SOURCE: Kramer, Leonie. “Imitation and Originality in Australian Colonial Poetry: The Case of Charles Harpur.” Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 116-32.

[In the following essay, Kramer highlights word choice and construction in Harpur's poetry to address early influences on his work. Kramer also analyzes the poet's later attempts to merge the form of his Continental “mentors” with an original Australian style.]

‘Australian poetry’, writes Vivian Smith, ‘starts with the indelible stamp of the cultivated amateur’.¹ It also starts with a mixed inheritance, with established modes of poetic address (particularly odes and elegies) and their accompanying eighteenth-century linguistic fashions; and with an expectation of imaginative freedoms and renovated forms and language promised by the experiments of Romanticism and supported by the hope of adventure in a new land.

Although the very earliest attempts at verse (such as Michael Massey Robinson's celebratory and occasional odes) were, like the clothes of the first arrivals, rather indicative of their origins than appropriate to their new life, they were not without some fortuitous relevance to the colonial situation. The neo-Classical rhetoric of the rise and fall of civilizations and the taming of the wilderness might not have found an echo in every bosom, but it was adaptable to the frequently expressed hopes for the colony. When he wanted to describe the failure of an attempt to educate the aborigines in farming and other skills, and the abandonment of the village built for the purpose, Charles Tompson turned naturally to Goldsmith's The Deserted Village for a model. More ambitious, William Charles Wentworth wrote a long ode in couplets (Australasia, 1823), celebrating the new British colony and describing some of the highlights of its short history. Barron Field, who published the first little book of verse (1819), found it extremely difficult to accommodate strange animals and plants within the poetic conventions available to him and was derided for his efforts. Yet these early attempts, however clumsy, to versify observations upon the new land initiated change in the forms of expression. But it was not until Charles Harpur began to write in the 1830s that real progress was made towards capturing the realities of Australian experience in poetry. It is ironical that a man who tried so hard to establish himself as a poet, and poetry as an indigenous growth, should have been unpopular in his life and still largely neglected 120 years after his death.

Among the many subjects of literary debate in the nineteenth century, imitation was one of the most sensitive. Originality (interpreted in a narrow though ill-defined sense) seemed to many critics to be a necessary condition of a distinctive literature. An anonymous reviewer of Charles Tompson's Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel (1826), writing in the Sydney Gazette, suggests to Tompson ‘the propriety of letting his similes and metaphors be purely Australian. He will soon find his account in doing so, as they will infallibly possess all the freshness of originality. In this respect he has a decided advantage over all the European poets, because here nature has an entirely different aspect’.² The reviewer's complaint that Tompson ‘imitates too closely the style of others’ has some force when one compares his ‘Black Town’ with Goldsmith's The Deserted Village. But it is not easy to determine the substance of some later critics' objections to Kendall's debt to Tennyson and Swinburne, or to evaluate the accusations of plagiarism against Adam Lindsay Gordon. When one considers the skill with which Wyatt and Surrey anglicized the Petrarchan sonnet, or the adaptation of Juvenalian and Horatian satire to English subjects, it is not at all clear why colonial poets should have attracted adverse criticism for trying to accommodate their sentiments and their experiences of Australian life within the English lyrical, satirical, and discursive modes. There was the obvious difficulty of finding new words for new objects; a poet of nature was more often dealing with the novel than with the familiar, and sometimes had to attempt an approximate description by means of an English analogy or conventional epithet. Uncertainty about the audience could tempt the writer into relying on recognized ways of describing the unfamiliar; so the mountain barrier west of Sydney becomes the Appenines, with the odd result of taming the wilderness by means of a misnomer.

There are some explanations of the sensitivity to imitation which must remain speculative. One is that in their desire to promote a distinctive literature, representative of the realities of colonial experience, commentators were simply not interested (and possibly not able) to argue the niceties of the relationship between imitation and originality. Another, even more speculative, is a growing desire to reject the formalities of traditional modes, and to hope that fresh ones, better suited to the interests of the colonists, would develop from popular forms such as the ballad, the narrative, the adventure story, the traveller's tale, the yarn, and simple lyric. In other words, one might be observing rebellion against the supremacy of the English tradition, a kind of literary republicanism, with a bias towards popular rather than learned expression.

In any enquiry into the relationship between imitation and originality in nineteenth-century Australian poetry, Charles Harpur is a test case. Judith Wright credits Harpur with making a virtue of necessity ‘by combining the English poetic tradition with the best that its lonely colony had to offer, to speak in the voice of a new country without rejecting what English tradition could give’. But even her sympathetic and perceptive account of his poetry does not resolve the problem of his poetic voice. For example, she writes that ‘he was prudent and honest enough to recognize that an Englishman in process of becoming an Australian must speak with an English voice before finding his true accent’. Yet it is difficult to see how one can describe Harpur as ‘an Englishman in process of becoming an Australian’, since he was born of convict parents in 1813 at Windsor, New South Wales. Even more surprising is the statement that ‘it would, of course, have been impossible for him at this time to have had the kind of appreciation of the Australian landscape that is possible nowadays’.³ For the Hawkesbury River and the ruggedly beautiful Blue Mountains along the foothills of which the Hawkesbury flows were his terrain. He knew no other environment. It was to him what the Lake District was to Wordsworth, and it is not surprising that he should have turned to Wordsworth for guidance in defining his perceptions of the natural world.

There is still no complete edition of Harpur's work, and there are considerable problems in dating even some of his major poems. Harpur worked over his poems many times and published in newspapers and journals as he revised. He published only two collections in his lifetime: Thoughts: A Series of Sonnets (1845) and The Bushrangers and other Poems (1853). An earlier collection, Wild Bee of Australia: A Series of Poems with Prose Notes (c. 1851), was prepared for publication but did not appear. In 1863 he prepared a manuscript for local publication; and in 1867-68 he made a selection of his poems for Thomas Mort to take to London. When Mort did not go Harpur continued his revisions, and this manuscript collection is the final version of his work. Until these manuscripts were used by Adrian Mitchell as the copy-text for a selection of Harpur's work published in 1973,⁴ the only available text was a corrupt one edited by Henry Martin in 1883.⁵ Martin ignored Harpur's own selection in the 1867-68 manuscripts, and made substantial ‘corrections’, thus changing significantly the direction and style of Harpur's work.⁶

Harpur had a strong sense of vocation. In designating himself ‘Charles Harpur, An Australian’⁷ he might seem to be declaring a rather crude nationalism; but his efforts were in fact directed not towards a mere assertion of nationalistic sentiment, or a rough application of local colour, but towards a considered analysis of political and social life (in his satires), and of the qualities of the landscape and the moral reflections it gave rise to (in some of the lyrics and the longer poems). It is in the longer poems that one most clearly sees evidence of Harpur's attempts to express, partly through the mediating influence of English poetry and partly through forging his own style, his developing perception of the land, past and present. These poems bear witness to the interplay of imitation and originality in a manner which disallows any simple account of the one or the other.

Although Harpur worked over his poems so carefully in the 1860s, writing them out in his meticulous hand many times, it is now clear that the major revisions, and in particular the additions to the longer poems, were made in the 1850s. In about 1841, after a period in Sydney, Harpur had returned to the Hunter Valley (where he had worked as a labourer much earlier in his life); and for some ten years or more he was only occasionally employed. This situation continued (except for an attempt at sheep farming after his marriage in 1850) until 1859, when he was offered a position as an assistant gold commissioner. The years of insecurity and restlessness from 1840 into the 1850s were also those in which he read extensively, and rethought much of his poetry.

‘A Storm in the Mountains’ (published in 1856)⁸ is one of the few of his longer works which appears to have been written for the first time in this decade and for which, to date, no earlier version has been found. The poem is in two parts, the first describing gathering storm clouds, the instinctive reactions of the birds and animals to the approaching storm, the first flash of lightning and the first thunder clap; the second describing the height of the storm, the ‘strife of Nature’, its dying away, and its aftermath, ‘the freshened scene’, silent and at peace. The poem is set in Harpur's territory, the escarpments and ‘vast-backed ridges’ of the Blue Mountains, seen on a hot summer day. Its inhabitants are native birds and insects (Harpur includes a lengthy note on the Australian grasshopper) and dingoes, and there is a reference to the ‘half-wild herd's dim tracks’ as a faint reminder that there is settlement even in this ‘rude peculiar world’. Most interesting of all, the whole event is seen through the eyes of a boy ‘far venturing from his home’, ‘A lonely Truant, numbering years eleven’.

A link between ‘A Storm in the Mountains’ and Wordsworth's The Prelude seems more than probable. Into the mind of Wordsworth's Winander boy, who died at the age of eleven, the ‘visible scene’ with ‘all its solemn imagery’ enters ‘unawares’.⁹ Harpur's boyhood self wanders among the crags and comes upon a pool scooped out, like the ‘rocky basin’ in Wordsworth's ‘An Evening Walk’, ‘by the shocks of rain-floods plunging from the upper rocks’, and here he drinks and muses.¹⁰ He is sufficiently observant to detect a change in the scene transmitted by the instinctive reactions of living things. He notices, for example, that the ‘locusts’ cease flying and climb to the top of the tallest grasses, as they in fact do, he explains in a footnote, to escape sudden floods. Harpur's boy is just as finely attuned to his natural world as is the Winander boy, or the young Wordsworth of The Prelude, but he is not in communion with it. The storm is merely a part of nature; it does not speak directly to him nor he to it. The perceptions are those of a solitary observer, not unlike the young Wordsworth, with ‘a listless, yet enquiring eye’; but the sentiments have more in common with those of Thomson's The Seasons or Cowper's ‘A Thunder Storm’ than with the intensity of Wordsworth's passionate hauntings.

Within ‘A Storm in the Mountains’ the perspective shifts from the child's view to the adult's, as he passes from musing to curiosity, to wonder, and finally to the sense of standing exposed before the possibility of finding ‘How through all being works the light of Mind’. The inwardness of the early part of the poem (where Wordsworth's influence seems strongest) gives way to a cheerful description of the calm evening scene, then to a rather bland statement about the purging of ‘pestilence’ and the return of peace. So does Harpur, in his own phrase, ‘moralise the agony’, though not without recovering at the last moment a glimpse of the earlier awareness when he notes ‘even 'mid the sylvan carnage spread … some pleasantness unmarked till now’ (Mitchell, pp. 55-62).

In ‘A Storm in the Mountains’ Harpur has profited by Wordsworth's example in his attempt to describe both the changing moods of nature and his changing perceptions of landscape. He is also indebted, probably to Cowper, for a reasonably flexible and expressive rhymed couplet. His language draws on eighteenth-century poetic diction in the use of words and phrases such as ‘prospect’, ‘sable bosom’, and ‘the elements of social life’, or in lines like

O'er all the freshened scene no sound is heard,
Save the short twitter of some busied bird.

(l. 188)

But there are other literary ingredients too, such as a modest Miltonic simile which begins

                                                                                as Travellers see
In the wide wilderness of Araby
Some pilgrim horde at even, band by band
Halting amid the grey interminable sand.(11)

(l. 43)

There are echoes of the Romantic poets in ‘some else-viewless veil’ and ‘Why congregate the swallows in the air’, and in the admiration of wildness and turbulent nature. Yet Harpur speaks in his own voice, even though with traces of the accent of the literary past. There is awkwardness and lack of polish in his phrasing, as in

Here huge-piled ledges, ribbing outward, stare
Down into haggard chasms; onward there,
The vast backed ridges are all rent in jags,
Or hunched with cones, or pinnacled with crags.

(l. 5)

The roughness comes not from any attempt to declaim, or to apply local colour to the canvas, but from a determination to fix his perceptions accurately. His effort has some curious results, as when his local terms bump into imported ones. In the line ‘Or list the tinkling of the dingle-bird’, ‘tinkling’ is the right word, and ‘dingle-bird’ is a local name for the ‘bell-bird’; but ‘list’ is not assimilated into the native context. Having acknowledged this, however, one must also acknowledge that ‘A Storm in the Mountains’ is a well-constructed poem, and that Harpur shows a real ability to dispose its elements. It is certainly not a mechanical performance or a bland imitation, but an energetic exposition, through contrasting sets of images, of an outbreak of natural violence within what Adrian Mitchell calls ‘a transcendent stability, a serene world of larger vision’ (p. xxvii). ‘A Storm in the Mountains’ is evidence of Harpur's understanding of the ways in which the English poets could help him, of his determination to shape his perceptions in his own way, and of his struggle for a poetic style.

The textual history of his long poem ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ is in essence an account of his poetic development, and through it can be plotted his changing sense of the possibilities of what began as an unadorned narrative poem and ended as a quite ambitious blending of narrative action, local history, landscape art, and moral reflection. Behind ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ might well be a real incident, as there is in his very early poem (possibly a rehearsal for this one?) ‘The Glen of the Whiteman's Grave’ (it is interesting that the word ‘Whiteman’ is used in the earliest text of ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’). One might also posit a literary source for the poem in Wordsworth's The Brothers:

                                        In our churchyard
Is neither epitaph nor monument
Tombstone nor name—only the turf we tread
And a few national graves.

(l. 12)

Thus speaks the ‘homely Priest of Ennerdale’ in a poem in which Leonard Ewbank is welcomed back from a journey which has taken him from one of the highest peaks in the Cumberland mountains as ‘far as Egremont’.

In all, four different versions of ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ have been located (five if one counts the corrupt Martin text), and two fragments. The first version of 202 lines was published in The Weekly Register over three issues in August 1845. It is a compact tale of four men who, under the leadership of Egremont (the source of the story), go off into ‘the wilderness’ beyond the limits of settlement in search of new pastures. They camp in the bush on a radiant moonlit night, are attacked by aborigines, and savagely slaughtered, only Egremont escaping by hiding in a hollow in the river bank. Description of the setting is concise and exact, and slightly elaborated only in order to draw a contrast between the serenity and beauty of the natural world and the brutality of man. There is no explicit censuring of aborigines, but there is a brief moral about unity and love. One of the four murdered men is singled out for special attention. He resists the violence of the attack because having ‘lived with misery nearly all his days’ he still hopes for ‘the taste of good’ and cannot bear to die, desolate, having lived so. Egremont, as he keeps watch, is filled with thoughts of home, because of some

                    subtile interfusion that connects
The cherished ever with the beautiful
And lasting Things of Nature.

(l. 66)

Egremont's ‘musing’ is more a matter of sentiment than perception, in keeping with the sobriety of the tale and the measured tone of its narration, as they are introduced by the first line, ‘I tell a settler's tale of the old times’.

In the telling Harpur allows himself only as much detail as is strictly necessary to the simple embroidery of the tale. The landscape references are brief. As the journey begins the sun sets beyond a mountain range and the travellers pass a ‘nameless creek’; and when darkness falls there is an effective but brief description of the dark ranges beyond the watch-fire's circle. The blank verse is sturdy, and the language (for the most part) echoes the regular certainties of the eighteenth-century discursive mode. The meal is ‘dispatched ❙ By the keen edge of healthful appetite’. Horses are called ‘cattle’, and the unexplored mountains are ‘new eminences’. But though the dominant manner of the poem is plain, and its rhythms those of the eighteenth century, it catches up other echoes. From Milton Harpur surely takes ‘the empyreal things of God’, from Wordsworth the ‘subtile interfusion’, and probably from Shakespeare ‘multitudinous’, which he uses elsewhere. It is Harpur, though, who observes that the creek is ‘fringed with oaks and the wild willow’, as he feels for words for new trees; and who has the wallaroo looking forth from the mountains; and who, much more inventively, refers to a cloud that ‘Crept, as with scrawling legs, across the sky’.

The second version of the poem was published in 1853 in The Bushrangers (the first 130 lines of this version, in Harpur's hand, are in the manuscript of the unpublished Wild Bee of Australia, 1851; Mitchell Library MS C376). It is 257 lines long. In the first line Harpur announces what seems to mark a change of direction away from the plain narrative, ‘I verse a Settler's Tale of the old times’, and as though to insist on this point he changes the 1845 version's ‘encreasing flocks and herds’ to ‘augmenting’. Horses are still ‘cattle’, but instead of being too precious for the ‘trackless depths’ of the wilderness (1845) they are now too precious for the ‘mountain routes’ and ‘brush lands perilously pathless’ (of 1853).

The additions in this first paragraph of the poem establish a pattern that persists throughout. The additional lines are chiefly descriptive, and indicate an attempt to be much more detailed and specific as well as more decorative. The mountains that in 1845 were ‘ne'er visited’ are now ‘barrier mountains’ (there is a particular reference here to the time of the events of the poem, which must be before 1813, the date of Harpur's birth, when the Blue Mountains were first crossed). Harpur, then, has now added an exact temporal perspective of forty years to the poem's action. He has also added a perspective which, perhaps, is possible only to the man born in the colony at the time when the mountains were conquered. This detail, like his references to the mountains as the Appenines and the aborigines as Indians, suggests that he is consciously addressing foreign readers, not just to inform them but to give them a link between the unknown and the known.

Through the additional passages of description he begins to develop an analysis of the awareness of the observer (his narrator Egremont) which was missing from the 1845 text. It is not just that the sunset over the Blue Mountains is described at length, but that it is described from within the intensely appreciative understanding of the narrator. So he does not simply add to the poetic effects by, for example, comparing the mountains to ‘rampires’ (which in one manuscript is changed, not in Harpur's hand, to ‘ramparts’). The wilderness is now seen to be beautiful as well as wild; and Harpur describes the breeze that stirs the forest leaves as ‘prompted from within’, not in the Wordsworthian sense of reciprocity between the lover of nature and the spirit of nature but as a property of a universal order. A further descriptive detail reinforces this idea. The account of the travellers' supper in the 1845 text ends somewhat abruptly with their seeing ‘the Wallaroo look forth’; in the fragment of c.1851 this prominent local feature retreats into a larger background. In the luminous sky as the sunset fades the woods on the ridges look even more distinct:

Even like a mighty picture of themselves
Hung in some vaster world.

(l. 54)

It is not elegantly phrased; but it is an original image of distance, perspective, and space, appropriate both to the actual scene, to the sentiment of the occasion, and especially to the percipience of the narrator.

The ‘one long cloud’ of the 1845 text (‘with scrawling legs’) is now, in addition, ‘diffused and shapen like a mighty spider’. The metaphor is elaborated, at some cost to the language, but not for merely decorative effects. It introduces a sense of strangeness, even menace, which is one of the devices Harpur uses in this version to heighten the dramatic effects. Some Miltonic echoes have been noted in the 1845 text; in this version he draws more extensively on Milton as he begins to develop the moral of the tale, and an early sign of this is an extended description of the moon rising. In the 1845 text Harpur in a slightly laboured manner describes the way in which the moon outlines the mountain ridges so that the ‘shrubs’ fringing its summit look as though they are growing out of the moon itself. It is a sharp observation which Harpur struggles valiantly to put into words. In the c.1851 fragment the word ‘shrubs’ (which is quite inappropriate to the forest scene) becomes ‘trees’, but in order to preserve the observation Harpur expands it to read

                                                                                                    whilst the trees
That fringed its outline, their huge statures dwarfed
By distance into brambles …

(l.99)

The other significant change is of a quite different order. Where in 1845 the moon ‘was seen ❙ Ascending slow’, in the 1853 text it is ‘seen ❙ Conglobing’, a word which he takes from Milton. One would like to think it is not an accident that Harpur also adds to this text the notion that the attacking aborigines ‘in their enmity … come ❙ In vengeance’, thus humanizing and making more specific the notion of ‘diabolic rage’ present in the 1845 text. He omits, on the other hand, the brief moral about ‘Unity and Love’ of the 1845 text.

The next complete text of the poem, with the title ‘The Creek of the Graves’ is at present known only in a printed cutting pasted in one of Harpur's small notebooks (Mitchell Library MS C384). It was printed either in or by the Braidwood Dispatch and could have been issued as a pamphlet, and I shall refer to it as the ‘Braidwood’ text. There is no date, but it is certainly later than the 1853 text. Harpur moved to Braidwood in October 1859 and left in December of the same year. The most likely date seems to be the early 1860s. What looks like a version of the text (a fragment 100 lines long) appears in the manuscript ‘Poems and Prose Pieces 1855-58’ (Mitchell Library MS B78). The ‘Braidwood’ text is 346 lines long, and is in detail very close to the final manuscript version of 1867-68.

A marked feature of this text is its changed sense of audience. In both the earlier versions Harpur addresses himself to his narrative and descriptive task without making any concessions to readers unfamiliar with the landscape of the poems. The first indication that he is thinking differently (possibly with the hope of an English audience in mind) comes in the c.1855-58 fragment referred to above. In the 1845 text the ‘oaks and the wild willow’ would have misled an English reader interested in Australian vegetation. Now Harpur, while preserving the ‘wild willow’, goes to considerable pains to identify the ‘oak’ as the casuarina, or, as it is popularly called, the she-oak. In doing so, he both invents an interesting and original image and offers an explanatory comment for a foreign reader about the creek

                                                                                duskily befringed
With the tall feathery upward tapering oak
The sylvan eyelash ever, as it were,
Of the Australian waters.

(l. 22)

He refines this image further in the ‘Braidwood’ text to read:

The sylvan eyelash always of the yet
Remote Australian waters

(l. 25)

remembering that he is looking back to the early days of settlement.

Approximately one third of the additional eighty-eight lines of this ‘Braidwood’ text are small revisions, like the one already quoted, which elaborate descriptive detail and in particular attempt to define more clearly the reactions of Egremont to the attack and to plot his escape more closely. But there are two passages, one of eight lines and one of twenty-five, which introduce quite new material and show that Harpur has moved a long way from the simple narrative structure of the 1845 text. Again, as in the use of the word ‘conglobing’ in the 1853 text, the new emphasis is prepared for by a quite simple change. In the earlier versions the four weary travellers fall asleep under ‘the wide gaze of Heaven’ secure in the knowledge that they are being watched over by their master, Egremont. In the ‘Braidwood’ text Harpur capitalizes ‘Master’. It would be unwise to attach much importance to this, were it not for the character of the passage which Harpur adds to the description of the rising moon:

Thus o'er that dark height her great orb conglobed,
Till her full light, in silvery sequence still
Cascading forth from ridgy slope to slope,
Like the dropped foldings of a lucent veil
Chased mass by mass the broken darkness down
Into the wooded valleys, where it crouched
And shrunk and struggled, like a dragon doubt
Glooming some lonely spirit lost to Truth
Though shining out of heaven.

(l. 121)

In Paradise Lost, Book vii, Milton, describing the creation of the earth, writes:

                                                                                Darkness profound
Cover'd th' Abyss: but on the watrie calme
His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspred,
And vital vertue infus'd, and vital warmth
Throughout the fluid Mass, but downward purg'd
The black tartareous cold infernal dregs
Adverse to life; then founded, then conglob'd
Like things to like, the rest to several place
Disparted, and between spun out the Air,
And Earth self-ballanc't on her Center hung.(12)

(l. 233)

Harpur has taken over the general sense of this passage, and his use of the word ‘conglobed’ gives access to the implied analogy between the banishing of darkness and doubt, and God's creation of light, and of earth out of chaos.

The longer passage, which is the penultimate paragraph of the poem, builds on this reference. It draws the conclusion that the world has been cursed by the deeds of Man, who has made ‘This glorious residence, the Earth, a Hell’. The passage about ‘Unity and Love’, dropped from the 1853 text, is reintroduced in this fuller statement; and Harpur even manages references to the moon and stars looking down both on Sidonian (in the final version changed to Arcadian) dancers on the village green, a hermit at his vigils, and a ‘monster battlefield’, just as they looked, on the night of the poem, on the ‘doomful forest’. There is no suggestion here that Harpur is unable to view his world for himself; on the contrary, he widens his gaze to take in those scenes of life removed in time and place from his own, and shows considerable confidence in doing so. He has also, of course, adjusted the structure of the poem so that it is no longer a simple action with a simple moral, but an action exemplifying by imagery and reference the fallen state of the world.

It is now clear that by the time Harpur came to revise the poem for the final manuscript version of 1867-68 (which is 410 lines long) he had only to attend to relatively minor but significant details.¹³ Most of the additions are to descriptive passages, and they show that Harpur is even more conscious than in the ‘Braidwood’ text of a possible foreign audience (some of these changes are marked in Harpur's hand on the ‘Braidwood’ text). The image of the ‘sylvan eyelash’ is enlarged to read:

The sylvan eyelash always of remote
Australian waters, whether gleaming still
In lake or pool, or bickering along
Between the marges of some eager stream.

(l. 25)

It is interesting to note what seems to be a concession on Harpur's part to an English audience in those last two lines, and especially in the phrase ‘eager stream’. It seems not unreasonable to suggest that Harpur was quite capable of using English poetic diction purposefully, and not simply for want of a suitable local idiom. It should be noted in passing that not all the additions to the original 1845 text are for the best. For example, what was then a simple camp fire, becomes, from c. 1851 onwards ‘A wilder creature than 'twas elsewhere wont’. Sometimes, too, he actually suppresses the local detail, as when he changes ‘tea-trees’ to ‘trees’ in the ‘Braidwood’ text. Other concessions, such as the use of the term ‘Indians’ and ‘Appenines’, are preserved in the final revision.

In the final text Harpur adds one new passage, interesting for its attempt to draw areas of reference into the poem and for what it might reveal of his reading and use of allusion. It is a paragraph in which he searches for words and ‘hues’ with which to paint the scene, when the sun has set behind the mountains but has left in its wake ‘exceeding radiancy aloft’. The mountains are

Like a great company of Archeons, crowned
With burning diadems, and tented o'er
With canopie of purple and of gold.

(l. 49)

Here Harpur offers a Miltonic flourish, a classical reference, and a glance at Byron. At the time this passage was added to the poem, Harpur was revising his own translations of ten similes from Homer.¹⁴ There is little doubt that he intends the simile to refer to the Archons, the chief magistrates of ancient Athens. But his spelling of ‘Archons’ in the manuscripts fluctuates, and the form ‘Archeons’ is not to be found in the dictionary. It may be that Harpur's interest in geological history led him to conflate the word ‘Archon’ with ‘Archaean’, thus bringing together his observation of the actual landscape and his literary experience.¹⁵ This passage demonstrates Harpur's ability to use his sources to define an individual view of the subject. It also clearly indicates that the descriptive and narrative elements are used emblematically. There is a real point of comparison between the spectacle and colour of the mountains at sunset and the brilliance of an imagined legendary host; but he is also preparing early in the poem for the notion of heavenly splendour from which man's inhumanity to man marks such a miserable fall. The landscape images are integrated with the ideas projected in the poem.

From this examination of the textual history of ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ one can see that Harpur depends, in the final version, much more on ideas than on action as a principle of organization. Further evidence of this shift in emphasis is his strengthening of Egremont's role as narrator. Harpur probes Egremont's feelings and reactions more deeply than in the early version, and also tries to recreate a sense of the experience he undergoes. He thus brings to the poem a double perspective, by creating awareness of the poet's perception of the past, as well as of the narrator's.

In working out his purposes Harpur, as has been seen, develops a language in which there are recognizable borrowings. Harpur advised Kendall to ‘study Milton & Wordsworth for a blank verse style, and combine the master-movements of the two’.¹⁶ From Milton he learnt how to express his sense of the beauty of the world (as exemplified by his own natural environment) and his sense of its betrayal and violation by the cruelty and violence of man. He adopts words and patterns of imagery which support his perceptions. From Wordsworth he learnt how to express his sense of the interpenetration of things in the natural world, and to report on what is revealed to the ‘inward eye’.

In registering these influences, Harpur is also acknowledging the clear line of descent from Shakespeare to Milton and the Romantic poets. From the beginning of his poetic career he was in search of a vocabulary appropriate to his view of poetry as ‘the vehicle of earnest purpose’.¹⁷ A particular group of words, much favoured by him, will illustrate more precisely the nature of his debt to the past, and the way he uses the riches he mined. The group includes intergrowth, interdazzlingly, instilled, insphere, ingathered, interfusion, interwrithing, and intermingled, most of which are to be found in Shakespeare and/or Milton, and which are used, in different combinations and with very different connotations, by Harpur (two of these, interdazzlingly and interwrithing seem to be his own invention, and both are most apt to their contexts). His adaptation of such words to his own purposes is inventive, and gives his poetic speech those qualities which, he felt, made him so unsympathetic to Tennyson: ‘Poetry, with him, should be nice and dainty, rather than wise and hearty; while to affect my admiration, it must be free, bold, and open, even at the risk of being rude.’¹⁸ Certainly this group of words reflects Harpur's earnest striving for an accurate verbal representation of certain natural scenes and events.

A textual history comparable to that of ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ lies behind a much more ambitious poem, ‘The World and the Soul’, which was also put into its final form in 1867-68. The first printed version of this poem appears in The Atlas on 4 September 1847 under the title ‘Geologia’ (48 lines). It presents a very brief geological history of the earth up to the appearance of man, and then goes on to speculate that ‘novel Orders’ might still spring from ‘our mother Earth's prolific womb’, concluding that, whatever changes might come about, man's soul is immortal. It has been suggested that Harpur was probably influenced by Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830), and more specifically by Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844).¹⁹ Two manuscript versions of the poem, accompanied by a long prose note, belong probably to the early 1850s; the second of these runs to eighty-nine lines. Harpur almost doubles the length again in the 1863 manuscript (154 lines); and adds a further sixty lines in about 1866. The final version is 211 lines long.

The additions, of two main kinds, correspond to the developments observed in ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’. First, Harpur greatly elaborates his original spare description of the history of the earth gathered from ‘the crude records’ of geological remains; secondly, he adds to his speculations about the future, and to his reasons for confidence in the Soul's immortality and in the ‘divine necessity’ which guarantees the emergence of a ‘state yet more exalted’. From the very modest beginning of 1847 Harpur developed over twenty years a poem which, though clotted and laboured at times, nevertheless contains passages of real imaginative strength. Harpur's ‘Old billowy Hawkesbury’ seems to be recognized in the Creation

Of rivers in their broad abundant flow
Through boundless depths of bloomy boughs, all tossed
And billowing in the breeze.

(l. 82)

And there is a kind of ingenuous imaginative realism in his description of the herd of mammoths

As into the dim spaces of the dense
And bordering woods it passed, and onward then
Crashed, munching as it went.

(l. 55)

Harpur has a metrical sense; and he presses towards his conclusion with vigour, making use of a range of acquired vocabulary appropriate to his subject (though not to be described as merely ‘poetic’) while struggling to clarify his own thoughts. The additions to the original ‘Geologia’, like those to ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’, are not mere verbal embroidery but an extension of the meaning of the poem beyond description or narration.

Harpur travels further long the road of conceptualization in his longest poem, ‘Genius Lost’, of which there appear to be six versions dating from 1837 to 1867. It is evidently inspired by Wordsworth's lines on Chatterton from ‘Resolution and Independence’. He suggests some affinity between his struggles and Chatterton's, but he fails to convey that sense of immediacy which marks his best poems. The ideas are attenuated, and the verse is ponderous and prosaic. What he said of Coleridge's early poems is applicable to this one. It is ‘too mouthy to be rightly musical’.²⁰

At the other extreme, Harpur attempted a substantially descriptive long poem. In 1860 he published, over seven issues of the Australian Home Companion, a poem of nearly 1200 lines, ‘The Kangaroo Hunt’. There is reason to believe that all or most of it was written nearly twenty years earlier, since an extract from Part iii (under the title ‘Australian Scenery’, described as being ‘From ‘The Kangaroo Hunt’, an unpublished poem’) was published in The Weekly Register on 1 November 1843. In the poem itself, and in the long prose notes which accompany it, Harpur displays his intimate knowledge of native trees and birds and shows considerable skill in describing them. He uses a flexible rhyming tetrameter verse form, with occasional varying line lengths, and his diction is an odd mixture of local terms and awkward poetic constructions. In his preface Harpur describes his versification as ‘designedly irregular’, remarks that since writing the poem he has come to know Coleridge's Christabel, and affirms that in writing ‘The Kangaroo Hunt’ he had read nothing ‘that was professedly imitative of it [that is, of Christabel] … My design, therefore, was so far original’. In one of the notes, which is really a gloss on lines which extol the character and physique of native-born Australians, he argues for a national educational system on the ground that ‘our career as a race should be full of boldness and invention, and as little imitative as possible’. The poem strives for this objective, and it is ironical that Harpur's attempt at originality should not have met with the success which elsewhere attends his sensible use of models. Here, one feels the lack of a basic structure of ideas; and the metrical form is an awkward one for so long a poem.

By contrast, in another purely descriptive poem, the short lyric ‘A Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest’, where Marvell is clearly his mentor, Harpur's fresh perception overcomes the occasional clumsiness of his language:

Even the grasshoppers keep
Where the coolest shadows sleep;
Even the busy ants are found
Resting in their pebbled mound

(l. 5)

and he acknowledges his debt to Marvell in the last lines;

O 'tis easeful here to lie
Hidden from Noon's scorching eye,
In this grassy cool recess
Musing thus of Quietness.

(l. 39)

In the lyrical mode, as in the satires and lampoons, where he draws on various models from the seventeenth century onwards, he manages to bring about an accommodation between the inherited mould and the new substance it receives.

Harpur's choice of subjects for poems such as ‘A Storm in the Mountains’, ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’, ‘A Flight of Wild Ducks’, ‘The Bush Fire’, and many others allowed him scope for his detailed observation; but he is judicious in his use of local detail and is rarely content merely to describe or record. In poems such as ‘A Coast View’ or ‘The Bush Fire’ (where Egremont again appears) Harpur's originality consists in his thoughtful choice of poetic form (‘The Bush Fire’, like ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ develops an action, but reaches beyond it) and in the way he organizes his poetic language so that it can range from a relatively unadorned narrative style to the heightened diction which always accompanies, though not always with equal force or conviction, his approach to the subject of transcendence or to the wonders and terrors of nature.

In his decorous use of the resources of English poetry Harpur draws on his many years of close study and reflection on the work of a number of English poets, from Chaucer to the Romantics. This studious approach to his poetic task is recorded in a series of ‘Rhymed Criticisms’, which he began publishing in the 1840s. Each poet is analysed in verse paragraphs in a style ‘something betwixt the heroic rhyme of Dryden and that of Cowper’, followed by prose notes. These, which are later than the verse paragraphs, combine detailed comment on stylistic characteristics with general reflection on the qualities of the verse. They reveal an attentive, sensitive, and perceptive reader, and also, interestingly, changing views. His admiration for Dryden increases, his liking for Pope diminishes; he comes to regret his early severity about Byron, while defending its justness; he cannot now read Moore ‘with any continuous relish’, finding him lacking in ‘repose’; Wordsworth, ‘a great poet’, is nevertheless ‘too persistently didactic’ and ‘not infrequently … lean in thoughts or feeling, and verbose in expression’; and while he has admired Coleridge ‘more than any of his contemporaries’, he finds his poetry inferior to Wordsworth's ‘in imaginative sanity’; he continues to admire Shelley, but not to recommend his poems ‘as an early study’ because they are ‘too morbid in their beauty’.

His analysis of Milton has a special interest, given the debt Harpur owes him. He sees as Milton's most characteristic quality ‘a certain picturesque and ideal suggestiveness’. He stoutly defends Milton against the ‘critical prate’, as he calls it, that there is a ‘falling off’ in the later books of Paradise Lost. He pays special attention to Books vii-xi. Milton's account of the Creation in Book vii clearly influenced him deeply, as has been seen; and he asks that close attention be given, in Book xi, to the passage describing Adam and Eve awaiting the arrival of Raphael and to the later ‘vision pictures’ in the same book. There are reflections of both the substance and tone of these sections in Harpur's works, and his admiration of them is a clue to his search for an enriched narrative and discursive style.

These compact prose and verse criticisms are the product of repeated reading, close study, and revision, and confirm the evidence of the textual history of Harpur's poems. He understood that a close acquaintance with poetry in all its forms is the first step towards the forging of a distinctive style; and only a concept of originality which excludes all access to traditional resources could deny it to him. He was neither a great thinker nor a great poet. But he knew what poetry is, and how poets learn their craft; he appointed himself good masters, and taught himself what to accept and adopt and how to present his individual perceptions, while drawing on the tradition he made his own. He could have done none of these things had he not been able to see for himself and test the accomplishment of others against his capacities and needs.

Notes

1. ‘Poetry’, in The Oxford History of Australian Literature, edited by Leonie Kramer (Melbourne, 1981), p. 275.

2. Sydney Gazette, 1 November 1826, p. 3.

3. Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne, 1965), pp. 8-9.

4. Charles Harpur, edited by Adrian Mitchell, Three Colonial Poets, Book 1 (Melbourne, 1973).

5. This text was also reproduced in Selected Poems of Charles Harpur, edited by Kenneth H. Gifford and Donald F. Hall (Melbourne, 1944), and in Charles Harpur, selected by Donovan Clarke, Australian Poets Series (Sydney, 1963).

6. For a fuller account of Martin's editing, see C. W. Salier, ‘Harpur and his Editor’, Southerly, 12 (1951), 47-54.

7. See J. Normington-Rawling, Charles Harpur, An Australian (Sydney, 1962), p. 23.

8. The Empire, 15 July 1856, p. 2. This version has 159 lines. There are 209 lines in Mitchell Library MS A89 (1863). This is Adrian Mitchell's copy text.

9. See Wordsworth's poem ‘There was a Boy’ (1800) which reappears in The Prelude, v. 364-97.

10. The 1856 text is subtitled ‘My First Poetical Conception’. In a later footnote Harpur wrote that ‘from the very coming-on of the storm he became possessed with the intention of eventually describing it’, thus emphasizing that he, like Wordsworth, early felt the urge to poetry. This note is in Mitchell Library MS A97, No. 2.

11. Note Wordsworth's reference to ‘Araby’ in The Prelude, v. 497.

12. The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited by H. C. Beeching (London, 1944).

13. For this text see Mitchell's edition, pp. 3-15.

14. There are three MS versions of these passages ‘one undated, the second dated 1867, and the third 1868’ (C. W. Salier, ‘Charles Harpur's Translations from the Iliad’, Southerly, 7 (1946), 218-23.

15. This could be a reference to J. D. Dana's Manual of Geology (Philadelphia and London, 1863), where Dana refers to man as ‘the Archon of mammals’ (p. 573). Dana is recorded as having proposed the word Archaean for the oldest geological period (pre-Cambrian era). See Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language (Cleveland, Ohio and New York, 1945), p. 93. Dana visited the Hunter Valley in 1840.

16. Letter to Kendall, 7 July 1866. See Mitchell, p. 193.

17. ‘My Own Poetry’, Mitchell, p. 125.

18. From ‘The Nevers of Poetry, footnote 15’, Mitchell, p. 126.

19. There was much discussion of the subject in Sydney in the 1840s. See Normington-Rawling, p. 155.

20. Rhymed Criticisms, Mitchell Library MS A89 (1863).