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.

Bill the Bullock-Driver

   The leaders of millions, the lords of the lands,
    Who sway the wide world with their will
   And shake the great globe with the strength of their hands,
    Flash past us—unnoticed by Bill.

   The elders of science who measure the spheres
    And weigh the vast bulk of the sun—
   Who see the grand lights beyond aeons of years,
    Are less than a bullock to one.

   The singers that sweeten all time with their song—
    Pure voices that make us forget
   Humanity's drama of marvellous wrong—
    To Bill are as mysteries yet.

   By thunders of battle and nations uphurled,
    Bill's sympathies never were stirred:
   The helmsmen who stand at the wheel of the world
    By him are unknown and unheard.

   What trouble has Bill for the ruin of lands,
    Or the quarrels of temple and throne,
   So long as the whip that he holds in his hands
    And the team that he drives are his own?

   As straight and as sound as a slab without crack,
    Our Bill is a king in his way;
   Though he camps by the side of a shingle track,
    And sleeps on the bed of his dray.

   A whip-lash to him is as dear as a rose
    Would be to a delicate maid;
   He carries his darlings wherever he goes,
    In a pocket-book tattered and frayed.

   The joy of a bard when he happens to write
    A song like the song of his dream
   Is nothing at all to our hero's delight
    In the pluck and the strength of his team.

   For the kings of the earth, for the faces august
    Of princes, the millions may shout;
   To Bill, as he lumbers along in the dust,
    A bullock's the grandest thing out.

   His four-footed friends are the friends of his choice—
    No lover is Bill of your dames;
   But the cattle that turn at the sound of his voice
    Have the sweetest of features and names.

   A father's chief joy is a favourite son,
    When he reaches some eminent goal,
   But the pride of Bill's heart is the hairy-legged one
    That pulls with a will at the pole.

   His dray is no living, responsible thing,
    But he gives it the gender of life;
   And, seeing his fancy is free in the wing,
    It suits him as well as a wife.

   He thrives like an Arab.  Between the two wheels
    Is his bedroom, where, lying up-curled,
   He thinks for himself, like a sultan, and feels
    That his home is the best in the world.

   For, even though cattle, like subjects, will break
    At times from the yoke and the band,
   Bill knows how to act when his rule is at stake,
    And is therefore a lord of the land.

   Of course he must dream; but be sure that his dreams,
    If happy, must compass, alas!
   Fat bullocks at feed by improbable streams,
    Knee-deep in improbable grass.

   No poet is Bill, for the visions of night
    To him are as visions of day;
   And the pipe that in sleep he endeavours to light
    Is the pipe that he smokes on the dray.

   To the mighty, magnificent temples of God,
    In the hearts of the dominant hills,
   Bill's eyes are as blind as the fire-blackened clod
    That burns far away from the rills.

   Through beautiful, bountiful forests that screen
    A marvel of blossoms from heat—
   Whose lights are the mellow and golden and green—
    Bill walks with irreverent feet.

   The manifold splendours of mountain and wood
    By Bill like nonentities slip;
   He loves the black myrtle because it is good
    As a handle to lash to his whip.

   And thus through the world, with a swing in his tread,
    Our hero self-satisfied goes;
   With his cabbage-tree hat on the back of his head,
    And the string of it under his nose.

   Poor bullocky Bill!  In the circles select
    Of the scholars he hasn't a place;
   But he walks like a man, with his forehead erect,
    And he looks at God's day in the face.

   For, rough as he seems, he would shudder to wrong
    A dog with the loss of a hair;
   And the angels of shine and superlative song
    See his heart and the deity there.

   Few know him, indeed; but the beauty that glows
    In the forest is loveliness still;
   And Providence helping the life of the rose
    Is a Friend and a Father to Bill.

Cooranbean

   Years fifty, and seven to boot, have smitten the children of men
   Since sound of a voice or a foot came out of the head of that glen.
   The brand of black devil is there—an evil wind moaneth around—
   There is doom, there is death in the air:  a curse groweth up from the ground!
   No noise of the axe or the saw in that hollow unholy is heard,
   No fall of the hoof or the paw, no whirr of the wing of the bird;
   But a grey mother down by the sea, as wan as the foam on the strait,
   Has counted the beads on her knee these forty-nine winters and eight.

   Whenever an elder is asked—a white-headed man of the woods—
   Of the terrible mystery masked where the dark everlastingly broods,
   Be sure he will turn to the bay, with his back to the glen in the range,
   And glide like a phantom away, with a countenance pallid with change.
   From the line of dead timber that lies supine at the foot of the glade,
   The fierce-featured eaglehawk flies—afraid as a dove is afraid;
   But back in that wilderness dread are a fall and the forks of a ford—
   Ah! pray and uncover your head, and lean like a child on the Lord.

   A sinister fog at the wane—at the change of the moon cometh forth
   Like an ominous ghost in the train of a bitter, black storm of the north!
   At the head of the gully unknown it hangs like a spirit of bale.
   And the noise of a shriek and a groan strikes up in the gusts of the gale.
   In the throat of a feculent pit is the beard of a bloody-red sedge;
   And a foam like the foam of a fit sweats out of the lips of the ledge.
   But down in the water of death, in the livid, dead pool at the base—
   Bow low, with inaudible breath, beseech with the hands to the face!

   A furlong of fetid, black fen, with gelid, green patches of pond,
   Lies dumb by the horns of the glen—at the gates of the horror beyond;
   And those who have looked on it tell of the terrible growths that are there—
   The flowerage fostered by hell, the blossoms that startle and scare.
   If ever a wandering bird should light on Gehennas like this
   Be sure that a cry will be heard, and the sound of the flat adder's hiss.
   But hard by the jaws of the bend is a ghastly Thing matted with moss—
   Ah, Lord! be a father, a friend, for the sake of the Christ of the Cross.

   Black Tom, with the sinews of five—that never a hangman could hang—
   In the days of the shackle and gyve, broke loose from the guards of the gang.
   Thereafter, for seasons a score, this devil prowled under the ban;
   A mate of red talon and paw, a wolf in the shape of a man.
   But, ringed by ineffable fire, in a thunder and wind of the north,
   The sword of Omnipotent ire—the bolt of high Heaven went forth!
   But, wan as the sorrowful foam, a grey mother waits by the sea
   For the boys that have never come home these fifty-four winters and three.

   From the folds of the forested hills there are ravelled and roundabout tracks,
   Because of the terror that fills the strong-handed men of the axe!
   Of the workers away in the range there is none that will wait for the night,
   When the storm-stricken moon is in change and the sinister fog is in sight.
   And later and deep in the dark, when the bitter wind whistles about,
   There is never a howl or a bark from the dog in the kennel without,
   But the white fathers fasten the door, and often and often they start,
   At a sound like a foot on the floor and a touch like a hand on the heart.

When Underneath the Brown Dead Grass

   When underneath the brown dead grass
    My weary bones are laid,
   I hope I shall not see the glass
    At ninety in the shade.
   I trust indeed that, when I lie
    Beneath the churchyard pine,
   I shall not hear that startling cry
    "'Thermom' is ninety-nine!"

   If one should whisper through my sleep
    "Come up and be alive,"
   I'd answer—No, unless you'll keep
    The glass at sixty-five.
   I might be willing if allowed
    To wear old Adam's rig,
   And mix amongst the city crowd
    Like Polynesian "nig".

   Far better in the sod to lie,
    With pasturing pig above,
   Than broil beneath a copper sky—
    In sight of all I love!
   Far better to be turned to grass
    To feed the poley cow,
   Than be the half boiled bream, alas,
    That I am really now!

   For cow and pig I would not hear,
    And hoof I would not see;
   But if these items did appear
    They wouldn't trouble me.
   For ah! the pelt of mortal man
    Weighs less than half a ton,
   And any sight is better than
    A sultry southern sun.

The Voice in the Wild Oak

   (Written in the shadow of 1872.)

   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
    Beneath thy shade with tired wings,
   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.

Billy Vickers

   No song is this of leaf and bird,
    And gracious waters flowing;
   I'm sick at heart, for I have heard
    Big Billy Vickers "blowing".

   He'd never take a leading place
    In chambers legislative:
   This booby with the vacant face—
    This hoddy-doddy native!

   Indeed, I'm forced to say aside,
    To you, O reader, solely,
   He only wants the horns and hide
    To be a bullock wholly.

   But, like all noodles, he is vain;
    And when his tongue is wagging,
   I feel inclined to copy Cain,
    And "drop" him for his bragging.

   He, being Bush-bred, stands, of course,
    Six feet his dirty socks in;
   His lingo is confined to horse
    And plough, and pig and oxen.

   Two years ago he'd less to say
    Within his little circuit;
   But now he has, besides a dray,
    A team of twelve to work it.

   No wonder is it that he feels
    Inclined to clack and rattle
   About his bullocks and his wheels—
    He owns a dozen cattle.

   In short, to be exact and blunt,
    In his own estimation
   He's "out and out" the head and front
    Top-sawyer of creation!

   For, mark me, he can "sit a buck"
    For hours and hours together;
   And never horse has had the luck
    To pitch him from the leather.

   If ever he should have a "spill"
    Upon the grass or gravel,
   Be sure of this, the saddle will
    With Billy Vickers travel.

   At punching oxen you may guess
    There's nothing out can "camp" him:
   He has, in fact, the slouch and dress
    Which bullock-driver stamp him.

   I do not mean to give offence,
    But I have vainly striven
   To ferret out the difference
    'Twixt driver and the driven.

   Of course, the statements herein made
    In every other stanza
   Are Billy's own; and I'm afraid
    They're stark extravaganza.

   I feel constrained to treat as trash
    His noisy fiddle-faddle
   About his doings with the lash,
    His feats upon the saddle.

   But grant he "knows his way about",
    Or grant that he is silly,
   There cannot be the slightest doubt
    Of Billy's faith in Billy.

   Of all the doings of the day
    His ignorance is utter;
   But he can quote the price of hay,
    The current rate of butter.

   His notions of our leading men
    Are mixed and misty very:
   He knows a cochin-china hen—
    He never speaks of Berry.

   As you'll assume, he hasn't heard
    Of Madame Patti's singing;
   But I will stake my solemn word
    He knows what maize is bringing.

   Surrounded by majestic peaks,
    By lordly mountain ranges,
   Where highest voice of thunder speaks
    His aspect never changes.

   The grand Pacific there beyond
    His dirty hut is glowing:
   He only sees a big salt pond,
    O'er which his grain is going.

   The sea that covers half the sphere,
    With all its stately speeches,
   Is held by Bill to be a mere
    Broad highway for his peaches.

   Through Nature's splendid temples he
    Plods, under mountains hoary;
   But he has not the eyes to see
    Their grandeur and their glory.

   A bullock in a biped's boot,
    I iterate, is Billy!
   He crushes with a careless foot
    The touching water-lily.

   I've said enough—I'll let him go!
    If he could read these verses,
   He'd pepper me for hours, I know,
    With his peculiar curses.

   But this is sure, he'll never change
    His manners loud and flashy,
   Nor learn with neatness to arrange
    His clothing, cheap and trashy.

   Like other louts, he'll jog along,
    And swig at shanty liquors,
   And chew and spit.  Here ends the song
    Of Mr. Billy Vickers.