III. "AUSTRALIA: victoria -- new south wales -- queensland ." THE OUTCASTS. ( Melbourne .)

Here to the parks they come,
The scourings of the town,
Like weary wounded animals
Seeking where to lie them down.

Brothers, let us take together
An easeful period.
There is worse than to be as we are—
Cast out, not of men but of God!

VICTORIA TO JAMES MOORHOUSE, [76]

Bishop of Melbourne, who left Melbourne for the Bishopric of Manchester, 10th March 1886.

He came, a stranger, and we gave him welcome
More as loved friend than rumour’s honoured guest.
He spoke! Were we, then, all so slack to listen?
To hail him as our wisest, noblest, best?
Why did he leave us?

He toiled! And we, we under such a leader,
Forgot all other creeds, but that he taught,
And proud of our clear answer to his summons,
Forgot all other fights but that he fought!
Why did he leave us?

He wearied! ’Twas too great, he said, the burden.
We saw it and we cried with anxious love;
“What does he (Let him back!) down in the battle?
Is not the general’s place at rest above?”
Why did he leave us?

He left us for a “wider sphere of labour!”
A tinsel seat within a House that shakes,
To herd with priests meal-mouthed, with lords and liars
That still would bind a nation’s chain that breaks!
Why did he leave us?

Farewell, then! Are there any to reproach you
In all this facile crowd that weeps and cheers?
Not one! But, ah you yet shall listen sadly
To an echo falling faint through the dead years:—
Why did he leave us?

IN THE SEA-GARDENS.
(Sydney.)
“the man of the nation.”

Yonder the band is playing
And the fine young people walk.
They are envying each other and talking
Their pretty empty talk.

There, in the shade on the outskirts,
Stretched on the grass, I see
A man with a slouch hat, smoking.
That is the man for me!

That is the Man of the Nation;
He works and much endures.
When all the rest is rotten,
He rises and cuts and cures.

He’s the soldier of the Crimea,
Fighting to honour fools;
He’s the grappler and strangler of Lee
Lord of the terrible tools.

He’s in all the conquered nations
That have won their own at last,
And in all that yet shall win it.
And the world by him goes past!

O strong sly world, this nameless
Still, much-enduring Man,
Is the hand of God that shall clutch you
For all you have done, or can!

“UPSTARTS.”

What? do you say that we, the toilers—the slaves—
(Why strain at the gnat name
Who swallow the camel thing your pocket craves?)—
That we are “just the same,”

(Nay, worse) when power is ours and wealth—that we
Are harder masters still,
More keen to ring her last from misery,
More greedy of our will?

’Tis true! And when you see men so—see us
Sneer at us, call us swine!—
“How we must love you who have made us thus,
You may perhaps divine!”

LABOUR—CAPITAL—LAND.

In that rich archipelago of sea
With fiery hills, thick woods wherein the mias [79a]
Browses along the trees, and god-like men
Leave monuments of speech too large for us, [79b]
There are strange forest-trees. Far up, their roots
Spread from the central trunk, and settle down
Deep in the life-fed earth, seventy feet below.
In the past days here grew another tree,
On whose high fork the parasitic seed
Fell and sprang up, and, finding life and strength
In the disease, decrepitude and death
Of that it fed on, utterly consumed it,
And stands the monument of Nature’s crime!
So Labour with his parasites, the two
Great swollen robbers, Land and Capital,
Stands to the gaze of men but as a heap
Of rotted dust whose only use must be
To rich the roots of the proud stem that killed it! [80]

AUSTRALIA.

I see a land of desperate droughts and floods:
I see a land where need keeps spreading round,
And all but giants perish in the stress:
I see a land where more, and more, and more
The demons, Earth and Wealth, grow bloat and strong.

I see a land that lies a helpless prey
To wealthy cliques and gamblers and their slaves,
The huckster politicians: a poor land
That less and less can make her heart-wish law.

Yea, but I see a land where some few brave
Raise clear eyes to the Struggle that must come,
Reaching firm hands to draw the doubters in,
Preaching the gospel: “Drill and drill and drill!”
Yea, but I see a land where best of all
The hope of victory burns strong and bright!

ART.

“Yes, let Art go, if it must be
That with it men must starve—
If Music, Painting, Poetry
Spring from the wasted hearth!”

Yes, let Art go, till once again
Through fearless heads and hands
The toil of millions and the pain
Be passed from out the lands:

Till from the few their plunder falls
To those who’ve toiled and earned
But misery’s hopeless intervals
From those who’ve robbed and spurned.

Yes, let Art go, without a fear,
Like autumn flowers we burn,
For, with her reawakening year,
Be sure she will return!—

Return, but greater, nobler yet
Because her laurel crown
With dew and not with blood is wet,
And as our queen sit down!

“HENRY GEORGE.”
(Melbourne.)

I came to buy a book. It was a shop
Down in a narrow quiet street, and here
They kept, I knew, these socialistic books.
I entered. All was bare, but clean and neat.
The shelves were ranged with unsold wares; the counter
Held a few sheets and papers. Here and there
Hung prints and calendars. I rapped, and straight
A young girl came out through the inner door.
She had a clear and simple face; I saw
She had no beauty, loveliness, nor charm,
But, as your eyes met those grey light-lit eyes
Like to a mountain spring so pure, you thought:
“He’d be a clever man who looked, and lied!”
I asked her for the book. . . . We spoke a little. . . .
Her words were as her face was, as her eyes.
Yes, she’d read many books like this of mine:
Also some poets, Shelley, Byron too,
And Tennyson, but ‘poets only dreamed!’
Thus, then, we talked, until by chance I spoke
A phrase and then a name. ’Twas “Henry George.”
Her face lit up. O it was beautiful,
Or never woman’s face was! “Henry George?”
She said. And then a look, a flush, a smile,
Such as sprung up in MagdalenÈ’s cheek
When some voice uttered Jesus, made her angel.
She turned and pointed up the counter. I,
Loosing mine eyes from that ensainted face,
Looked also. ’Twas a print, a common print,
The head and shoulders of some man. She said,
Quite in a whisper: “That’s him, Henry George!”

Darling, that in this life of wrong and woe,
The lovely woman-soul within you brooded
And wept and loved and hated and pitied,
And knew not what its helplessness could do,
Its helplessness, its sheer bewilderment—
That then those eyes should fall, those angel eyes,
On one who’d brooded, wept, loved, hated, pitied,
Even as you had, but therefrom had sprung
A hope, a plan, a scheme to right this wrong,
And make this woe less hateful to the sun—
And that pure soul had found its Master thus
To listen to, remember, watch and love,
And trust the dawn that rose up through the dark:
O this was good
For me to see, as for some weary hopeless
Longer and toiler for “the Kingdom of Heaven”
To stand some lifeless twilight hour, and hear,
There in the dim-lit house of Lazarus,
Mary who said: “Thus, thus, he looked, he spake,
The Master!”—So to hear her rapturous words,
And gaze upon her up-raised heavenly face!

WILLIAM WALLACE.
(For the Ballarat statue of him.)

This is Scotch William Wallace. It was he
Who in dark hours first raised his face to see:
Who watched the English tyrant nobles spurn,
Steel-clad, with iron hoofs the Scottish free:

Who armed and drilled the simple footman Kern,
Yea, bade in blood and rout the proud Knight learn
His Feudalism was dead, and Scotland stand
Dauntless to wait the day of Bannockburn!

O Wallace, peerless lover of thy land,
We need thee still, thy moulding brain and hand!
For us, thy poor, again proud tyrants spurn,
The robber rich, a yet more hateful band!

THE AUSTRALIAN FLAG.

Pure blue flag of heaven
With your silver stars,
Not beside those crosses’
Blood-stained torture-bars:

Not beside the token
The foul sea-harlot gave,
Pure blue flag of heaven,
Must you ever wave!

No, but young exultant,
Free from care and crime,
The soulless selfish England
Of this later time:

No, but, faithful, noble,
Rising from her grave,
Flag of light and liberty,
For ever must you wave!

TO AN OLD FRIEND IN ENGLAND.
“esau.”

Was it for nothing in the years gone by,
O my love, O my friend,
You thrilled me with your noble words of faith?—
Hope beyond life, and love, love beyond death!
Yet now I shudder, and yet you did not die,
O my friend, O my love!

Was it for nothing in the dear dead years,
O my love, O my friend,
I kissed you when you wrung my heart from me,
And gave my stubborn hand where trust might be?
Yet then I smiled, and see, these bitter tears,
O my friend, O my love!

No bitter words to say to you have I,
O my love, O my friend!
That faith, that hope, that love was mine, not yours!
And yet that kiss, that clasp endures, endures.
I have no bitter words to say. Good-bye,
O my friend, O my love!

. . . One rises now and speaks: “The Cause is one—
Labour o’er all the earth! Shan’t we, then, share
With these, whose very flesh and blood’s our own,
All that we can of what we have and are?

“What is it that their work is in the earth,
Down in its depths, and ours is on the sea?
The fight they fight is ours; their worth our worth;
Their loss our loss. We help them! They are we!

“We help them!—Ay, and when our hour too breaks,
And on to every ship that ploughs the wave
We put our hand at last, our hand that takes
Its own, will they forget the help we gave?

“And, if our robber lords would rob us still
With the foul hoard of beasts without a soul,
They may find leprous hands to work their will,
But, for their ships, where will they find the coal?”

“Help them!” the voices cry. They help them. Here,
Resolute, stern, menacing, hark the sound!
Look, ’tis the simple fearlessness of fear—
Dark faces and deep voices all around.

TO HIS LOVE.

“Teach me, love, to be true;
Teach me, love, to love;
Teach me to be pure like you.
It will be more than enough!

“Ah, and in days to come,
Give me, my seraph, too,
A son nobler than I,
A daughter true like you:

“A son to battle the wrong,
To seek and strive for the right;
A beautiful daughter of song,
To point us on to the light!”

HER POEM:
“my baby girl, that was born and died on the same day.”

“Ah, with torn heart I see them still,
Wee unused clothes and empty cot.
Though glad my love has missed the ill
That falls to woman’s lot.

“No tangled paths for her to tread
Throughout the coming changeful years;
No desperate weird to dree and dread;
No bitter lonely tears!

“No woman’s piercing crown of thorns
Will press my aching baby’s brow;
No starless nights, no sunless morns,
Will ever greet her now.

“The clothes that I had wrought with care
Through weary hours for love’s sweet sake
Are laid aside, and with them there
A heart that seemed to break.”

TO HENRY GEORGE IN AMERICA.

Not for the thought that burns on keen and clear,
Heat that the heat has turned from red to white,
The passion of the lone remembering night
One with the patience day must see and hear—
Not for the shafts the lying foemen fear,
Shot from the soul’s intense self-centring light—
But for the heart of love divine and bright,
We praise you, worker, thinker, poet, seer!
Man of the People,—faithful in all parts,
The veins’ last drop, the brain’s last flickering dole,
You on whose forehead beams the aureole
That hope and “certain hope” alone imparts—
Us have you given your perfect heart and soul;
Wherefore receive as yours our souls and hearts!

“ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.”

Shrieks out of smoke, a flame of dung-straw fire
That is not quenched but hath for only fruit
What writhes and dies not in its rotten root:
Two things made flesh, the visible desire
To match in filth the skunk, the ape in ire, [87a]
Mouthing before the mirrors with wild foot
Beyond all feebler footprint of pursuit,
The perfect twanger of the Chinese lyre!
A heart with generous virtues run to seed
In vices making all a jumbled creed:
A soul that knows not love nor trust nor shame,
But cuts itself with knives to bawl and bleed—
If thou we’ve known of late, art still the same,
What need, O soul, to sign thee with thy name?

Once on thy lips the golden-honeyed bees
Settling made sweet the heart that was not strong,
And sky and earth and sea burst into song: [87b]
Once on thine eyes the light of agonies
Flashed through the soul and robbed the days of ease. [87c]
But tunes turn stale when love turns babe, and long
The exiled gentlemen grow fat with wrong.
And peasants, workmen, beggars, what are these? [87d]
O you who sang the Italian smoke above,—
Mud-lark of Freedom, pipe of that vile band
Whose envy slays the tyrant, not the love
Of these poor souls none have the keeping of—
It is your hand—it is your pandar hand
Smites the bruised mouth of pilloried Ireland!

TO AN UNIONIST.

“If you only knew
How gladly I’ve given it
All these years—
The light of mine eyes,
The heat of my lips,
Mine agonies,
My yearning tears,
My blood that drips,
My brain that sears:
If you only knew
How gladly I’ve given it
All these years—
My hope and my youth,
My manhood, my Art,
My passion, my truth,
My mind and my heart:

“O my brother, you would not say,
What have you to do with me?
You would not, would not turn away
Doubtingly and bitterly.

“If you only knew
How little I cared for
These other things—
The delicate speech,
The high demand
Of each from each,
The imaginings
Of Love’s Holy Land:
If you only knew
How little I cared for
These other things—
The wide clear view
Over peoples and times,
The search in the new
Entrancing climes,
Science’s wings
And Art’s sweet chimes:

“O my brother, if you only knew
What to me in these things is understood,
As it seems to me it would seem to you,
What was good for the Cause was surely good:

“O my brother, you would not say:
What have you to do with me?
You would not, would not turn away
Doubtingly and bitterly:

“But you would take my hand with your hand,
O my brother, if you only knew;
You would smile at me, you would understand,
You would call me brother as I call you!”

TO MY FRIEND SYDNEY JEPHCOTT,
with a copy of my “poetical works.”

“Take with all my heart, friend, this,
The labour of my past,
Though the heart here hidden is
And the soul’s eternities
Hold the present fast.

“Take it, still, with soul and heart,
Pledge of that dear day
When the shadows stir and start,
By the bright Sun burst apart—
Young Australia!”

TO E. L. ZOX. [89]
(Melbourne.)

We thank you for a noble work well done.
There is a kindness—(’tis the truer one;
The better part the simpler heart doth know),
The care to give the day a brighter sun

To these, the nameless crowd that drags on slow
The common toil, the common weary woe
The world cares nought for. But your work secures
Thro’ union strength and self-respect that grow.

There is a courage that unflawed endures
The sneer, the slander of earth’s epicures.
And here are grateful women’s hearts to show
This kindness and this courage, both are yours!

“FATHER ABE.”
(Song of the American Sons of Labour.)

THE SONG.

“O we knew so well, dear Father,
When we answered to your call,
And the Southern Moloch stricken
Shook and tottered to his fall—

“O we knew so well you loved us,
And our hearts beat back to yours
With the rapturous adoration
That through all the years endures!

“Mothers, sisters bade us hasten
Sweethearts, wives with babe at breast;
For the Union, faith and freedom,
For our hero of the West!

“And we wrung forth victory blood-stained
From the desperate hands of Crime,
And our Cause blazed out Man’s beacon
Through the endless future time!

“And forgiven, forever we bade it
Cease, that envy, hatred, strife,
As he willed, our murdered Father
That had sealed his love with life!

“O dear Father, was it thus, then?
Did we this but in a dream?
Is it real, hideous present?
Does our suffering only seem?

“Bend and listen, look and tell us!
Are these joyless toilers We?
Slaves more wretched, patient, piteous
Than the slaves we fought to free!

“Are these weak, worn girls and women
Those whose mothers yet can tell
How they kissed and clasped men god-like
With fierce faces fronting hell?

“Bend and listen, look and tell us!
Is this silent waste, possessed
By bloat thieves and their task-masters,
Thy free, thy fair, thy fearless West?

“Are these Eastern mobs of wage-slaves,
Are these cringing debauchees,
Sons of those who slung their rifles—
Shook the old Flag to the breeze?”

THE ANSWER.

“Men and boys, O fathers, brothers,
Burst these fetters round you bound!
Women, sisters, wives and mothers,
Lift your faces from the ground!

“O Democracy, O People,
East and West and North and South,
Rise together, one for ever,
Strike this Crime upon the mouth!

“Bid them not, the men who loved you,
Those who fought for you and died,
Scorn you that you broke a small Crime,
Left a great Crime pass in pride!

“England, France, the played-out countries,
Let them reek there in their stew,
Let their past rot out their present,
But the Future is with you!

“O America, O first-born
Of the age that yet shall be
Where all men shall be as one man,
Noble, faithful, fearless, free!—

“O America, O paramour
Of the foul slave-owner Pelf,
You who saved from slavery others,
Now from slavery save yourself!

“Save yourself, though, anguish-shaken,
You cry out and bow your head,
Crying ‘Why am I forsaken?’
Crying ‘It is finishÈd!’

“Save yourself, no God will save you;
Not one angel can He give!
They and He are dead and vanished,
And ’tis you, ’tis you must live!

“Risen again, fire-tried, victorious,
From the grave of Crime down-hurled,
Peerless, pure, serene and glorious,
Wield the sceptre of the world!”

A FOOL.
(Brisbane).

He asked me of my friend—“a clever man;
Such various talent, business, journalism;
A pen that might some day have sent out ‘leaders’
From our greatest newspapers.”—“Yes, all this,
All this,” I said.—“And yet he will not rise?
He’ll stay a “comp.,” a printer all his life?”—
I said: “Just that, a workman all his life.”
But, as my questioner was a business man,
One of the sons of Capital, a sage
Whose practicality saw I can suppose
Quite to his nose-tip even his finger-ends,
I vouchsafed explanation. “This young man
My friend, was born and bred a workman. All
His heart and soul (And men have hearts and souls
Other than those the doctor proses of,
The parson prates of, and both make their trade)
Were centred in his comradeship and love.
His friends, his ‘chums’, were workmen, and the girl
He wooed, and made a happy wife and mother,
Had heart and soul like him in whence she sprung.
Observe now! When he came to think and read,
He saw (it seemed to him he saw) in what
Capitalists, Employers, men like you,
Think and call ‘justice’ in your inter-dealings,
Some slight mistakes (I fancy he’d say ‘wrongs’)
Whereby his order suffered. So he wonders:
‘Cannot we change this?’ And he tries and tries,
Knowing his fellows and adapting all
His effort in the channels that they know.
You understand? He’s ‘only an Unionist!’
Now for the second point. This man believes
That these mistakes—these wrongs (we’ll pass the word)
Spring from a certain thing called ‘competition’
Which you (and I) know is a God-given thing
Whereby the fittest get up to the top
(That’s I—or you) and tread down all the others.
Well, this man sees how by this God-given thing
He has the chance to use his extra wits
And clamber up: he sees how others have—
(Like you—or me; my father’s father’s father
Was a market-gardener and, I trust, a good one).
He sees, moreover, how perpetually
Each of his fellows who has extra wits
Has used them as the fox fallen in the well
Used the confiding goat, and how the goats
More and more wallow there and stupefy,
Robbed of the little wit the hapless crowd
Had in their general haplessness. Well, then
This man of mine (This is against all law,
Human, divine and natural, I admit)
Prefers to wallow there and not get out,
Except they all can! I’ve made quite a tale
About what is quite simple. Yet ’tis curious,
As I see you hold. Now frankly tell me, will you,
What do you think of him?”—“He is a fool!”—
“He is a fool? There is no doubt of it!
But I am told that it was some such fool
Came once from Galilee, and ended on
A criminal’s cross outside Jerusalem,—
And that this fool, he and his criminal’s cross,
Broke up an Empire that seemed adamant,
And made a new world which, renewed again,
Is Europe still.
He is a fool! And it was some such fool
Drudged up and down the earth these later years,
And wrote a Book the other fools bought up
In tens of thousands, calling it a Gospel.
And this fool too, and the fools that follow him,
Or hold with him, why, he and they shall all
End in the mad-house, or the gutter, where
They’ll chew the husk of their mad dreams, and die!
For what are their follies but dreams? They have done nothing,
And never will! . . .
One moment! I have just a word to say.
How comes it, tell me, friend, six weeks ago
A ‘comp.’ was sent a-packing for a cause
His fellows thought unjust, and that same night
(Or, rather, the next morning) in comes one
To tell you (quite politely) that unless
That ‘comp.’ was setting at his frame, they feared
One of our greatest newspapers would not go
That day a harbinger of light and leading
To gladden and instruct its thousands? And,
If I remember right, it did—and so did he,
That wretched ‘comp.,’ set at his frame, and does!
How came it also that three months ago
Your brother, the shipowner, “sacked” a man
Out of his ship, and bade him go to hell?
And in the evening up came two or three,
Discreetly asking him to state the cause?
And when he said he’d see them with the other,
(Videlicet, in hell), they said they feared,
Unless the other came thence (if he was there),
And was upon his ship to-morrow morning,
It would not sail. It did not sail till noon,
And he sailed with it!
But this is all beside the point! Our ‘comp.,’
Who sweats there, and who will not write you ‘leaders’
Except to help a friend who’s fallen ill,
Why, he, beyond a doubt he is a fool!”

“MOUNT RENNIE.” [95]

I.
(The Australian Press speaks).

“Kill them! Yes, hang them all!
They are fiends, just that!
And we’re all agreed fiends should be sent
To a place that’s hot.

“They were fiends, too, of themselves;
They delighted in it!
It’s all their fault, their own fault!
Don’t listen a minute!

“Don’t let anyone talk
About ‘fatality,’ ‘lot,’
That sort of talk (excuse us!)
Is just damned rot.

“You and I, p’raps, are what we’re made.
If I’m dying of phthisis,
It’s because my father passed on
To me what the price is

“Of his excesses, and I,
Overworked, come off worse.
Just so; but, with these young fiends,
It’s quite the reverse.

“Their homes were happy and bright,
(All are in Australia).
Their parents were good, kind, wise:
No breath of failure

“Can be breathed on their education,
Their childhood’s surroundings,
The healthy training that gives
Youth morality’s groundings.

“Those people who say
That the larrikins come
From that God-spat-out-thing,
The Australian ‘home’—

“The narrow harsh rule
Of base mean parents,
Whose played-out ideas drive
All of good and of fair thence:

“That our prostitute girls
Come from just the same Cause—
Why, these idiots know nothing
Of facts, social laws!

“Kill them, then! Hang them all!
We (like God) must be just.
It was all their own faults,
Not ours. . . . Dust to dust!”

II.
(The Time-Spirit speaks.)

“Poor lads! And you for others’ wrongs and sins
Whose dead past greed and lust did never wince
To make your fathers, mothers, and now you
Miserable fiends in hell, must expiate, since

“We the more guilty, we the strong, the few,
Whose triumph thrusts you down into the stew,
Fear lest our victims rise and rend us, fear
This problem mad we will not listen to!

“Victims, with her your fellow-victim here,
Blind, deaf, dumb beasts, the hour shall yet appear
When men, when justicers resolute-terrible, you
Shall speak and all men tremble as they hear!”

“TYRANNY.”
(Melbourne.)

[The Delegates speak.]

“‘Tyranny’? Yes, that’s it!
We are not afraid
To face the word that’s fit
For what we’ve said!

“It’s the tyranny of the Many,
That will not allow
There’s the right to any
To seek wealth and power now

“At the expense of the Many.
Say, that one or this
Works ‘over hours’: then he
Drives us all to the abyss,

“Where, struggling together
One rises again
While the rest all together
Are stifled and slain.

“From this death-strife of brothers
Comes the tyranny of One.
That’s your sort. But we others,
We prefer our own!”

FROM A VERANDAH.
(Sydney.)
“Armageddon.”

O city lapped in sun and Sabbath rest,
With happy face of plenteous ease possessed,
Have you no doubts that whisper, dreams that moan
Disquietude, to stir your slumbering breast?

Think you the sins of other climes are gone?
The harlot’s curse rings in your streets—the groan
Of out-worn men, the stabbed and plundered slaves
Of ever-growing Greed, these are your own!

O’er you shall sweep the fiery hell that craves
For quenchment the bright blood of human waves:
For you, if you repent not, shall atone
For Greed’s dark death-holes with War’s swarming graves!

“ELSIE:”
A Memory.

Little elfin maid,
Old, though scarce two years,
With your big dark hazel eyes
Tenderer than tears,

And your rosebud mouth
Lisping jocund things,
Breaking brooding silence with
Wistful questionings!

Like a flower you grew
While life’s bright sun shone.
Does the greedy spendthrift earth
Heed a flower is gone?

No; but Love’s fond ken,
That gropes through Death’s strange ways,
Almost seems to hear your Voice,
Seems to see your Face!

“NATIONALISM AND M‘ILWRAITH!”
The Queensland Elections Cry, 1888.

Australia listened! Through the brawling game
Of played-out rascals gambling for her gold,
The rotten-hearted traitors who had sold
For flimsy English gauds her righteous fame—
Through the foul hubbub, it did seem, there came
The still small voice of nobler things untold.
But now, but now with wonder manifold
She hears a voice that calls her by her name!

Australia listens, as the mother wilt
To hear her first-born cry. “Say, is it death,
Or life and all life’s hope made audible
That thrills my heart and gives my spirit faith?”
From out the gathering war-hosts leaps forth shrill
The double cry, “Australia, M‘Ilwraith!”

The dawn is breaking northward! Rise, O Sun,
Australian Liberty, and give us light!
And thou who through the dark and doubtful night
With great clear eyes of patience looking on
Even to that splendid hour Republican,
O know what things are with thee in the fight—
What hope and trust, what truth, what right, what might
To never leave this work till it be done!
Not as these others were, the helpless slaves
Of each diurnal need and cringing debt,
Australia’s statesman, have we known thee yet!—
The world’s great heroes call from a thousand graves:
“Thy land, a nation, cries to thee to be set
Free as the freedom of her ocean waves!”

TO THE EMPEROR WILLIAM.

London, May 15, 1889.—“The promised interview with the Emperor William was granted to-day to the delegates from the coal-miners now on strike in Westphalia; but the audience lasted for only ten minutes. The men asked that the Emperor would inquire into the merits of their case and the hardships under which they suffered. His Majesty replied that he was already inquiring into the matter. He then warned the miners that he would employ all his great powers to repress socialistic agitation and intrigue. If the slightest resistance was shown he would shoot every man so offending. On the other hand, he promised to protect them if peaceable.”—Cablegram.

Son of a Man and grandson of a Man,
Mannikin most miserable in thy shrunken shape
And peevish, shrivelled-soul, is’t thou wouldst ape
The thunder-bearer of Fate’s blustering clan?
Know, then, that never, since the years began,
The terrible truth was surer of this word:
“Who takes the sword, shall perish by the sword!”
For mankind’s nod makes mannikin and man.

Surely it was not shed too long ago,
That Emperor’s blood that stained the Northern snow,
O thou King Stork aspiring that art King Log,
Wild-boar that wouldst be, reeking there all hog;
To teach thy brutish brainlessness to know
Those who pulled down a lion can shoot a dog.

A STORY.
(For the Irish Delegates in Australia.)

Do you want to hear a story
With a nobler praise than “glory,”
Of a man who loved the right like heaven and loathed the wrong like hell?
Then, that story let me tell you
Once again, though it as well you
Know as I—the splendid story of the man they call Parnell!

By the wayside of the nations,
Lashed with whips and execrations,
Helpless, hopeless, bleeding, dying, she, the Maiden Nation, lay;
And the burthen of dishonour
Weighed so grievously upon her
That her very children hid their eyes and crept in shame away.

And there as she was lying
Helpless, hopeless, bleeding, dying,
All her high-born foes came round her, fleering, jeering, as they said:
“What is freedom fought and won for?
She is dead! She’s down and done for!”
And her weeping children shuddered as they crouched and whispered: “Dead!”

Then suddenly up-starting,
All that throng before him parting,
See, a man with firm step breaking through that central knot that gives;
And, as by some dear lost sister,
He knelt down, and softly kissed her,
And he raised his pale, proud face, and cried: “She is not dead. She lives!

“O she lives, I say, and I here,
I am come to fight and die here
For the love my heart has for her like a slow consuming fire;
For the love of her low lying,
For the hatred deep, undying
Of the robber lords who struck and stabbed and trod her in the mire!”

Then upon that cry bewildering,
Some of them, her hapless children—
In their hearts there leaped up hope like light when night gives birth to day;
And, as mocks and threats defied him,
One by one they came beside him,
Till they stood, a band of heroes, sombre, desperate, at bay!

And the battle that they fought there,
And the bitter truth they taught there
To the blinded Sister-Nation suffering grievously alway,
All the wrong and rapine past hers,
Of her lords and her task masters,
Is not this the larger hope of all as night gives birth to day!

For the lords and liars are quaking
At the People’s stern awaking
From their slumber of the ages; and the Peoples slowly rise,
And with hands locked tight together,
One in heart and soul for ever,
Watch the sun of Light and Liberty leap up into the skies!

That’s the story, that’s the story
With a nobler praise than “glory,”
Of the Man who loved the right like heaven and loathed the wrong like hell,
And with calm, proud exultation
Bade her stand at last a nation,
Ireland, Ireland that is one name with the name of Charles Parnell!

AT THE INDIA DOCKS.
A Memory of August, 1883.

[The spectacle of the life of the London Dock labourers is one of the most terrible examples of the logical outcome of the present social system. In the six great metropolitan docks over 100,000 men are employed, the great bulk of whom are married and have families. By the elaborate system of sub-contracts their wages have been driven down to 4d., 3d., and even 2d. for the few hours they are employed, making the average weekly earnings of a man amount to 7, 6, and even 5 shillings a week! Hundreds and hundreds of lives are lost or ruined every year by the perilous nature of the work, and absolutely without compensation. Yet so fierce is the competition that men are not unfrequently maimed or even killed in the desperate struggles at the gates for the tickets of employment, guaranteeing a “pay” which often does not amount to more than a few pence! The streets and houses inhabited by this unfortunate class are of the lowest kind—haunts of vice, disease, and death, and the monopolistic companies are thus directly able to profit by their wholesale demoralization by ruthlessly crushing out, through the contractors, all efforts at organisation on the part of the men. To see these immense docks, the home of that more immense machine, British Commerce, crowded with huge and stately ships, steamers, and sailors the first in the world, and to watch with intelligent eyes by what means the colossal work of loading and unloading them is carried out; this is to face a sacrificial orgy of human life—childhood, youth, manhood, womanhood, and age, with everything that makes them beautiful and ennobling, and not merely a misery and a curse—far more appalling than any Juggernaut progress or the human holocausts that were offered up to Moloch.]

I stood in the ghastly gleaming night by the swollen, sullen flow
Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth and Woe;
And mine eyes were heavy with sleepless hours, and dry with desperate grief,
And my brain was throbbing and aching, and mine anguish had no relief.
For never a moment—no; not one—through all the dreary day,
And thro’ all the weary night forlorn, would the pitiless pulses stay
Of the thundering great Machinery that such insistence had,
As it crushed out human hearts and souls, that it slowly drove me mad.

And there, in the dank and foetid mist, as I, silent and tearless, stood,
And the river’s exhalations, sweating forth their muddy blood,
Breathed full on my face and poisoned me, like the slow, putrescent drain
That carries away from the shambles the refuse of flesh and brain—
There rose up slowly before me, in the dome of the city’s light,
A vast and shadowy Substance, with shafts and wheels of might,
Tremendous, ruthless, fatal; and I knew the visible shape
Of that thundering great Machinery from which there was no escape.

It stood there high in the heavens, fronting the face of God,
And the spray it sprinkled had blasted the green and flowery sod
All round where, through stony precincts, its Cyclopean pillars fell
To its adamantine foundations that were fixed in the womb of hell.
And the birds that, wild and whirling, and moth-like, flew to its glare
Were struck by the flying wheel-spokes, and maimed and murdered there;
And the dust that swept about its black panoply overhead,
And the din of it seemed to shatter and scatter the sheeted dead.

But mine eyes were fixed on the people that sought this horrible den,
And they mounted in thronged battalions, children and women and men,
Right out from the low horizons, more far than the eye could see,
From the north and the south and the east and the west, they came perpetually—
Some silent, some raving, some sobbing, some laughing, some cursing, some crying,
Some alone, some with others, some struggling, some dragging the dead and the dying
Up to the central Wheel enormous with its wild devouring breath
That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.

Then suddenly, as I watched it all, a keen wind blew amain,
And the air grew clearer and purer, and I could see it plain—
How under the central Wheel a black stone Altar stood,
And a great, gold Idol upon it was gleaming like fiery blood.
And there, in front of the Altar, was a huge, round lurid Pit,
And the thronged battalions were marching to the yawning mouth of it
In the clangour of the Machinery and the Wheel’s devouring breath
That winnowed the livid smoke-clouds and the sickening fume of death.

And once again as I gazed there, and the keen wind still blew on,
I saw the shape of the Idol like a king turned carrion,
Yet crowned and more terrific thus for his human fleshly loss,
And with one clenched hand he brandished a lash, and the other held up a cross!
And all around the Altar were seated, joyous and free,
In garments richly-coloured and choice, a goodly company,
Eating and drinking and wantoning, like gods that scorned to know
Of the thundering great Machinery and the crowds and the Pit below.

Ah, Christ! the sights and the sounds there that every hour befell
Would wring the heart of the devils spinning ropes of sand in hell,
But not the insolent Revellers in their old lascivious ease—
Children hollow-eyed, starving, consumed alive with disease;
Boys and men tortured to fiends and branded with shuddering fire;
Girls and women shrieking caught, and whored, and trampled to death in the mire;
Babyhood, youth, and manhood and womanhood that might have been,
Kneaded, a bloody pulp, to feed the gold-grinding murderous Machine!

And still, with aching eyeballs, I stared at that hateful sight,
At the long dense lines of the people and the shafts and wheels of might,
When slowly, slowly emerging, I saw a great Globe rise,
Blood-red on the dim horizon, and it swam up into the skies.
But whether indeed it were the sun or the moon, I could not say,
For I knew not now in my watching if it were night or day.
But when that Great Globe steadied above the central Wheel,
The thronged battalions wavered and paused, and an awful silence fell.

Then (I know not how, but so it was) in a moment the flash of an eye—
A murmur ran and rose to a voice, and the voice to a terrible cry:
“Enough, enough! It has had enough! We will march no more till we drop
In the furnace Pit. Give us food! Give us rest! Though the accursed Machinery stop!”
And then, with a shout of angry fear, the Revellers sprang to their feet,
And the call was for cannon and cavalry, for rifle and bayonet.
And one rose up, a leader of them, lifting a threatening rod.
And “Stop the Machinery!” he yelled, “you might as well stop God!”

But the terrible thunder-cry replied: “If this indeed must be,
It is you should be cast to the furnace Pit to feed the Machine—not we!”
And the central Wheel enormous slowed down in groaning plight,
And all the Ærial movement ceased of the shafts and wheels of might,
And a superhuman clamour leaped madly to where overhead
The great Globe swung in the gathering gloom, portentous, huge, blood-red!
But my brain whirled round and my blinded eyes no more could see or know,
Till I struggling seemed to awake at last by the swollen, sullen flow
Of the dreadful river that rolls her tides through the City of Wealth and Woe!

DIRGE.
(Brisbane.)
“A little Soldier of the Army of the Night.”

Bury him without a word!
No appeal to death;
Only the call of the bird
And the blind spring’s breath.

Nature slays ten, yet the one
Reaches but to a part
Of what’s to be done, to be sung.
Keep we a proud heart!

Let us not glose her waste
With lies and dreams;
Fawn on her wanton haste,
Say it but seems.

Comrades, with faces unstirred,
Scorning grief’s dole,
Though with him, with him lies interred
Our heart and soul,

Bury him without a word!
No appeal to death;
Only the call of the bird
And the blind spring’s breath.

TO QUEEN VICTORIA IN ENGLAND.
an address on her jubilee year.

Madam, you have done well! Let others with praise unholy,
Speech addressed to a woman who never breathed upon earth,
Daub you over with lies or deafen your ears with folly,
I will praise you alone for your actual imminent worth.
Madam, you have done well! Fifty years unforgotten
Pass since we saw you first, a maiden simple and pure.
Now when every robber landlord, capitalist rotten,
Hated oppressors, praise you—Madam, we are quite sure!

Never once as a foe, open foe, to the popular power,
As nobler kings and queens, have you faced us, fearless and bold:
No, but in backstairs fashion, in the stealthy twilight hour,
You have struggled and struck and stabbed, you have bartered and bought and sold!
Melbourne, the listless liar, the gentleman blood-beslavered,
Disraeli, the faithless priest of a cynical faith out-worn,
These were dear to your heart, these were the men you favoured.
Those whom the People loved were fooled and flouted and torn!

Never in one true cause, for your people’s sake and the light’s sake,
Did you strike one honest blow, did you speak one noble word:
No, but you took your place, for the sake of wrong and the night’s sake,
Ever with blear-eyed wealth, with the greasy respectable herd.
Not as some robber king, with a resolute minister slave to you, [110]
Did you swagger with force against us to satisfy your greed:
No, but you hoarded and hid what your loyal people gave to you,
Golden sweat of their toil, to keep you a queen indeed!

Pure at least was your bed? pure was your Court?—We know not.
Were the white sepulchres pure? Gather men thorns of grapes?
Your sons and your blameless spouse’s, certes, as Galahads show not.
Round you gather a crowd of bloated hypocrite shapes!
Never, sure, did one woman produce in such sixes and dozens
Such intellectual canaille as this that springs from you;
Sons, daughters, grandchildren, with uncles, aunts, and cousins,
Not a man or a woman among them—a wretched crew!

Madam, you have done well! You have fed all these to repletion—
You have put a gilded calf beside a gilded cow,
And bidden men and women behold the forms of human completion—
Albert the Good, Victoria the Virtuous, for ever—and now!
But what to you were our bravest and best, man of science and poet,
Struggling for Light and Truth, or the Women who would be free?
Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Arnold? We know it—
Tennyson slavers your hand; Argyll fawns at your knee!

Good, you were good, we say. You had no wit to be evil.
Your purity shines serene over Floras mangled and dead.
You wasted not our substance in splendour, in riot or revel—
You quietly sat in the shade and grew fat on our wealth instead.
Madam, you have done well! To you, we say, has been given
A wit past the wit of women, a supercomputable worth.
Of you we can say, if not “of such are the Kingdom of Heaven,”
Of such (alas for us!), of such are the Kingdom of Earth!

FAREWELL TO THE CHILDREN.

In the early summer morning
I stand and watch them come,
The children to the school-house;
They chatter and laugh and hum.

The little boys with satchels
Slung round them, and the girls
Each with hers swinging in her hand;
I love their sunny curls.

I love to see them playing,
Romping and shouting with glee,
The boys and girls together,
Simple, fearless, free.

I love to see them marching
In squads, in file, in line,
Advancing and retreating,
Tramping, keeping time.

Sometimes a little lad
With a bright brave face I’ll see,
And a wistful yearning wonder
Comes stealing over me.

For once I too had a darling;
I dreamed what he should do,
And surely he’d have had, I thought,
Just such a face as you.

And I, I dreamed to see him
Noble and brave and strong,
Loving the light, the lovely,
Hating the dark, the wrong,—

Loving the poor, the People,
Ready to smile and give
Blood and brain to their service,
For them to die or live!

No matter, O little darlings!
Little boys, you shall be
My citizens for faithful labour,
My soldiers for victory!

Little girls, I charge you
Be noble sweethearts, wives,
Mothers—comrades the sweetest,
Fountains of happy lives!

Farewell, O little darlings!
Far away,—with strangers, too—
He sleeps, the little darling,
I dreamed to see like you.

And I, O little darlings,
I have many miles to go,
And where I too may stop and sleep,
And when, I do not know.

But I charge you to remember
The love, the trust I had,
That you’d be noble, fearless, free,
And make your country glad!

That you should toil together,
Face whatever yet shall be,
My citizens for faithful labour,
My soldiers for victory!

I charge you to remember;
I bless you with my hand,
And I know the hour is coming
When you shall understand:

When you shall understand too,
Why, as I said farewell,
Although my lips were smiling,
The shining tears down fell.

EPODE.
“On the Ranges, Queensland.”

Beyond the night, down o’er the labouring East,
I see light’s harbinger of dawn released:
Upon the false gleam of the ante-dawn,
Lo, the fair heaven of day-pursuing morn!

Beyond the lampless sleep and perishing death
That hold my heart, I feel my new life’s breath,
I see the face my spirit-shape shall have
When this frail clay and dust have fled the grave.

Beyond the night, the death of doubt, defeat,
Rise dawn and morn, and life with light doth meet,
For the great Cause, too,—sure as the sun yon ray
Shoots up to strike the threatening clouds and say;
“I come, and with me comes the victorious Day!”

When I was young, the muse I worshipped took me,
Fearless, a lonely heart, to look on men.
“’Tis yours,” said she, “to paint this show of them
Even as they are!” Then smiling she forsook me.

Wherefore with passionate patience I withdrew,
With eyes from which all loves, hates, hopes, and fears,
Joys aureole, and the blinding sheen of tears,
Were purged away. And what I saw I drew.

Then, as I worked remote, serene, alone,
A child-girl came to me and touched my cheek,
And lo her lips were pale, her limbs were weak,
Her eyes had thirst’s desire and hunger’s moan.

She said: “I am the soul of this sad day
Where thousands toil and suffer hideous Crime,
Where units rob and mock the empty time
With revel and rank prayer and deaths display!”

I said: “O child, how shall I leave my songs,
My songs and tales, the warp and subtle woof
Of this great work and web, in your behoof
To strive and passionately sing of wrongs?

“Child, is it nothing that I here fulfil
My heart and soul? that I may look and see
Where Homer bends and Shakspere smiles on me,
And Goethe praises the unswerving will?”

She hung her head, and straight, without a word,
Passed from me. And I raised my conscious face
To where, in beauteous power in her place,
She stood, the muse, my muse, and watched and heard.

Her proud and marble brow was faintly flushed;
Upon her flawless lips, and in her eyes
A mild light flickered as the young sunrise,
Glad, sacred, terrible, serene and hushed.

Then I cried out, and rose with pure wrath wild,
Desperate with hatred of Fate’s slavery
And this cold cruel demon. With that cry,
I left her, and sought out the piteous child.

“Darling, ’tis nothing that I shed and weep
These tears of fire that wither all the heart,
These bloody sweats that drain and sear and smart,
I love you, and you’ll kiss me when I sleep!”

The End.