When Dawn drew near and tree or hill
Stood slowly bright, and clear and still,
It lit the Shepherd, a dark rock
Amid his wide, grey, tumbling flock;

He stands as stand great ancient trees
When streams leap loud about their knees;
And he moves slow and tranquilly
As clouds across a peaceful sky.

There is no voice for him to hear,
Save from men coming once a year
Beyond that haze-blue mountain bar,
Where the eastern cities are.

In still repose his features sleep,
He grows to look like his own sheep;
And priestlike at each dawn he stands,
An ancient blessing on those lands.

The days, the years, half life slips by
Under that bright Australian sky:
The gum trees are a rustling dream
Upon the sunshine's golden stream:

The whip-bird and the cockatoo,
They are the cries of dream-birds too,
And more unearthly and unreal
Grows Kookaburra's mocking peal.

Still magic is the country round,
Dead branches strew the snake-bright ground:
In luminous transparency
Quivers each thin-leaved, blue-green tree;

There is an ecstasy of light,
And silence is as lightning bright:
The earthflower, air, a still, blue blaze
Springs from earth's pot those rainless days.

The Shepherd sees as in a glass
The flitting lyre-birds soundless pass,
The trees in sunlight standing deep,
A world in an enchanted sleep.

Nor ice, nor snow, nor rough winds come
Unto him from his father's home,
Old and remote in that grey sea
Of cold, mist-haunted memory.

But the men coming once a year
Tell tales incredible to hear,
Tales that sound legendary and dim,
From long-dead camp fires brought to him.

And brooding when the men have done,
How fifty happy years are gone,
Not knowing how, not knowing why,
He turns towards the eastern sky;

There, clasped with towns, meet land and sea,
Thence sail the ships of destiny—
They also sail those ships on high,
Winged with deep purpose, through the sky:

He gazed at that immenser sea,
And those travelling worlds gleamed steadily;
Then, shouting faintly from a star,
A voice called that old man to war.


The Shepherd reached the coast,—amazed
On Sydney's crowded streets he gazed;
On Circular Quay, with parted lips,
He stared upon the thronging ships.

He sailed across the summer sea,
And fighting through Gallipoli,
He often hungered and thirsted till
Nought stirred in him save human will.

To France from Suvla they were brought.
Time faded from them as they fought
And scratched and dug, with only the sky
To stare at as they fall and die.

Unhurt in victory's ebb and flow,
He watched friends unreturning go;
Then on the Somme was hit, and lay
At Denmark Hill for many a day.

One of his countrywomen found
Him there, and twice a week came round—
But he spake little, and 'twould mostly be
About their own far-off country:

And in a silence 'twould appear
Glittering with light and ghostly clear;
And she secretly wondered it should seem
So strange, so beautiful a dream.

And Winter passed and Spring returned,
His soul, reviving, homeward yearned;
War was no more for him, he knew,
Than that dim boom the East wind blew.

And when she came to him one day,
He said: “In a month I shall sail away;
These cities and armies then shall seem
More far, more faint than any dream:

“And I shall stand amid my sheep
In that still light I shall sink deep;
The shouting of nations clashed in war
Shall not a leaf or feather jar;

“But as the days pass I shall stand
Lost between dream and dream; no land,
No thing at all shall solid be—
But cries of joy and mystery:

“For I shall see behind my sheep
Tall ships on death-pale oceans leap;
Dark hulls with armed men's faces white
Crowded beneath the stars' cold light.

“And ships that gape and shudder down,
And soft, bright bubbles of men that drown,
And the same calm, watching Moon o'erhead
My sheep and those wide-eyed drifting dead:

“And the dim hordes of men that sigh
Moon-tossed, sun-cracked, uneasily,
Shall move amid my sightless sheep
When women long have ceased to weep;

“And this vast city's terrible roar
Shall be silent there as it was before;
Though dark among the summer flowers
Hang its streets, its steeples and its towers;

“And faces that were torn from speech
And in a dream the soul beseech,
My comrades of a month or day,
With me a little while shall stay.

“And that still place shall be the cup
Where this world's spirit gathered up
Will be lifted silently
Day by day unto the sky:

“Until the brightness of the stars
Is gone from me, and all the wars
Of earth cannot refill my eyes
Again with sheep and trees and skies.”