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,

But born to be thinkers and doers, and makers of wonderful things.

By all the deeds to Thy dear glory done,
By all the life blood spilt to serve Thy need,
By all the fettered lives Thy touch hath freed,
By all Thy dream in us anew begun;
By all the guerdon English sire to son
Hath given of highest vision, kingliest deed,
By all Thine agony, of God decreed
For trial and strength, our fate with Thine is one.

Still dwells Thy spirit in our hearts and lips,
Honour and life we hold from none but thee
And if we live Thy pensioners no more
But seek a nation's might of men and ships,

The lemon sunlight poured out far between things
inhabits a coolness. Mosquitoes have subsided,
flies are for later heat.
Every tree's an auburn giant with a dazzled face
and the back of its head to an infinite dusk road.
Twilights broaden away from our feet too
as rabbits bounce home up defiles in the grass.
Everything widens with distance, in this perspective.
The dog's paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinity
and dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share.
Bright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beans

Who have been educated out of naive responses,
The hoodoo of love, the cinderella of class
Knowing that everywhere man has the same clock face,
the same moody defences

Against age and the loss of love in the hope of millennimums
Who think too much perhaps of elegance
Or the form of wisdom, having outgrown dreams
Like baby clothes a long while since;

Wiseacres playing with terrible dolls in the twilight
holding our sides, thinking of mad Loyola
Or that bald maker of roads, the much stabbed Caesar
Till the stars are bright;

Aunt Imogen was coming, and therefore
The children—Jane, Sylvester, and Young George—
Were eyes and ears; for there was only one
Aunt Imogen to them in the whole world,
And she was in it only for four weeks
In fifty-two. But those great bites of time
Made all September a Queen’s Festival;
And they would strive, informally, to make
The most of them.—The mother understood,
And wisely stepped away. Aunt Imogen
Was there for only one month in the year,
While she, the mother,—she was always there;

1. FAITH

“I’ve been having these
awful dreams, each a little different,
though the core’s the same—

we’re walking in a field,
Wally and Arden and I, a stretch of grass
with a highway running beside it,

or a path in the woods that opens
onto a road. Everything’s fine,
then the dog sprints ahead of us,

excited; we’re calling but
he’s racing down a scent and doesn’t hear us,
and that’s when he goes

onto the highway. I don’t want to describe it.
Sometimes it’s brutal and over,

I was always afraid of Somes's Pond:
Not the little pond, by which the willow stands,
Where laughing boys catch alewives in their hands
In brown, bright shallows; but the one beyond.
There, where the frost makes all the birches burn
Yellow as cow-lilies, and the pale sky shines
Like a polished shell between black spruce and pines,
Some strange thing tracks us, turning where we turn.

You'll say I dreamed it, being the true daughter
Of those who in old times endured this dread.
Look! Where the lily-stems are showing red

Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Loves offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the colored lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the water
They stand in the crowd lining the shore
Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it. Their eyes
Are haunted by water

Three score and ten, the psalmist saith,
And half my course is well-nigh run;
I've had my flout at dusty death,
I've had my whack of feast and fun.
I've mocked at those who prate and preach;
I've laughed with any man alive;
But now with sobered heart I reach
The Great Divide of Thirty-five.
II
And looking back I must confess
I've little cause to feel elate.
I've played the mummer more or less;
I fumbled fortune, flouted fate.
I've vastly dreamed and little done;
I've idly watched my brothers strive:

To sit and watch the wavelets as they flow
Two - side by side;
To see the gliding clouds that come and
And mark them glide;

If from low roofs the smoke is wreathing pale,
To watch it wreath;
If flowers around breathe perfume on the gale,
To feel them breathe;

If the bee sips the honeyed fruit that glistens,
To sip the dew;
If the bird warbles while the forest listens,
To listen too;

Beneath the willow where the brook is singing,
To hear its song;
Nor feel, while round us that sweet dream is clinging