Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, BY THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH, by JOHN LAURENCE RENTOUL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

BY THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The lone 'bush' breaks: and the forest dips and clings
Last Line: "^2^ australia has, however, her own ""song-thrush"" and ""song-lark."
Alternate Author Name(s): Gage, Gervais
Subject(s): Australia; Brooks; Desolation; Forests; Trees; Streams; Creeks; Woods


THE lone "bush" breaks: and the forest dips and clings,
Cleft deep to its heart by the sickle of glinting stream:
List! that is the bell-bird's call that flits and rings?—
Like a vague new song heard once in a land of dream.

The crickets drone, and the drowsy cicadas chirr:
The tinkling cow-bells echo athwart the range:
O'er log and leaf deft lizards rustle and stir;
A mopoke hoots, with his welcome quaint and strange.

The gaunt white arms of the gum-trees ring'd on the slope,
Like ghosts of a Joy and a Beauty slain by Greed
For scant pelf hid in their girdles, seem to grope
Blindly for grace that's lost:—blind quest indeed!

And here and there, 'mid their death-wan mute appeal,
Peeps out the bark-clad roof of a rude slab-hut,
Or a straggling rail-fence: there, by a torn cart-wheel,
Two calves, with lowering foreheads, strain and butt.

Yonder's a bittock of garden: stunted pear:
Dried cabbage-plot, with the rough paths scrub-o'ergrown:
A tangled rose, but it lives, and it still can dare
To flaunt one English stem, which has blushed and blown.

Beyond is a plot still smaller, with a small grave
Set slantwise to the sun and the dawning East:
Seems God-blest!—mound is green, soft branchlets wave—
God's acre, far from the churchyard and the priest!

So life is here!—Man's home with its hope and care,
Its squalid toil, and its fight with the field and the clay—
(Yon lurching chimney sends its reek to the air,
Signal to all it is meal-time o' the day)—

The same weird tale, since the gate of Eden closed,—
Of woman and man out-driven to face the wild,
By the curse on the ground and the baffling thorns opposed,
With sweat on brow and death on the Abel-child!

And the same grim battle is fought 'neath the alien sun,
Till the hot heart chills, and the yearning and loving and lust;
And the old Earth-mother, wherever the rivers run,
Bids Man "return," and folds him in her dust.

But here, where the woodland dips to the waters' flow,
Are nooks of grace no trampling foot hath stirred,
Shrines sacro-sanct to rest and the twilight glow,
Murmur of stream and chaunt of the careless bird.

And the gladness leaps in my heart and floods to my face,
As it was in the lands of the North—the rush and the cheer;
For the whole world's joy can be framed in a little space,
As the whole world's pain can be globed in a sudden tear.

Yes: I will climb adown to the river bed:
O, the free wild water is clear as in burns at Home,
And the traceried lichen is sun-kissed to blushes of red,
And the fern is a maze of pearl from the drift of the foam.

The fern-trees are arching an aisle with its vaulted shade,
And the flickering lights fall softened upon its floor:
And sweet as the weaving of sleep is the cadence made
By the pulse and pause of the cataract's far outpour.

Glad, glad, O land of the Sun, is thy noise of brooks!
In thy ranges high are the leapings of fountains clear;
But mine own heart yearns for the tones in the quiet nooks
By the streams of a colder zone and a younger year.

Glint of blue sky gleamed through with a dazzle of gold!—
A kingfisher darts from the height to the pool below;
And the wren,^1^ in a joy too great for his heart to hold,
Fills the listening vale with the lyric overflow.

But why should I tremble and thrill at the song of the bird,
And why, ere I know, should there dash from mine eye the tear?
No thrush's^2^ note this woodland glade has stirred,
No nightingale moans with a passion wild and clear.

O nightingale's dirge, and carol of soaring lark!—
Ye pierced with a too-keen yearning the heart and the brain;
But, songs of the brooks that are heard through the day and the dark,
Whence cometh your secret to sweeten the pools of pain?

The mosses are soft as your singing, and hushed is the dell,
And mellow the light as it glints through the whispering trees,
And finer the gold of the wattle than gold we may sell,
And the ferns by the stream have the ken and the dreaming of ease.

And the clematis clings to the strength of the "lilac" or "musk,"
With blooms like a bride's sweet eyes through her bridal veil
When the cloistered shade and the tears make the vision dusk,
And high is her heart, though her tremulous beauty be pale.

O murmurous chaunt that is haunting the primal brooks,
And thrilling from lips of the quenchless mountain springs,
O song of birds that peoples the nesting nooks
Till mirth of heaven to earth its rapture flings,

O message of Love and Beauty scattered wide,
And lyric Joy that floats over creek and dale,
Your glamour-plea,—too eager to be denied,—
Pants through me, leaving me all athirst and pale!

Ah, glades! ye are silent of voices I used to hear,
And vacant of faces more fair than the glen and the tree:
If I sit by the river will Some-one be waiting a-near?—
And her tones had a music more sweet than of brook and of sea!

Will ever a brother speak here, by the bank of the stream,
With challenge of swimmer or risp of the whirring reel?—
With shout: "It is morn! Brother, wake! It was all a dream!
We are still 'mid the snows of the North, 'mid the snipe and the teal!"

Look, look!—where an "English" trout has leapt in the pool,
And the circles pulse outward, and quiver and widen away,
As it used to be in the evenings soft and cool
By the Nor'land streams, when at home for the holiday:

As he used to leap in the wave of the wimpling Wye,
Or light with his sheen old Thames's upland rills,
Or dart, 'mid the Bann's swift rush, on the hovering fly,
Or hie up the "chiming Tweed" to the haunt in the hills.

He has spaced and timed his moods to the alien lands,
He has found new eddying glides for his food and his play,
With a changeling mate he will speed to the golden sands
And furrow a couch in the fords of the newer day.

But Man, with the inward ken, though banished far,
May not cease from the backward glance, and the mystic spell
Of the first glad lights, and the gleam of the first sweet star,
And the flash of the Phrath, and the song of the Hiddekel.

And, O, that I could have again the boy's young heart,
As it was when we dived by the bends of the red-cliffed Roe,
Or cleft the wave of the silvery Bann apart,
Or swam through the "Alts" of the rippling Aghavoe!

^FOOTNOTES^

^1^ The "blue-wren," or "superb warbler" of Australia.

^2^ Australia has, however, her own "song-thrush" and "song-lark."





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