Ah, now we know the long delay
But served to assure a prouder day,
For while we waited, came the call
To prove and make our title good—
To face the fiery ordeal
That tries the claim to Nationhood—
And now, in pride of challenge, we unroll,
For all the world to read, the record-scroll
Whose bloody script attests a Nation’s soul.
O ye, our Dead, who at the call
Fared forth to fall as heroes fall,
Whose consecrated souls we failed
To note beneath the common guise
Till all-revealing Death unveiled
The splendour of your sacrifice,
Now, crowned with more than perishable bays,
Immortal in your country’s love and praise,
Ye too have portion in this day of days!
And ye who sowed where now we reap,
Whose waiting eyes, now sealed in sleep,
Beheld far off with prescient sight
This triumph of rejoicing lands—
Yours too the day! for though its light
Can pierce not to your folded hands,
These shining hours of advent but fulfil
The cherished purpose of your constant will
Whose onward impulse liveth in us still.
Still lead thou vanward of our line
Who, shaggy, massive, leonine,
Couldst yet most finely phrase the event—
For if a Pisgah view was all
Vouchsafed to thine uncrowned intent,
The echoes of thy herald-call
Not faintlier strive with our saluting guns,
And at thy words through all Australia’s sons
The ‘crimson thread of kinship’ redder runs.
But not the memory of the dead,
How loved soe’er each sacred head,
To-day can change from glad to grave
The chords that quire a Nation born—
Twin-offspring of the birth that gave,
When yester-midnight chimed to morn,
Another age to the Redeemer’s reign,
Another cycle to the widening gain
Of Good o’er Ill and Remedy o’er Pain.
Our sundering lines with love o’ergrown,
Our bounds the girdling seas alone—
Be this the burden of the psalm
That every resonant hour repeats,
Till day-fall dusk the fern and palm
That forest our transfigured streets,
And night still vibrant with the note of praise
Thrill brotherhearts to song in woodland ways,
When gum-leaves whisper o’er the camp-fire’s blaze.
* * * * *
The Charter’s read; the rites are o’er;
The trumpet’s blare and cannon’s roar
Are silent, and the flags are furled;
But not so ends the task to build
Into the fabric of the world
The substance of our hope fulfilled—
To work as those who greatly have divined
The lordship of a continent assigned
As God’s own gift for service of mankind.
O People of the onward will,
Unit of Union greater still
Than that to-day hath made you great,
Your true Fulfilment waiteth there,
Embraced within the larger fate
Of Empire ye are born to share—
No vassal progeny of subject brood,
No satellite shed from Britain’s plenitude,
But orbed with her in one wide sphere of good!
James Brunton Stephens.
