street or stream,
Or tread by grove or shore,
But, in the nation’s highest dream,
They shine for evermore.
V
By lawny slope and lucent strand
Are singing flags of every land;
On streams of splendour—bays impearled—
The keels are here of all the world.
With lutes of light and cymbals clear
We waft goodwill to every sphere.
The links of love to-day are thrown
From sea to sea—from zone to zone;
And, lo! we greet, in glory drest,
The lords that come from east and west,
And march like noble children forth
To meet our fathers from the North!
VI
To Thee be the glory, All-Bountiful Giver!
The song that we sing is an anthem to Thee,
Whose blessing is shed on Thy people for ever,
Whose love is like beautiful light on the sea.
Behold, with high sense of Thy mercy unsleeping,
We come to Thee, kneel to Thee, praise Thee, and pray,
O Lord, in whose hand is the strength that is keeping
The storm from the wave and the night from the day!
poem by Henry Kendall
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!
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
Submitted by Poetry Lover
Vote! | Copy!