Henry Kendall: Verses about City

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!

To-night a strong south wind in thunder sings
Across the city. Now by salt wet flats,
And ridges perished with the breath of drought,
Comes up a deep, sonorous, gulf-like voice —
Far-travelled herald of some distant storm —
That strikes with harsh gigantic wings the cliff,
Where twofold Otway meets his straitened surf,
And makes a white wrath of a league of sea.
To-night the fretted Yarra chafes its banks,
And dusks and glistens; while the city shows
A ring of windy light. From street to street
The noise of labour, linked to hurrying wheels,
Rolls off, as rolls the stately sound of wave,
When he that hears it hastens from the shore.

To-night beside a moody window sits
A wife who watches for her absent love;
Her home is in a dim suburban street,
In which the winds, like one with straitened breath,
Now fleet with whispers dry and short half-sobs,
Or pause and beat against the showery panes
Like homeless mem’ries seeking for a home.

There, where the plopping of the guttered rain
Sounds like a heavy footstep in the dark,
Where every shadow thrown by flickering light
Seems like her husband halting at the door,
I say a woman sits, and waits, and sits,
Then trims her fire, and comes to wait again.

The chapel clock strikes twelve! He has not come.
The night grows wilder, and the wind dies off
The roads, now turned to thoroughfares of storm,
Save when a solitary, stumbling foot
Breaks through the clamour. Then the watcher starts,
And trembles, with her hand upon the key,
And flutters, with the love upon her lips;
Then sighs, returns, and takes her seat once more.

Is this the old, old tale? Ah! do not ask,
My gentle reader, but across your doubts
Throw shining reasons on the happier side;
Or, if you cannot choose but doubt the man —
If you do count him in your thoughts as one
Who leaves a good wife by a lonely hearth
For more than half the night, for scenes (we’ll say)
Of revelry — I pray you think of how
That wretch must suffer in his waking times
(If he be human), when he recollects
That through the long, long hours of evil feasts
With painted sin, and under glaring gas,
His brightest friend was at a window-sill
A watcher, seated in a joyless room,
And haply left without a loaf of bread.

I, having learnt from sources pure and high,
From springs of love that make the perfect wife,
Can say how much a woman will endure
For one to whom her tender heart has passed.
When fortune fails, and friends drop off, and time
Has shadows waiting in predestined ways —
When shame that grows from want of money comes,
And sets its brand upon a husband’s brow,
And makes him walk an alien in the streets:
One faithful face, on which a light divine
Becomes a glory when vicissitude
Is in its darkest mood — one face, I say,
Marks not the fallings-off that others see,
Seeks not to know the thoughts that others think,
Cares not to hear the words that others say:
But, through her deep and self-sufficing love,
She only sees the bright-eyed youth that won
Her maiden heart in other, happier days,
And not the silent, gloomy-featured man
That frets and shivers by a sullen fire.

And, therefore, knowing this from you, who’ve shared
With me the ordeal of most trying times,
I sometimes feel a hot shame flushing up,
To think that there are those among my sex
Who are so cursed with small-souled selfishness
That they do give to noble wives like you,
For love — that first and final flower of life —
The dreadful portion of a drunkard’s home.

I dread that street - its haggard face
I have not seen for eight long years;
A mother's curse is on the place,
(There's blood, my reader, in her tears).
No child of man shall ever track,
Through filthy dust, the singer's feet -
A fierce old memory drags me back;
I hate its name - I dread that street.

Upon the lap of green, sweet lands,
Whose months are like your English Mays,
I try to hide in Lethe's sands
The bitter, old Bohemian days.
But sorrow speaks in singing leaf,
And trouble talketh in the tide;
The skirts of a stupendous grief
Are trailing ever at my side.

I will not say who suffered there,
'Tis best the name aloof to keep,
Because the world is very fair -
Its light should sing the dark to sleep.
But, let me whisper, in that street
A woman, faint through want of bread,
Has often pawned the quilt and sheet
And wept upon a barren bed.

How gladly would I change my theme,
Or cease the song and steal away,
But on the hill and by the stream
A ghost is with me night and day!
A dreadful darkness, full of wild,
Chaotic visions, comes to me:
I seem to hear a dying child,
Its mother's face I seem to see.

Here, surely, on this bank of bloom,
My verse with shine would ever flow;
But ah! it comes - the rented room,
With man and wife who suffered so!
From flower and leaf there is no hint -
I only see a sharp distress -
A lady in a faded print,
A careworn writer for the press.

I only hear the brutal curse
Of landlord clamouring for his pay;
And yonder is the pauper's hearse
That comes to take a child away.
Apart, and with the half-grey head
Of sudden age, again I see
The father writing by the dead
To earn the undertaker's fee.

No tear at all is asked for him -
A drunkard well deserves his life;
But voice will quiver, eyes grow dim,
For her, the patient, pure young wife,
The gentle girl of better days,
As timid as a mountain fawn,
Who used to choose untrodden ways,
And place at night her rags in pawn.

She could not face the lighted square,
Or show the street her poor, thin dress;
In one close chamber, bleak and bare,
She hid her burden of distress.
Her happy schoolmates used to drive,
On gaudy wheels, the town about;
The meat that keeps a dog alive
She often had to go without.

I tell you, this is not a tale
Conceived by me, but bitter truth;
Bohemia knows it, pinched and pale,
Beside the pyre of burnt-out youth:
These eyes of mine have often seen
The sweet girl-wife, in winters rude,
Steal out at night, through courts unclean,
To hunt about for chips of wood.

Have I no word at all for him
Who used down fetid lanes to slink,
And squat in tap-room corners grim,
And drown his thoughts in dregs of drink?
This much I'll say, that when the flame
Of reason reassumed its force,
The hell the Christian fears to name,
Was heaven to his fierce remorse.

Just think of him - beneath the ban,
And steeped in sorrow to the neck,
Without a friend - a feeble man,
In failing health - a human wreck.
With all his sense and scholarship,
How could he face his fading wife?
The devil never lifted whip
With thongs like those that scourged his life.

But He in whom the dying thief
Upon the Cross did place his trust,
Forgets the sin and feels the grief,
And lifts the sufferer from the dust.
And now, because I have a dream,
The man and woman found the light;
A glory burns upon the stream,
With gold and green the woods are bright.

But still I hate that haggard street,
Its filthy courts, its alleys wild;
In dreams of it I always meet
The phantom of a wailing child.
The name of it begets distress -
Ah, song, be silent! show no more
The lady in the perished dress,
The scholar on the tap-room floor.