city

About me leagues of houses lie,
Above me, grim and straight and high,
They climb; the terraces lean up
Like long grey reefs against the sky.

Packed tier on tier the people dwell;
Each narrow, hollow wall is full;
And in that hive of honeycomb,
Remote and high, I have one cell.

And when I turn into my street
I hear in murmurous retreat
A tide of noises flowing out --
The city ebbing from my feet!

And lo! two long straight walls between,
There dwells a little park serene,

"To see my love suffices me."
--Ballades in Blue China.


Some men to carriages aspire;
On some the costly hansoms wait;
Some seek a fly, on job or hire;
Some mount the trotting steed, elate.
I envy not the rich and great,
A wandering minstrel, poor and free,
I am contented with my fate --
An omnibus suffices me.

In winter days of rain and mire
I find within a corner strait;
The 'busmen know me and my lyre
From Brompton to the Bull-and-Gate.
When summer comes, I mount in state

We must suffer, husband and father, we must suffer, daughter and son,
For the wrong we have taken part in and the wrong that we have seen done.
Let the bride of frivolous fashion, and of ease, be ashamed and dumb,
For I tell you the nations shall rule us who have let their children come!

How shall Australia escape it – we in the South and alone
Who have taken the sword for no right of England and none of our own?
(Can we bring back the husbands and fathers, can we bring the lovers and sons?

Ah, well! but the case seems hopeless, and the pen might write in vain;

The people gabble of old things over and over again.

For the sake of the sleek importer we slave with the pick and the shears,

While hundreds of boys in Australia long to be engineers.



A new generation has risen under Australian skies,

Boys with the light of genius deep in their dreamy eyes---

Not as of artists or poets with their vain imaginings,

Now Pat Ahearne, of Ingleburn
Upon the Castlereagh,
Was flush of cash and very "flash"
As shearer-persons say.
At Yankee grab his luck was cool,
At loo he'd lately scooped the pool;
He'd simply smashed the two-up school -
[Assisted by a "grey!"]

And Pat grew then like other men,
His head began to swell;
As he was fly he thought he'd try
The Sydney folks as well.
"Their chances would be mighty slim
Of working any points on him,
When Euchre Bill and Ginger Jim

Through thick Arcadian woods a hunter went,
Following the beasts upon a fresh spring day;
But since his horn-tipped bow but seldom bent,
Now at the noontide nought had happed to slay,
Within a vale he called his hounds away,
Hearkening the echoes of his lone voice cling
About the cliffs and through the beech-trees ring.

But when they ended, still awhile he stood,
And but the sweet familiar thrush could hear,
And all the day-long noises of the wood,
And o'er the dry leaves of the vanished year

Although I enter not,
Yet round about the spot,
Ofttimes I hover,
And near the sacred gate,
With longing eyes I wait,
Expectant of her.

The minster-bell tolls out
Above the city's rout,
And noise and humming;
They've hushed the minster-bell,
The organ 'gins to swell, --
She's coming, -- coming!

My lady comes at last,
Timid and stepping fast,
And hastening hither,
With modest eyes downcast;
She comes, -- she's here, -- she's past;
May heaven go with her!

LEAVE me a little while alone,
Here at his grave that still is strown
With crumbling flower and wreath;
The laughing rivulet leaps and falls,
The thrush exults, the cuckoo calls,
And he lies hush’d beneath.

With myrtle cross and crown of rose,
And every lowlier flower that blows,
His new-made couch is dress’d;
Primrose and cowslip, hyacinth wild,
Gather’d by monarch, peasant, child,
A nation’s grief attest.

I stood not with the mournful crowd

The lamps now glitter down the street;
Faintly sound the falling feet;
And the blue even slowly falls
About the garden trees and walls.
II
Now in the falling of the gloom
The red fire paints the empty room:
And warmly on the roof it looks,
And flickers on the back of books.
III
Armies march by tower and spire
Of cities blazing, in the fire;--
Till as I gaze with staring eyes,
The armies fall, the lustre dies.
IV
Then once again the glow returns;
Again the phantom city burns;

Many things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes,
me-too, me-too.

The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gable of Jones, Johnson, Smith,
All whose names take pages in the city directory.

I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.