The War After The War
I.
Yonder, with eyes that tears, not distance, dim,
With ears the wide world's thickness cannot daunt,
We see tumultuous miseries that haunt
The night's dead watches, hear the battle hymn
Of ruin shrieking through the music grim,
Where the red spectre straddles, long and gaunt,
Spitting across the seas his hideous taunt
At those who nurse at home the unwounded limb.
What shall we say, who, drawing indolent breath,
Mark the quick pant of those who, full of hate,
Drive home the steel or loose the shrieking shell,
Heroes or Huns, who smite the grin of death
And laugh or curse beneath the blows of fate,
Swept madly to the thudding heart of hell?
II.
O peace, be still! Let no drear whirlwind sweep
Our souls about the vault, that groans or yells
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poem by John Le Gay Brereton
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The Dirge
Out of the pregnant darkness, where from fire
To glimmering fire the watchword leaps,
The dirge floats up from those who build the pyre
High and still higher
That yet shall blaze across the verminous deeps.
Farewell, O brother-heart,
Yet we shall not forget;
Though hand from hand must part,
Your hope is with us yet.
The clank of the swaggerer's sword
And clink of the grasper's gold
Are not so loud as the lover's word
In a thousand echoes rolled.
The lords of the tottering order sit and plot,
With cunning courtesy haggling still:
The insistent chorus cannot be forgot
Its words are shot
Like summoning rockets from the eastern hill.
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poem by John Le Gay Brereton
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A Reflection on Lawson's Poems
Seasons bloom and seasons wither; dark or bright, they cannot last.
Must we try with floods of bitter teas to vivify the past?
Vainly chase the brown and broken blossoms blown along the blast?
Shall we scorn the flowers around us - red, or blue, or white as snow -
Flowers giving loads of fragrance unto all the winds that blow
Must we hide our eyes and falter: 'O, the days of long ago!'
Never stop to look behind you, if the blaze of glory there
Blinds you to the splendour stretching round about and everywhere.
True, the past was pleasant, Lawson, but the present is as fair.
I, too, love the days when heroes, seeking treasure, seaward sped;
Days of Drake, when English sailors followed where their leaders led;
Days when Marlowe trod the glowing clouds, that thundered to his tread.
Even then, though, there were cowards, traitors, swindler, 'business men,'
Plot and murder, slave and master, secret sneer, and wounding pen;
And the poets thought the present vile and barren even then.
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poem by John Le Gay Brereton
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Death
He, born of my girlhood, is dead, while my life is yet young in my heart
Ere the breasts where his baby lips fed have forgotten their softness, we part.
We part. He was mine, he was here, though he travelled by land and by sea,
My son who could trample on fear, my babe who was moulded in me.
As I sat in the darkness, it seemed I could still feel his touch on my head;
He came in the night as I dreamed, and he knelt at the side of my bed;
He murmured the words I had taught when his lips were the lips of a child,
Ere the strength of his arm had been bought and the love that upheld him defiled;
Then my faltering spirit grew bold, and my heart had forgotten its drouth,
And I crooned little songs as of old, till I woke at his kiss on my mouth.
Now waking and sleeping are pain. Nevermore will he kiss, nevermore
Shall I hear his low whistle again at the gate, or his step on the floor,
For to-night he was here while I slept, and this is the end of it all.
Now that welter of darkness has swept us apart, can he come if I call?
Can he come, little chap with the eyes that brought light out of heaven to earth?
Can he come, though the soul of me cries for the joy that I bought by his birth?
I can see but the horror that bids the heart of the mother despair,
The vision that burns on my lids, the face that will always be there,
For he holds out his hands to me, red, and his eyes tell the truth as he stands.
He is dead. He is dead. He is dead. He is dead, with the blood on his hands.
poem by John Le Gay Brereton
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A Prologue
While to the clarion blown by Marlowe's breath
Tall Tragedy tramped by in hues of death,
And Shakespeare yet was tuning string by string,
With English hawthorn crowned, in that glad spring
When bright clouds melted in a sky serene,
Romance moved lightly to the pipe of Greene.
As fresh as buds half-open, pure as dew,
Two damsels came in forefront of her crew,
One native to the hedgerows and the meads,
The keeper's lass, in simple country weeds,
Her firm white arms, as delicate as silk,
Below her smock-sleeve shining wet with milk;
No marvel the young noble learnt to woo
A maid so merry and frank and homely true.
The other with sad mien, though yet a bride,
Clad in man's raiment softly stole aside
And grieved that he who should have been her stay
Would privily have done her life away,
For still his crime with bloodshot eyeballs grim
And dripping fangs turned back and hunted him.
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The Explorer
Dearest, when I left your side,
I stood a moment, hesitating,
And plunged. The boiling tide
Of darkness took me, and down I went
Swift as a bird with folded wing,
And upward sent
The bubbles of my vital breath
That shuddered from my secret deeps
To freedom and light;
Then, dimly, on my sight
Opened the still abode of living death.
Amid the mire,
In which invisibly sightless horror creeps,
Sat, each intent on his own woe,
The host that burns with inward fire,
Crowded like monuments of memorial stone
Beneath a pitchy sky
Where even the flash of tempest dare not show,
Yet each of them alone;
And each was I.
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The Domain
The bulging cloud mounts lazily
In shade where sunlight glances through,
And sweeping lightly from the tree
Melts indolently in the blue.
The scanty grass-blades yonder shake,
A tremulous flurry takes the smoke,
And ancient memories start awake
At pungent scent of fig and oak.
For here of old an urchin strayed
And gloomed in lonely pride the while,
An outlaw in a forest glade
Or pirate on a tropic isle.
Here where a staid policeman strolls
Ned Kelly in his armour stood,
And underneath the roadway rolls
The river of the Haunted Wood.
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Middle Harbour
Lonely wonder, delight past hoping!
Sky-line broken by stirring trees,
Grey rocks hither and shoreward sloping,
Silent bracken about my knees.
Dusky scrub where the sunlight splashes,
Glimmer of waters barely seen
Here the hope that was dust and ashes
Leaps and flashes in flames of green.
Through the boughs that are still before me,
Misty blue of the harbour hills;
Mighty Spirit of Earth who bore me,
Here the peace of thy love distils.
Fools have harried me; hell has driven,
Bidding me toil for its fading shows:
Back I spring to your arms, forgiven,
Back to the truth that a dreamer knows.
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poem by John Le Gay Brereton
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Hymn To The God Of War
From every quarter we,
Who bent the trembling knee
And cowered or grovelled prostrate day and night,
Now come once more to sing
A dirge before thee, King,
Once more with earnest heart to do thee right.
Have we not hailed thee God?
Our weary feet have trod
The vasty barren sands and treacherous ice,
With many a bitter cry,
To pile thine altar high
With pallid human hearts in sacrifice.
We hated thee and came
With eyes of shifty shame,
With heavy steel above the craven breast,
Yet evermore we did
The ill thy servants bid,
For everywhere thy might was manifest.
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Dedication
Grant me a moment of peace,
Let me but open mine eyes,
Forgetting the empire of lies
And warfare's majestic increase
Of national folly and hate;
Ere I return to my fate,
Grant me a moment of peace.
To what is I would turn from what seems
From a world where men fall and adore
The god that Fear shuddering bore
To Greed in the desert of dreams,
Unholy, inhuman, impure;
From the State to the loves that endure,
To what is I would turn from what seems.
No man has been richer than I,
Though he staggered with infinite gold
And bought of whatever is sold
Of the beauty that money can buy.
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poem by John Le Gay Brereton
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