SOURCE: Ackland, M. “Innocence at Risk: Charles Harpur's Adaptation of a Romantic Archetype to the Australian Landscape.” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 70 (November 1988): 239-59.

[In the following essay, Ackland demonstrates Harpur's linking of the possibility of redemption for man with the relatively untouched Australian landscape.]

Charles Harpur, it is now agreed, is a poet of ideas, but the precise nature of his thought remains largely unexplored. Repeatedly his works express faith in a suffusing Divinity, and the related recognition that trust in a Providential presence demands a corresponding advocacy of ‘the capacity of human nature for good’ (‘Have Faith’, A92).¹ Yet these major tenets of his thought, taken in isolation, provide no clear understanding of why an avowed ‘Settler's tale’, such as ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’, should contain scenes of violent death and a plaint on man's primal disobedience:

          O God! and thus this lovely world hath been
Accursed for ever by the bloody deeds
Of its prime Creature—Man. Erring or wise,
Savage or civilised, still hath he made
This glorious residence, the Earth, a Hell
Of wrong and robbery and untimely death!
Some dread Intelligence opposed to Good
Did, or a surety, over all the earth
Spread out from Eden—or it were not so!

(pp. 171-72)

In what follows, I wish to demonstrate the centrality of these inherited ideas to Harpur's self-professed mission as ‘the bard of thy country’. For this vision of existence as a struggle between death-affiliated forces and God's benevolent influence is related to the poet's preoccupation with how man would shape the largely untouched landscape of terra australis. Was he irredeemably fallen, or could a terrestrial paradise, free from the Old World's failings, be restored through the generous, loving acts of mankind? What forces would oppose this Edenic rebirth, and to what extent would we need to revise our socially-sanctioned notions of rights and duties, or material success and spiritual failure? Harpur sought to offer answers to these pressing issues; and his poetry reveals many instances of the familiar Romantic motif of innocence betrayed or at risk, adapted to meet the demands and conditions of the newly-founded colony.

In Harpur's works, God's beneficent intention is never at issue, though man is portrayed as having the ability to ‘mar its just design’ (‘Providential Design’, p. 565). To the poet's eye creation offers constant indices of an ‘ultimately perfect Plan’. It is evident each day in the arising sun's radiant majesty, when God re-enacts His founding creation of order from chaos, and confirms His promise that regenerative light will triumph over the forces of darkness. Similarly, it appears in each new human being who represents a birth of unspoilt Edenic innocence, a spring-time potential which, as in the beginning, may make or unmake his natural and human surroundings. Nevertheless, man's propensity to sin is not underplayed. Harpur's measured and characteristic view is summarised in ‘Eden Lost’, where he asserts that stars, sun, moon, birds and beasts

Are loyal to their mould as on
                              Creation's earliest day.
'Tis Man alone—dishonest Man,
                              Who schemes a plan
          Excluding brotherhood!
He only, with disnatured mind,
Becomes the Tyrant of his kind:
          He! in his lordly mood.

(p. 406)

To explain man's fall away from nature into sin thus becomes a major concern, as well as to lead his audience beyond the labyrinth of recurrent erring towards paradisiacal possibilities under the southern cross. To this end his works focus on a diverse range of violent deeds which repeat primal error, and each of which has a specific bearing on Australian experience. In ‘The Slave's Story’ and ‘The Spectre of the Cattle Flat’, for example, encounters between blacks and whites serve to direct the reader towards values which transcend the accepted dichotomies of ‘Erring or wise, / Savage or civilised’; while in other poems, such as ‘The Murder of the Lamb’ and ‘The Glen of the Whiteman's Grave’, Harpur examines the growth of error and the potential for its eclipse in God's ‘prime Creature—Man’. In all these works, as we shall see, the dictates of mercy gradually supplant those of retribution.² The uncomprehending Cain-like actions of an ostensibly Christian world are exposed, the source of man's ‘bloody deeds’ is explored, and a way pointed back to the garden landscape through Christ-like acts based on charity, forgiveness, and selfless love triumphant.

The poet's preoccupation with man as the battleground of opposing instincts, and his related advocacy of inner reform, are well illustrated by ‘The Slave's Story’ and ‘The Spectre of the Cattle Flat’. Here, too, characteristic attempts are made to involve the reader in moral and spiritual judgments; while the interaction of blacks and whites is used to undermine the presumed superiority conferred on Europeans by their enlightened religion and advanced civilization. Harpur's blacks, at worst, are no more savage than their white foes and, at best, exhibit a natural gentility and charitable disposition long abrogated in the whites by the gross material dictates of their society. ‘The Slave's Story’, for instance, tells how a happy ‘Indian’ family extends generous hospitality to a forlorn whiteman. Their guest, however, proves to be the pitiless captain of a slave-ship, who is fated not only to act inhumanely towards blacks, but also to slaughter his fellows and himself on a subsequent voyage. A parable constructed around absolute contrasts, the poem counterbalances a vision of European man in extremis with the incorruptible good instilled in nature's child. The captain is raised among pirates and knows no spiritualizing influence. Steeped in evil, his life becomes increasingly violent until it is terminated by hunger in the midst of tropical plenty. The black, in contrast, is nurtured solely on the bosom of unspoilt nature; and is still capable of disinterested acts of charity even after the dehumanizing experience of slavery. As a free man, the measure of his bounty was his final thought before going to bed of how he would furnish his guest with provisions next day to spare him the ordeals of thirst and hunger in the ‘desert track’. This same generosity of spirit remains unbroken, as is seen in his concluding benediction to the passing traveller. A tale which inverts inherited cultural categories, and compels us to ‘read black’ where narrow sectarian interest usually perceives white, ‘The Slave's Story’ demonstrates the repeated moral of Harpur's treatment of the innocence at risk theme: that brotherhood can and must be recognized, or man will ultimately sink to the self-destructive level of a maddened beast. Man's savage deeds are the poet's abhorrence, irrespective of whether their perpetrator be black or white; although the European, in acting against what should be his better knowledge, is arguably more reprehensible than the supposed ‘savage’.

‘The Spectre of the Cattle Flat’ expands this stark contrast of native humanity with ‘Christian’ ingratitude into a general portrayal of man's Cain-like impulses. The setting is a camp-fire, where stockmen vie for status through accounts of bloody atrocities which they have wreaked on the blacks. The first speaker's boast provides an unconscious subversion of the parable of the Good Samaritan:

One tells how, after a fierce fray,
                    A wounded Chief he found
Dark-lying, log-like, on his way,
                    Sore gashed with many a wound,
And how, as there alive he lay,
                    He staked him to the ground.

(p. 188)

The second recalls an act of racial genocide, when ‘a tribe entire … was pent, and held at bay, / Till there, like sheep, in one close heap, / Their slaughtered bodies lay.’ Ned Connor, however, claims superiority for his murderous deed because it was not motivated by a counterthreat: ‘What is there in an open stroke / To boast of? Ye but slew / Those who'd have done, each hell-black one, / The same or worse to you.’ He coolly shoots a black who, in return for a promised knife, has led him home. Short-sighted cunning overcomes his physical plight as a lost stockman, but confirms his condition of moral and spiritual error: ‘I raised my gun, as if in fun— / I fired! and he was dead!’ Furthermore, the precedence claimed for and accorded his crime is virtually meaningless. Fratricide emerges from the accounts of these whitemen as the distinctive and accepted condition of humanity, while religious associations like ‘hell-black’ are evoked only to sanction unchristian acts. Natural innocence, in the stockmen and slavers alike, has been overlaid by the experience of Western civilization. Through it they have gained such developed instruments of death as knife and gun, and thoroughly debased attitudes which discern in native trust only exploitable gullibility. Thus, as Harpur grimly concludes of man in Part I of ‘The Slave's Story’,

Oh learn how like a Upas Tree
(Not fabled) his dread cruelty
Can make a scene that else might tell
Of Paradise, a type of Hell!

(p. 438)

Opposed to this awareness of man's intransigent heart is a vision of nature redolent with benevolent and supernatural influence. Part I of ‘The Slave's Story’ creates an image of nature ever-renewed, which will provide the reader with grounds for hope even in the wake of the slaver's disruptive actions. Successive images drawn from pagan and Christian mythology are used to portray the setting in terms of the world's ‘earliest style’. First the tropical isle is likened to ‘a vast shield of fretted gold / Dropt by some worsted Elder God’; and then, following this legend of Olympian strife, to ‘one Altar graven / From the rude mass of things terrene / By Time inspired with Eden lore.’ The island affords a paradisiacal vision of what might be; the allusions pinpoint the source of its eclipse in our overreaching pride and subsequent violence. Within this unspoilt tropical setting man's generosity is the overflow of creation's plenitude, and this perfect harmony finds its emblem in the native's home:

          That hut my dwelling had been;
'Twas joisted in four living trees
That met aloft high o'er the roof
In domes of solid shade sun-proof;
And from its wicker door the sheen
Of a clear brook might just be seen.

(p. 440)

Ideally man and nature are mutually supportive; and life, not death, informs their relationship. Cultivation and local vegetation are interblent, heightening each other's bounty and affording a landscape where the meeting of aspiring finite and answering infinitude is continual: ‘Far as might range the wandering eye, / The vast uprising main was seen / To meet the bending Sky.’ Even in the sullied realm portrayed in ‘The Spectre of the Cattle Flat’ something of the primal bond remains, as witnessed in the supernatural occurrences. The contest for status among the stockmen in a blood-peerage terminates only with the discovery that the water-container is mysteriously empty. The synonymous phrases ‘heart of sin’ and ‘heart of stone’, used to describe Ned Connor, are translated into a dry water-pail in the midst of nature's plenty. Fittingly, the very essence of life is denied to those who boast of its violent disjunction. In the subsequent quest for water Connor, and through him his companions, will be brought face to face with an indigenous manifestation of those moral and spiritual values which they have repeatedly contravened.

Here as elsewhere in Harpur, man emerges first as the agent and finally as the victim of oppressive acts. A spiritually divided sinner, he can be a cold enactor of blasphemy and yet a prey to indwelling remorse. This constellation of ideas, of course, is a familiar one in Romantic literature, and there is much in the plot and narrative mode of the poems to recall works such as ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’.³ Like Coleridge's protagonist, Harpur's villains return death for a potentially life-saving act, and are punished by an absence of sustenance in the midst of teeming creation. But whereas the reasons for the mariner's deeds and the death of his shipmates remain unspecified except as givens of a larger existential design, which moves us from innocence through experience to restored unity, Harpur locates the source of all fatal action in man alone.⁴ Specifically, suffering has external and internal causes, attributable to the wilful denial of that basic brotherhood manifested in others and in the heart's spiritual promptings. These innate bonds can be consciously suppressed but not annulled, as seen in both Harpur poems. There the eclipse of daylight and rational strategies brings man into open confrontation with the conflicting sides of his character. The slaver asleep assumes the aspect of another Cain. His fair face reveals ‘the shadow as of crime or care, / Or secret hate’, while his apparent youth is belied by ‘lines of grey’. Later in the tale, he rises ‘ghastly as a ghost / … raging, murder mad’, butchers half his crew, and brings about his own death. Driven by mysterious impulses, he becomes the manifestation simultaneously of his crime and its avenger, affording the final enactment of his fratricidal life and its spiritual consequence: self-slaughter. Similarly in ‘The Spectre of the Cattle Flat’, the murderer becomes the object of a supernatural counterforce which, though ‘dreadful to the eye’, was ‘more so to the thought’. Whatever the phenomenological status of the apparition, its buffeting torment of Connor accurately reflects a retributive dread arising from a guilty conscience. His mortal shot is now answered by a series of blows and by an overwhelming stench ‘decayedly of the earth’, which will eventually mortify his proud heart. Simulated death, the reawakening of consciousness, and the terminal pangs of remorse follow in quick succession; and his violent fate links him with the ‘base Enslaver’, of whom it is said:

Fit end, though terrible and sad,
For one so violently bad
Even in his evils,—if ever sane
We may account the sons of Cain.

(p. 446)

Ironically, each man becomes the ghost of his former self, or even assumes what, to conventional eyes, may seem temporary insanity, before he can bring to a close the physical acts which have all but consumed his spiritual existence.

In these works, however, vengeful retributive deeds are integrated into a larger pattern concerned with the possibility of moral growth, enlarged sympathy, and the recognition of fraternity. Harpur's preoccupation with the need for man to meliorate his worst impulses or, preferably, to maintain his best is clearly illustrated by revisions to ‘The Spectre of the Cattle Flat’. Originally entitled ‘Ned Connor’, the story was expanded to ensure that the fate of the main protagonist would assume a truly representative cast. The first major change was the addition of stanzas three and four, which afford accounts of the butchery done by Connor's associates. As a result they are fully implicated in the crime of fratricide, and participate in the supernatural ordeals. Next Harpur altered the description of Connor's temporary unconsciousness from ‘A moment—and then all was tame / Forgotten, painless, past’ to the straightforward simulation of death.⁵ The earlier suggestions of peace, cessation and forgetfulness scarcely accord with the notion of an unrelenting process of spiritual arousal, which climaxes in his physical prostration and constant supplication for mercy. Finally, the morally inclusive perspective introduced by the opening expansion is assured by adding a last stanza. The initial version of the poem concludes with the stockmen still largely detached from the main drama. They simply acknowledge Connor's error and bury him by the stream. The added lines, however, explore their motivation, and suggest that they have been involved in an analogous process of spiritual growth:

There did they bury him, to ease,
                    A crudely pious dread,
That sought, so choosing, to appease
                    Some Influence from the dead,
Which there had brought for his crime, they thought
                    God's doom on a Murderer's head.

(p. 197)

For the first time in the poem dread and death are placed in an overtly religious context; and man chooses openly to act on the interrelated dictates of Divinity and common humanity. Enlightenment is by no means complete, but all Connor's auditors, both within and without the poem, have been brought to awareness of a supernatural mystery informing creation. Theirs is a propitiatory act of atonement, an acknowledgement of brotherhood and of that original compact which still links all inhabitants of nature's primal realm.

The crucial function of the audience's response in Harpur's dramatic narratives is even more evident in ‘The Slave's Story’, where a surrogate reader-audience, in the person of a ‘pitying Traveller’, becomes imaginatively involved in the reaffirmation of charity in a humanly brutalized environment. Unlike Coleridge's wedding-guest, who seems repeatedly disturbed by and desirous of escape from the mariner's tale, Harpur's chance auditor displays untiring patience and the solace of pity throughout. Moreover, given his liberty of movement in a setting dominated by slavery, we may assume him to be white. He thus affords an implicit alternative to the slaver's crew, and demonstrates that Western civilization, while providing the lucrative incentive to inhuman acts, need not always annul the well-springs of charity. His freely-given sympathy elicits a corresponding spiritual blessing from the slave, couched in terms of a Divine design which guarantees the ultimate survival of merciful benevolence: ‘never—never mayest thou need / Ere God shall shield thee in thy grave, / Such pity as thou has shown indeed / So freely to a Slave’ (p. 447). The threatened bond of faith and brotherhood is thereby restored; and even civilized man proves himself worthy of a place in nature's order. A benediction, intended originally for the fair betrayer, finds its meet object in one willing to assume the burden of humanity. Here the process of denaturalization lamented in ‘Eden Lost’ is arrested. A simple act within the reach of everyman marks a giant step towards rooting up the cruel, Upas-like growths of man's mind, which poison and constrict the otherwise ‘bounteous … fair, / And genial’ aspects of natural existence. The Edenic setting of section I, Harpur implies, is always present, though we are spiritually deadened to its regenerative potential by our violence and unthinking deeds.

Harpur's espousal of the role of imaginative sympathy and active deeds of charity in restoring or, perhaps more accurately, maintaining ‘this glorious residence, the Earth’ emerges clearly in the last works for discussion, ‘The Murder of the Lamb’ and ‘The Glen of the Whiteman's Grave’. In the first of these genuine contrition, such as Connor experiences, is translated into saving acts; and the cycle of fatal retribution is also symbolically transcended through the typological assimilation of the Cain motif to the dictates of the new dispensation.⁶ This ‘Legend of the Sheep Fold’, as it is subtitled, tells how the unrequited passion of a young shepherd for a dazzlingly white lamb turns to cruelty, when the boy leaves it tied up in rushes to be slain by a marauding beast of the night. Yet light will eventually conquer evil. For the boy, tormented by his conscience, confesses his deed and begins a restorative process based on extending charity to God's creatures. Present here are the major elements of previously discussed works: natural innocence destroyed; the mysterious progress of the soul which transforms acts of love into those of hate; evocation of the supernatural, not merely as a dramatic device by which to effect retribution, but as evidence of a suffusing and ever-operative spiritual dimension; and bloody, fratricidal acts, presented as a recurrent dilemma which affects all existence but emanates solely from man. Here, however, the dialectic of evil is converted into one of ultimate good through an elaborate Cain-Abel typology, created by Harpur's substitution of a lamb for the human victim, and by making the Cain-like culprit ‘a keeper of sheep’, and not the biblical ‘tiller of the soil’. Most obviously, the first change facilitates the conventional linking of prototypal violence with the crucifixion, when the ‘Spectre’ of the murdered creature appears ‘so white— / And lo, from its side ran blood!’ This visionary ordeal, in turn, makes the shepherd lad a victim of the same spite and cruelty which slew his ‘brother’; and so completes his earlier identification by occupation with the Abel figure. Alternatively a Cain or an Abel, the boy becomes the focal-point of man's apparently conflicting responses, and the means of their resolution.

Central to Harpur's depiction of these events is his belief in the interconnectedness of existence. Here as in other poems, nature appears as an ever-renewed but ever-endangered primal garden:

And now the golden Eventide
                    Is glowing in the west—
Glowing like a Summer bride
                    Upon old Winter's breast!
O how can Hate in all the wide
And beautiful world thus beautified
                    Dare harbor unconfest—
Nor casting off his hellish scroff,
                    Transform to a Spirit blest?

(p. 210)

The creation is envisioned in terms of an ongoing spiritual wedding, and the controlling seasonal metaphor suggests a mistaken tardiness, or plain contrariety, in man's response to its regenerative impulse. This withheld or ‘unconfest’ union, it will be suggested, arises from fundamental incomprehension on the part of individuals. Like Egremont in ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ and the poet's other blood-sinners, the boy is ‘wild-willed’ and, most importantly, subject to ambivalent motivation. He is, according to the shepherd's definitive prescription, ‘brave at heart and good, / Though given at times to hate.’ He responds instinctively with love to the innate bond of life he feels with a lamb, only to be greeted with an inversion of his best impulses: ‘But only fear was living there— / Not what he yearned to trace.’ The result is a baffling and ultimately tragic lack of communication, arising from the inappropriateness of the boy's naive expectations:

O had it been a thing with speech
                    Tow'rd which his love did glow,
Some sympathy within their reach
                    Fond words had taught to flow;
And through the might of his strange delight
                    To have wakened a kindred mood,
Had kept its fountain pure and bright,
                    And welling forth for good.

(p. 208)

The protagonist is mankind in its spiritual infancy and maturing self-awareness. His innate purity and intuitive quest for sympathy or extended fellowship are demonstrated, but so too is his limited view of what nature offers. Individual failure to grasp comprehensively the inherent pattern of existence causes it to assume a negative aspect, so that in his once clear ‘eye there lurks some sad / Life-urking mystery.’ Man's subjective perception begins to eclipse God's; and the benevolent influence of the solar eye on events is temporarily replaced by the circumscribed, subverting awareness of the boy. In place of mild and radiant love, cruelty ‘glares outward from his mind’. Appropriately, the sense of thwarted love turns his thoughts to Cain, and the archetypal blood-deed arising from incomprehension. For as in the case of the primal murderer, his apparently rejected gifts lead to vengeance against his nearest kinsman and to Divine intervention.

Regeneration in Part III of the poem is dependent on inter-related external and internal impulses. This redemptive process comprises three phases: remorse, contrition and eventual salvation, when repeated prayers and deeds of atonement will have purged ‘his young life … of a crime’. The first phase is introduced by the ewe's plaint, described as ‘that mournful Mother's wail’, and ends with memories of his own mother, who instilled in him the merciful precepts which cause ‘his wilful heart … [to] quail.’ The kinship between all nature's creatures is thus reasserted through the evocation of a common source of nurturing love, which finds its spiritual type in the climactic vision of the murdered lamb. Similarly the states of victim and victimizer are subtly interlinked. The boy, rising ‘from his thorny bed’, standing ‘ghostly stiff’ and pierced with remorse, becomes the counterpart of his victim; just as he answers the ‘low wild moan’ of a solitary, suffering spirit aloft with his own ‘fearful groan’. The second stage of his regeneration depends on this recognition of, and identification with, the crime. Like the Ancient Mariner, he openly confesses his sin and bursts involuntarily into inward supplication:

Thus lay he—till his heart did break
                    Into a wondrous prayer,
That God, the Father of All, would take
Sweet pity upon him for sorrow's sake,
                    Thus lowly lying there!
Nor let the wrong that he had done,
Being tempted of the Evil One,
                    Some deadlier fruitage bear!

(p. 215)

The crisis of the soul's disease is now passed. The individual heart is restored as God's temple;⁷ and the fruits of primal error become the means to that ‘inner paradise, happier far’ which results from the positive application of increased knowledge. In ensuing stanzas emphasis falls on ‘mystic Influence’, ‘healing’ and spiritual enlightenment which teach man that the supernatural and physical consequences of his blood-deed require ‘sorrow true and penance due’, as well as a voluntary pledge to care for ‘the firstlings of his flock’ (Genesis, 4:4). For as the sage shepherd argues, ‘of all ways, the best / For righting the wrong thou hast done to one, / Is justice to the rest.’ Justice is tempered with mercy, and their claims reconciled through expanded understanding of the appropriate terms in which to respond to the ordained unity of creation. Red blood, which spelt vengeance in the old dispensation, assumes here its Christian identification with the redemptive operation of grace, which we may witness in the salvation of a single murderer or in one of God's natural epiphanies. Hence in the final lines guilt and crime, likened only to ‘a thin white mist’, are dispelled by the transfiguring ‘golden ray’ of presiding Divinity to reveal ‘the first / Red flash of the perfect day’. The shadowy doubts which haunted the prospect are ‘shrunken’ or ‘burst’ in response to the broken and restored heart of this spiritual everyman.

The fullest expression of violence eclipsed and guilt transformed into expansive sympathy occurs in ‘The Glen of the Whiteman's Grave’, a work which affords a triumphant close to the poet's treatment of the innocence at risk motif by emphasizing the good inherent in man and creation. As Harpur's biographer Normington-Rawling notes, the poem was inspired by the murder of a ‘settler named Clementson’;⁸ though Harpur's description of funeral mounds in both ‘The Glen of the Whiteman's Grave’ and ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’, which is based on Clementson's resting-place, is intentionally generalized through suppression of the victim's name. In ‘The Glen of the Whiteman's Grave’ we are told pointedly that the name is ‘Deep carved in the bark of a grand old Tree’; but its wider significance resides in its being ‘The name of a murdered man’: a phrase which Harpur underscores. The particular is thereby elevated into the universal, as the poet prepares to take up the drama of individual atonement for the actions of humankind where ‘The Slave's Story’ left off, through concentrating on the response of a chance auditor to a tale of Cain-like betrayal. The speaker tells first of his solitary pilgrimage, motivated by a camp-side story, to the forest grave of a young man murdered by whites; while Part II offers a meditation there on how others, whether relatives or strangers, blacks or whites, are affected by the event. Throughout the emphasis is not so much on the act of betrayal and fratricide, as on its spiritually regenerative consequences. For the poet-speaker will provide confirmation of each man's Christ-like potential to redeem the errors of his fellows, when he descends to the grave and arises enlightened and imaginatively strengthened through his sympathetic sharing in the experience of untimely death.⁹

Part I of the poem focuses on the actual state or potential of creation through a series of elaborate vignettes that image either harmony or discord perceived in nature, depending on which influences predominate in the speaker's mind. As a lone traveller on the heights of sun-drenched mountains, he perceives the scene as an ennobling vista of vast, wild ranges merging with the heavens, ‘like a dusky main / Of monster breakers flowing high / And wide along the shoreless sky’ (p. 218). The prospect is one of primal concord. Mountains are likened to ‘old-world Kings’, or appear in ‘tribe-like groups’; and the aspiring acts of peaks and perceiving mind find their type in a kindred image: ‘High as soar the eagle's wings’. Upon his descent into the gloomy ‘melancholy Glen’ which houses the grave, the speaker looks back on the same objects from a lower vantage-point, and discerns the awesome ruins of a broken, fallen world. Though still ‘mingled’, all is ‘unblent’, ‘rudely wild’ and fragmented, with the very peaks seeming to rend the sky. The movement into a realm that knows sin and violent death is everywhere apparent; but so too is the sensed potential of individual intellect to discern here causes for hope. To the speaker's eye, the glen from afar can seem ‘a huge gap between / Two craggy walls’, and ‘a time-hewn path / For the giant Pan of so wild a place’. It provides at once a magnified projection of the scar-like grave at its heart and a suggestion that the spirit behind creation can turn acts of despoliation to life-giving ends. Similar antitheses are mediated by the same setting at sunset:

A few grey cloud-shreds only were
Seen in the vault of heaven to stir,
As cobwebs, dim and torn, might wave
From the marble dome of a mighty cave.

(p. 219)

A chilling sense of death is present, transforming clouds to cobwebs and the world to a tomb. Yet there is also a promise of afterlife in the imaged oneness of a creation whose upper part consists of heaven. Moreover, with earth itself assuming the aspect of a tomb, we are invited to realize that the pilgrim's quest after the dead individual in fact embraces the fate of all. Imperceptibly topography and metaphysical implications have been interwoven by the light of mind; much as the described journey becomes the physical correlative of the previous imaginative response to the tale of murder. This too carried him from a setting of unity or community by the camp-fire, through images of wilderness, to ‘some grey / Abysm in the Far Away’. But then as now, the stated physical and emotional predominance of ‘grey’ mediates, not suggestions of termination and vacuity, but of the grave as a threshold to broader prospects and vastly enlarged consciousness.

This play of antitheses, together with the possibility of hope emerging from the lap of despair, finds its most detailed projection in the description of the burial mound at the close of Part I. In this third tableau the speaker's contrition, his impelling ‘sympathetic load’, enables him to discern a regenerative kinship between natural and human life. The process of identification begins when the gloom-dispelling rays of the sun withdraw from the grave ‘As Hope's last flickering gleam might fade / From the face of a doomed Man’ (p. 220). Moreover, the use of ‘might’ should alert us that hope is no more unconditionally banished from the following setting than it was in a comparable scene in ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’, when Egremont witnessed the death of the poor man:¹⁰

                    Only one tuft of grass did wave
Above that sterile desert Grave
Bestrewn with leaves and withered sprays,
And only one blue flower did gaze
Timidly up, as near I trod,
From 'twixt the dry lips of a broken clod.
O 'twas a desolate, dreary thing,
That Grave in the else-green lap of Spring—
In the else-unbroached primeval sod!

(pp. 220-21)

As always, responsibility for despoliation rests with mankind, just as nature continually extends relief and evidence of a covenant maintained. From the midst of man-created indices of death and drought flowers a solitary emblem of regeneration. Evoking hope and the virgin through the colour blue, it appears like an anticipatory response to the speaker's ensuing prayer that ‘not one human child / Of the Earth should be laid in the lonely cold / Of a Grave so wild!’ Compassion not dread is awakened by this ‘desolate dreary thing’. Certainly the grave will next recall to the viewer's mind the primal past of murdered Abel; but with this spiritual enlargement of the scene also comes the knowledge that ‘Spring's healing hand, after many a year’ does ‘flower … [the tomb] with purple and gold!’ Creation rewards the speaker's journey of selfless atonement with a vision of Edenic bounty encompassing a single scar-like plot ‘bestrewn with leaves and withered sprays’, as if in sign of gracious mourning and affirmative charity towards man's repeated Cain-like acts. Nature's face, although bearing the traces of human sin, provides everywhere evidence that temporal does merge with eternal: that even parched lips may yield up saving words of forgiveness and renewal.

The topographical transitions of Part I, signalling shifts from primal unity through untimely devastation to hope restored, find their imaginative and human analogues in the meditations of Part II. The speaker, kneeling at the grave-side in response to ‘a spirit of dread’, invokes the past of the murdered man in terms of the geographically contrasted but spiritually linked realms of England and Australia. In this visionary sequence, England serves as the first garden, the state of loving accord characterized by the cherishing bonds of village and familial care. By contrast, in the New World ‘felons bent to slay’ and ‘savage mountains’ suggest not harmonious community but postlapsarian desolation and solitude. Further, the English new-chum affords an image both of innocent everyman sallying forth into the forbidding landscape of experience; as well as of the poet-elect in man, faced with the task of reconciling ideality and actuality:

A visionary Youth, methought,
On he came, all wonder-wrought
With the dreary grandeur massed
Aloft in shapes so wild and vast,
And which his memory oft compared
For contrast, with the rural joy
Of scenes in England …

(p. 221)

In his death, then, we mark an eclipse of creative potential—but only to recognize its continued existence in the narrator, who passes beyond physical and temporal bounds in his imaginative perusal of the consequences of violent death. Hence even cumulative images of bereavement can provide grounds for faith. Significantly his account focuses on human response. First the parents ‘mourning hopelessly’ for their lost promise of life's continuation are evoked; then we are invited to see the instinctive but Christianly unreclaimed reactions of a passing black. He avoids the place, ‘nor dares to halt’, and hushes the play of ‘his Boys’ in pointing admonishingly at ‘the Whiteman's Grave’. Finally, the very glen is ‘that primeval waste’ to the lone speaker's enlarged perception; though as in Part I the imaged nadir of despair provides cause for joy. For whereas the parents failed imaginatively (‘they saw not’ the grave), and the black, like his counterparts in ‘The Creek’, was unable to overcome superstitious dread; to the poet-speaker alone is given the capacity to approach and daringly reassert the bonds between men, nature and God.

The reaffirmation of this constantly threatened covenant is achieved in the final section through a complex series of identifications. Like the shepherd boy, the speaker's troubled spirit will be restored through an intuitive revelation of suffusing order and individual responsibility. He identifies with ‘a Brother's sorrow’ and unconsciously acts to cover or redeem this ‘bleak scar in the Earth's … mould’ (p. 221). The corporeal and spiritual blow rendered creation in the murder of young, spring-time life is mollified by the physically prostrate and mentally abased figure of the speaker, weeping and lying by the grave. From this strongly felt experience of blood-crime and its consequences for all existence springs a ‘deepened’ understanding of how death can provide a site for rebirth, or woe the starting-point for ‘wisely sympathetic strength’ (p. 223).¹¹ The key-note of this evolution is ‘stretched’. It marks his first sighting of the burial place, ‘And now the sought for Grave I found— / Against me stretched in lonely mound / Was darkly seen.’ It recurs with the allusion to Cain, ‘O God! / That first bleak scar in the Earth's new mould / Which stretched over Abel in Eden of old’, and is enacted by the speaker at the grave. The iterated concept links past to present, marks stages in an ongoing process, and evokes a sense of that universal kinship from which will emerge the mysterious well-spring of regeneration. In each instance, living creation is measured by its response to death. The physical as well as poetic deeds of the speaker arguably complement and complete the shrouding, healing action of ‘Earth's new mould’; just as they answer the implied injunction of the opening scene for affirmative, individual acts. Scars may point to injuries, but they also indicate an overall wholeness sustained. In this scheme, the speaker's arisal from the grave confirms a direct continuation of the visionary potential endangered with the eclipse of the new-chum. It also affords an act that transcends the physical termination of death, as well as evidence of the capacity of humanity in the New World to redeem its accumulated burden of guilt. Again we witness a dramatisation of Harpur's major theme: that ‘this lovely world’, in the words of ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’, may still prove a ‘glorious residence’, if ‘its prime Creature—Man’ can overcome savage passion through awareness of Divinely sanctioned ties which interlink all aspects of creation. The poem concludes with images of life's apparently antagonistic impulses resolved. There the generosity of man and nature are shown to conspire in soothing ‘a dying child’ with ‘wreaths of flowers’, and the ‘moon's beams’ are imaged as ‘smoothing / O'er some benighted wild’—figures which suggest that even untimely death and unillumined wildness are parts of an ultimately just design.

Here as in the other poems surveyed, Harpur's use of the innocence at risk theme is informed by the belief that dread primal recurrence can only be countered by the charitable extension of love and forgiveness. This the speaker enacts physically through his pilgrimage and mentally through his narrative which, by means of studied transitions, attempts to engage its audience imaginatively in an unfolding spiritual progress. The text slips effortlessly from ‘I’ to ‘we’, from the presumably physical givens of the opening scenes to the frankly fictional constructs of Part II, as the poem becomes an overt act of inclusion, a call for responsible participation, and an instrument for the enlargement of sympathy which it preaches. Characteristically the process of genuine atonement is presented as one of identification by potentially alienated man with his slaughtered brother; and with this union comes a transformed perception of nature, seen no longer as an inhospitable, Cain-tormenting waste, but as a kindly ministering presence:

Yea, wept as we are fain to weep
When some great load is on the brain,
As given by Nature so to keep
The saddest thinking sane;
And sweet for future use, I trow,
When we shall understand at length
What beauty of soul, and grace to know,
And wisely sympathetic strength
Was born to us of Woe.

(p. 223)

The passage provides a bare summation of Harpur's beliefs. As this and previous works have shown, murder is antithetical to all that distinguishes existence. It is hateful, ugly, grace-denying and marks an uncomprehending denial of fraternity. Together, these implied attributes constitute a receipt for the insanity which motivates all the poet's blood-sinners from Egremont to the shepherd boy, those lineal ‘Sons of Cain’. Opposed to this vision of evil rampant is the spiritualizing gift of nature to ‘the brain’—that seat and source of primal strife. Sanity, in this context, means faith in an unshaken celestial presence ever able and willing to turn evil to higher good, and to maintain in man those redeeming Christian virtues of charity and love. Unobtrusively the poem attains the status of prophecy, distilling from present problems a spiritual knowledge which is synonymous with grace; and ensuring, through our involvement in the pilgrim-poet's response, the unbroken operation of creative potential in humankind as well as in nature.

According to Harpur man, though fallen, is redeemable. Certainly ‘some dread Intelligence opposed to Good’ has spread ‘over all the earth’, but error may emerge as a station in a necessary process of maturation. Life under the condition of full consciousness may be viewed as a blessing and not as a punishment or curse, while the young or intellectually benighted may progress through emulation of bardic precepts. Ours remains the primal choice, and with it the fate of a young nation. True children of the earth, we feel the pull of savage, destructive impulse, and yet we remain subject to the same regenerative pulse which energizes all creation. Against recurrent error, Harpur offers examples of selfless charity which, through healing wounds and forging sympathetic bonds, provides the groundwork for a God-ordained democracy. Thus charity becomes, in the poet's words, ‘all mankind's concern’, and ‘the core / Of Wisdom's social aim’ (‘Charity’, A87). Transcending economic and religious demarcations, it elevates the individual to his original status as ‘man-god’ and becomes, in Harpur's verse and theoretical pronouncements, synonymous with the annulment of violence and the restoration of paradisiacal existence through Christ-like acts of faith in mankind. Moreover charity, in his dramatic narratives, provides the touchstone for judging the torch-bearers of Western civilization in the New World. In the culturally superior whites, acquisitive rights are often shown to have eclipsed natural humanitarian duties, and material success to have annulled Christian concerns. As a corrective Harpur preaches the thinly veiled republican doctrine of righting individual wrong through ‘justice to the rest’, and the accompanying vision of an all-encompassing natural kinship. In the spring superabundance of creation, or in the innate reverence which distinguishes the actions of his narrators, the passing blacks and the very seasons, he offers us evidence of a Providential presence maintained. Its influence guarantees the renewal of ‘a nameless flower’ or the spontaneous act of disinterested charity in ‘a nameless scene’, and with them a new Adamic chance for mankind in the preserved spiritual garden of this world.

Notes

1. Quotations from Harpur's writings are accompanied either by a reference to their Mitchell Library manuscript source, or by a page reference to Elizabeth Perkins, ed., The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1984).

2. The same is true for Harpur's other major works, stretching from his early youthful drama, ‘The Bushrangers’, through to his last ambitious poem of epic scope, ‘The Witch of Hebron’. For further detailed treatment of these concerns see my essay ‘God's Sublime Order in Harpur's “The Creek of the Four Graves”’, Australian Literary Studies, 11 (1984), 355-70.

3. J. J. Healy in Literature and the Aborigine in Australia: 1770-1975 (Brisbane: Queensland Univ. Press, 1978), noting this possible source, posits that the poem ‘was an effort to construct, in narrative terms, a fundamental breach of the moral order’; but limits and even distorts the work's implications by concluding: ‘The European in Australia, for Harpur, was part of a disturbed moral order; his killing of the Aborigine initiated and manifested this fundamental disturbance’ (p. 95). As the poet's works repeatedly indicate, he maintained that Australia represented a new chance for mankind. The coming of the white was not reprehensible per se; but only in so far as he brought with him the errors of a fallen, botched Old World, and attempted to re-establish them in the new colony, as Harpur explains, for instance, in the opening lines of his sonnet on ‘The New Land Orders’ (pp. 635-36).

4. The Australian is also careful not to suggest that the humans' evil-doings are in any way part of a presiding spiritual design. Heaven is thereby absolved of blame, but remains free to intervene supernaturally in order to awaken a sense of contrition and genuine repentance.

5. The text of the earlier version appears in The Bushrangers, a Play in Five Acts, and Other Poems (Sydney: Piddington, 1853), p. 86.

6. On the Romantic and mid-nineteenth century use of these motifs see George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 174-275; and Leslie Tannenbaum, ‘Lord Byron in the Wilderness: Biblical Tradition in Byron's Cain and Blake's The Ghost of Abel’, Modern Philology, 72 (1975), 350-64; and ‘Blake and the Iconography of Cain’, in Blake in his Time, ed. Robert N. Essick and Donald Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 23-34. In the latter, Tannenbaum draws attention to the Romantic use of the Cain motif to stress the possibilities of forgiveness, reconciliation and sympathy, as well as the bond between man and Divinity (pp. 29-32): points also emphasized in Harpur's treatment of the Cain-centred typology.

7. Interesting confirmation of this reading is supplied by the A92 version of the poem, where Harpur substitutes ‘templed’ for the qualifier ‘tempted’, used in the A89 and A95 texts.

8. Normington-Rawling, Charles Harpur, An Australian (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963), p. 32.

9. The motifs are familiar Romantic ones; and Hartman traces them authoritatively in Wordsworth's Poetry: 1788-1814 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1964). Harpur, of course, was well read in Romantic poetry, particularly that of Wordsworth, to whom he owes much in theme and technique, as Judith Wright describes in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 7-10.

10. The scene is discussed in some detail in Michael Ackland, ‘God's Sublime Order in Harpur's “The Creek of the Four Graves”’, Australian Literary Studies, 11 (1984), 367-68.

11. Here as so often in Romantic poetry Nature, or an indwelling presence both within and without the speaker, seems to motivate his unpremeditated acts. His tears spring from thought and are ‘as given by Nature’—a telling simile which suggestively pinpoints the source of his atoning deeds in a force mediated through but not necessarily synonymous with the natural creation. For further examination of these concerns in Harpur's verse, see my ‘Cognitive Man and Divinity in the Short Descriptive Verse of Charles Harpur’, Southern Review, 16 (1983), 389-403; and ‘Charles Harpur's “The Bush Fire” and “A Storm in the Mountains”: Sublimity, Cognition and Faith’, Southerly, 43 (1983), 459-74.