AUSTRALIAN POETS

(Pall Mall Gazette, December 14, 1888.)

Mr. Sladen dedicates his anthology (or, perhaps, we should say his herbarium) of Australian song to Mr. Edmund Gosse, ’whose exquisite critical faculty is,’ he tells us, ’as conspicuous in his poems as in his lectures on poetry.’  After so graceful a compliment Mr. Gosse must certainly deliver a series of discourses upon Antipodean art before the Cambridge undergraduates, who will, no doubt, be very much interested on hearing about Gordon, Kendall and Domett, to say nothing of the extraordinary collection of mediocrities whom Mr. Sladen has somewhat ruthlessly dragged from their modest and well-merited obscurity.  Gordon, however, is very badly represented in Mr. Sladen’s book, the only three specimens of his work that are included being an unrevised fragment, his Valedictory Poem and An Exile’s Farewell.  The latter is, of course, touching, but then the commonplace always touches, and it is a great pity that Mr. Sladen was unable to come to any financial arrangement with the holders of Gordon’s copyright.  The loss to the volume that now lies before us is quite irreparable.  Through Gordon Australia found her first fine utterance in song.

Still, there are some other singers here well worth studying, and it is interesting to read about poets who lie under the shadow of the gum-tree, gather wattle blossoms and buddawong and sarsaparilla for their loves, and wander through the glades of Mount Baw-baw listening to the careless raptures of the mopoke.  To them November is

      The wonder with the golden wings,
   Who lays one hand in Summer’s, one in Spring’s: 

January is full of ‘breaths of myrrh, and subtle hints of rose-lands’;

   She is the warm, live month of lustre—­she
   Makes glad the land and lulls the strong sad sea;

while February is ‘the true Demeter,’ and

   With rich warm vine-blood splashed from heel to knee,
   Comes radiant through the yellow woodlands.

Each month, as it passes, calls for new praise and for music different from our own.  July is a ‘lady, born in wind and rain’; in August

   Across the range, by every scarred black fell,
   Strong Winter blows his horn of wild farewell;

while October is ‘the queen of all the year,’ the ’lady of the yellow hair,’ who strays ‘with blossom-trammelled feet’ across the ‘haughty-featured hills,’ and brings the Spring with her.  We must certainly try to accustom ourselves to the mopoke and the sarsaparilla plant, and to make the gum-tree and the buddawong as dear to us as the olives and the narcissi of white Colonus.  After all, the Muses are great travellers, and the same foot that stirred the Cumnor cowslips may some day brush the fallen gold of the wattle blossoms and tread delicately over the tawny bush-grass.