Heartbreak

    Twas in that place o' Scotland's isle
    That bears the name o' Auld King Coil,
    Upon a bonnie day in June,
    When wearing through the afternoon,
    Twa dogs that were na thrang at hame,
    Forgather'd ance upon a time.
    The first I'll name, they ca'd him Cæsar,
    Was keepit for his honour's pleasure;
    His hair, his size, his mouth, his lugs,
    Show'd he was nane o' Scotland's dogs;
    But whalpit some place far abroad,
    Where sailors gang to fish for cod.

    His locked, letter'd, braw brass collar
    Show'd him the gentleman and scholar;
    But though he was o' high degree,
    The fient a pride, nae pride had he;
    But wad hae spent an hour caressin',
    Ev'n wi' a tinkler-gypsey's messin'.
    At kirk or marke...

The God of Fair Beginnings
Hath prospered here my hand,
The cargoes of my lading,
And the keels of my command.
For out of many ventures
That sailed with hope as high,
My own have made the better trade,
And Admiral am I.

To me my King's much honour,
To me my people's love,
To me the pride of Princes
And power all pride above;
To me the shouting cities,
To me the mob's refrain:,
"Who knows not noble Valdez
"Hath never heard of Spain."

But I remember comrades,
Old playmates on new seas,
When as we traded orpiment
Among the savages,
A thousand leagues to south'ard
And thirty years removed,
They knew nor noble Valdez,
But me they knew and loved.

Then they that found good liquor,
They drank it not alone,...

1851-1870

I

Now there was one who came in later days
To play at Emperor: in the dead of night
Stole crown and sceptre, and stood forth to light
In sudden purple.    The dawn's straggling rays
Showed Paris fettered, murmuring in amaze,
With red hands at her throat--a piteous sight.
Then the new Caesar, stricken with affright
At his own daring, shrunk from public gaze

In the Elysee, and had lost the day
But that around him flocked his birds of prey,
Sharp-beaked, voracious, hungry for the deed.
'Twixt hope and fear behold great Caesar hang!
Meanwhile, methinks, a ghostly laughter rang
Through the rotunda of the Invalides.

II

What if the boulevards, at set of sun,
Reddened, but not with sunset's kindly glow?
What if fr...

Nature in charms is exhaustless, in beauty ever reviving;
And, like Nature, fair art is inexhaustible too.
Hail, thou honored old man! for both in thy heart thou preservest
Living sensations, and thus ne'er-ending youth is thy lot!

Have you seen but a bright lily grow
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of snow
Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool of beaver,
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the brier,
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!

Oh! listen to the tale of little Annie Protheroe.
She kept a small post-office in the neighbourhood of BOW;
She loved a skilled mechanic, who was famous in his day -
A gentle executioner whose name was Gilbert Clay.

I think I hear you say, "A dreadful subject for your rhymes!"
O reader, do not shrink--he didn't live in modern times!
He lived so long ago (the sketch will show it at a glance)
That all his actions glitter with the lime-light of Romance.

In busy times he laboured at his gentle craft all day -
"No doubt you mean his Cal-craft," you amusingly will say -
But, no--he didn't operate with common bits of string,
He was a Public Headsman, which is quite another thing.

And when his work was over, they would ramble o'er the lea,
And sit beneath the frond...

This mood hath known all beauty for it sees
O'erwhelmed majesties
In these pale forms, and kingly crowns of gold
On brows no longer bold,
And through the shadowy terrors of their hell
The love for which they fell,
And how desire which cast them in the deep
Called God too from his sleep.
O, pity, only seer, who looking through
A heart melted like dew,
Seest the long perished in the present thus,
For ever dwell in us.
Whatever time thy golden eyelids ope
They travel to a hope;
Not only backward from these low degrees
To starry dynasties,
But, looking far where now the silence owns
And rules from empty thrones,
Thou seest the enchanted halls of heaven burn
For joy at our return.
Thy tender kiss hath memory we are kings
For all our wanderi...

This is the tale that was told to me by the man with the crystal eye,
As I smoked my pipe in the camp-fire light, and the Glories swept the sky;
As the Northlights gleamed and curved and streamed, and the bottle of "hooch" was dry.

A man once aimed that my life be shamed, and wrought me a deathly wrong;
I vowed one day I would well repay, but the heft of his hate was strong.
He thonged me East and he thonged me West; he harried me back and forth,
Till I fled in fright from his peerless spite to the bleak, bald-headed North.

And there I lay, and for many a day I hatched plan after plan,
For a golden haul of the wherewithal to crush and to kill my man;
And there I strove, and there I clove through the drift of icy streams;
And there I fought, and there I sought for the pay...

OCT. 10, 1718 NINE IN THE MORNING

To you whose virtues, I must own
With shame, I have too lately known;
To you, by art and nature taught
To be the man I long have sought,
Had not ill Fate, perverse and blind,
Placed you in life too far behind:
Or, what I should repine at more,
Placed me in life too far before:
To you the Muse this verse bestows,
Which might as well have been in prose;
No thought, no fancy, no sublime,
But simple topics told in rhyme.
    Three gifts for conversation fit
Are humour, raillery, and wit:
The last, as boundless as the wind,
Is well conceived, though not defined;
For, sure by wit is only meant
Applying what we first invent.
What humour is, not all the tribe
Of logic-mongers can describe;
Here only natu...

I am older than Nature and her Time
By all the timeless age of Consciousness,
And my adult oblivion of the clime
Where I was born makes me not countryless.
Ay, and dim through my daylight thoughts escape
Yearnings for that land where my childhood dreamed,
Which I cannot recall in colour or shape
But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed
And yet is not as light remembered,
Nor to the left or to the right conceived;
And all round me tastes as if life were dead
And the world made but to be disbelieved.
    Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet
    How but by hope do I the unknown truth get?

"Let there be light!" God spake of old,
And over chaos dark and cold,
And through the dead and formless frame
Of nature, life and order came.

Faint was the light at first that shone
On giant fern and mastodon,
On half-formed plant and beast of prey,
And man as rude and wild as they.

Age after age, like waves, o'erran
The earth, uplifting brute and man;
And mind, at length, in symbols dark
Its meanings traced on stone and bark.

On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll,
On plastic clay and leathern scroll,
Man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed,
And to! the Press was found at last!

Then dead souls woke; the thoughts of men
Whose bones were dust revived again;
The cloister's silence found a tongue,
Old prophets spake, old poe...

Aweel, I'm couped. But wha' could tell
    The road wad rin sae sair?
I couldna gang yon pace mysel',
    An' I winna try nae mair!

There's them wad coonsel me to stan',
    But this is what I say:
When Natur's forces fecht wi' man,
    Dod, he maun just give way!

If man's nae framed to lift his fit
    Agin' a nat'ral law,
I winna' lift my heid, for it
    Wad dae nae guid ava'.

Puir worms are we; the poo'pit rings
    Ilk Sawbath wi' the same,
Gin airth's the place for sic-like things,
    I'm no sae far frae hame!

Yon's guid plain raes'nin'; an' forby,
    This pairish has nae sense,
There's mony traiv'lin wad deny
    Natur and Providence;

For loud an' bauld the leears wage
    On men lik...

Ere the mother's milk had dried
On my lips, the Brethren came,
Tore me from my nurse's side,
And bestowed on me a name

Infamously overtrue,
Such as "Bunny," "Stinker," "Podge";
But, whatever I should do,
Mine for ever in the Lodge.

Then they taught with palm and toe,
Then I learned with yelps and tears,
All the Armoured Man should know
Through his Seven Secret Years...

Last, oppressing as oppressed,
I was loosed to go my ways
With a Totem on my breast
Governing my nights and days,

Ancient and unbribeable,
By the virtue of its Name,
Which, however oft I fell,
Lashed me back into The Game.

And the World, that never knew,
Saw no more beneath my chin
Than a patch of rainbow-hue,
Mixed as Life and cru...

    (Air: “Belle Mahone.”)


At River Bend, in New South Wales,
All alone among the whales,
Busting up some post and rails,
            Sweet Belle Mahone.
In the blazing sun we stand,
Cabbage-tree hat, black velvet band,
Moleskins stiff with sweat and sand,
            Sweet Belle Mahone.

                Chorus: Sweet Belle Mahone, &c.

In the burning sand we pine,
No one asks us to have a wine,
’Tis a jolly crooked line,
            Sweet Belle Mahone.
When I am sitting on a log,
Looking like a great big frog,
Waiting for a Murray cod,
            Sweet Belle Mahone.

Land of snakes and cockatoos,
Native bears and big emus,
Ugly blacks and kangaroos,
            Sweet Belle Mahone.
Paddymelons by th...

I plod and peer amid mean sounds and shapes,
I hunt for dusty gain and dreary praise,
And slowly pass the dismal grinning days,
Monkeying each other like a line of apes.

What care? There was one hour amid all these
When I had stripped off like a tawdry glove
My starriest hopes and wants, for very love
Of time and desolate eternities.

Yea, for one great hour's triumph, not in me
Nor any hope of mine did I rejoice,
But in a meadow game of girls and boys
Some sunset in the centuries to be.

The breezes waved the silver grass,
Waist-high along the siding,
And to the creek we ne'er could pass
Three boys on bare-back riding;
Beneath the sheoaks in the bend
The waterhole was brimming,
Do you remember yet, old friend,
The times we "went in swimming"?

The days we "played the wag" from school,
Joys shared, and paid for singly,
The air was hot, the water cool,
And naked boys are kingly!
With mud for soap the sun to dry,
A well planned lie to stay us,
And dust well rubbed on neck and face
Lest cleanliness betray us.

And you'll remember farmer Kutz,
Though scarcely for his bounty,
He leased a forty-acre block,
And thought he owned the county;
A farmer of the old world school,
That grew men hard and grim in,
He drew...

A cottager leaned whispering by her hives,
    Telling the bees some news, as they lit down,
    And entered one by one their waxen town.
Larks passioning hung o'er their brooding wives,
And all the sunny hills where heather thrives
    Lay satisfied with peace. A stately crown
    Of trees enringed the upper headland brown,
And reedy pools, wherein the moor-hen dives,
Glittered and gleamed.
    A resting-place for light,
They that were bred here love it; but they say,
    "We shall not have it long; in three years' time
A hundred pits will cast out fires by night,
Down yon still glen their smoke shall trail its way,
And the white ash lie thick in lieu of rime."

Hence they have borne my Lord; behold! the stone
Is rolled away and my sweet Saviour's gone.
Tell me, white angel, what is now become
Of Him we lately sealed up in this tomb?
Is He, from hence, gone to the shades beneath,
To vanquish hell as here He conquered death?
If so, I'll thither follow without fear,
And live in hell if that my Christ stays there.

Of all the good things whatsoe'er we do,
God is the {ARCHÊ}, and the {TELOS} too.