SOURCE: Ackland, Michael. “God's Sublime Order in Harpur's ‘The Creek of the Four Graves.’” Australian Literary Studies 11, no. 3 (May 1984): 355-70.

[In the following essay, Ackland compares Harpur's treatment of the union of man, nature, and God in “The Creek of the Four Graves” with that of poet John Milton.]

‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ has long been a rallying-point for the defence of Charles Harpur's poetic standing. Published separately in 1845 and reissued in the 1853 collection entitled The Bushrangers: A Play in Five Acts and Other Poems, it was singled out for special praise by the Maitland Mercury, while Daniel Deniehy writing in the Empire felt that it would ‘best support’ Harpur's ‘claims to a laurel’.¹ Even severe critics of the self-appointed bard of Australia have acknowledged its power. G. B. Barton, for instance, in his pioneering survey of Literature in New South Wales (1866) praised the poem for its ‘dramatic power’ and its ‘landscape painting’, although in general he judged the poet to be self-conceited, and lacking the basic skills of his craft.² Similarly, G. A. Wilkes offers qualified recognition of Harpur's ability to capture large, natural ‘effects’ in this poem; but finds the overall impression left by his verse to be one of ‘earnest ineptitude’.³ Harpur then, and this his best known work, have met with only limited acclaim. Although its individual felicities are applauded, on the whole it is adjudged ‘a heroic fragment’, chiefly notable for its ‘lively observation’.⁴ But, as I hope to demonstrate, this ‘settler's tale’ transcends purely descriptive categories to take its place within the tradition of prophetic, blank verse narrative, which Harpur had encountered in the works of his two great English mentors, Milton and Wordsworth.⁵

Harpur, no less than Milton or Wordsworth, saw himself as a visionary or bard, whose mission was to lay bare the well-springs of natural and human life, and ultimately ‘to justify the ways of God to men’. ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ represents arguably his most complete attempt to work within this tradition. As in Book I of The Prelude, so here Harpur's poetic precursors are evoked through the choice of their common verse form, and through veiled references to their characteristic settings and concerns. The conceptual framework of the poem is evidently Miltonic in origin. Man is envisaged as a violent, fallen creature; nature as a battle-ground of opposing principles:

Some dread Intelligence opposed to Good
Did, of a surety, over all the earth
Spread out from Eden—or it were not so!(6)

Moreover, Milton's epic offers us allusive ‘keys’ to scenes in the poem, which are crucial to an understanding of Harpur's vision of loss and redemption. As we shall see, the camp-site of Egremont's party evokes the nuptial bower of Adam and Eve; Harpur's splendid description of the rising moon recalls Raphael's account of the first day of creation; and the poem's frequent references to violent, untimely death gain wider resonances when seen in the context of Paradise Lost. These mythic parallels, however, are subsumed in a pervasive awareness of the natural sublime. Here landscape, as in Wordsworth's verse, is suffused with spiritual and inner reality.⁷ It is at once a promise of and a setting for redemption. Against this backdrop Harpur portrays the continual struggle between reason and instinct and, as I shall argue, the re-enactment of man's fall. For in ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ early colonial experience is placed within a larger teleological framework inherited from the old world; and the reader is asked to recognize the possibility of human regeneration even in this vast, wild and unknown continent.

In ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’, Charles Harpur establishes a powerful sense of Divine immanence through his portrayal of sublime phenomena. Part I emphasizes the presence of rampire-like mountains which, in the descriptive verse tradition of the eighteenth century, had established themselves as the supreme example of the natural sublime. They dominate the entire action, and are presented as ‘dissolving’ in the ‘exceeding radiancy’ advocated by Edmund Burke, or as obscured by that darkness which is even more productive of sublimity. In Part II the rising moon provides the occasion for an awed celebration of creative Divinity, and one which reveals a sacramental conception of nature: that is, a concern with outer reality as a type or emblem of the moral, the intellectual and the religious. These wider concerns, in turn, are underlined through the adaptation of Miltonic scenes, so that Harpur is able to develop Egremont's tale into a dramatic account of the place of error and salvation in God's universal order.

Like so much of Harpur's verse, Part I of ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ is conceived of primarily in pictorial terms. The second stanza, which describes the countryside through which the explorers pass, is picturesque in a dual sense. Its visual details are ordered in accordance with the principles of composition to be found in landscape painting, with mountains, forest, and ‘the windings of a nameless creek’ occupying respectively the back-, middle-, and fore-ground of the verbal canvas; while the overall depiction is characterized by that roughness and complexity in a wild, natural scene so sought after by devotees of the picturesque, as defined by William Gilpin.⁸ This informing habit of vision becomes increasingly evident in the speaker's stress on the ‘wildly beautiful’, and in his emphasis on the scenic and pictorial qualities of the landscape:

Before them, thus extended, wilder grew
The scene each moment—beautifully wilder!
.....… O what words, what hues
Might paint the wild magnificence of view.

(pp. 3-4)

The description, grounded as it is on the Horatian concept of ut pictura poesis, is thoroughly eighteenth century.⁹ Like the English descriptive poets, Harpur's verse fulfils Simonides' famous dictum that ‘Painting is mute poetry, and poetry a speaking picture’. Moreover, there seems no reason to doubt that Harpur was aware of these concepts, because in a later poem, ‘The World and the Soul’, he refers explicitly to the Sister Arts tradition, which is based on these notions. There poetry is seen to be engendered by the Soul, as are painting and sculpture, which operate through their own cognate ‘languages’.

And thence descending in her [Soul's] influence, grew
More intimate and plastic,—till at last
Semblance idealised in hues, or wrought
From the rude rock into a life which spake
The language of immutable loveliness,
Adorned the abodes of Learning, and the shrines
Of Worship, and of Virtue;—Sister Arts,
Three Sister Arts in fellowship divine—
A triune glory of exalted Soul.

(p. 42)

But significantly, for Harpur these arts, far from representing a pure aesthetic, are imbued by spiritual presence, and take their place with other manifestations of ‘the evoking word of God!’ (p. 43).

Dominating Harpur's verbal picture are ‘unknown mountains’, and through their depiction the picturesque elements of the scene are absorbed into a profound experience of the natural sublime. As M. H. Nicolson has demonstrated, mountains play a vital role in man's shifting view of the relationship between Divinity and nature.¹⁰ Once regarded as blots and warts on the landscape, and hence as apparent signs of God's displeasure with erring man, they came in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to form the focal point of a new psychology or ‘aesthetics of the infinite’. Man, marvelling at the magnitude of interstellar space, transferred emotional responses once reserved for the Divinity to the heavens and then, by a natural progression, to the vastest objects on earth—mountains. These phenomena characterized by vast dimension and wild inaccessibility led observers to experience an expansion of spirit and mingled feelings of joy and awe, as they achieved a greater sense of God's presence. In the words of Edward Young's popular eighteenth century meditative poem, Night Thoughts:

… great objects make
Great minds, enlarging as their views enlarge;
Those still more godlike, as these more divine.(11)

The distinctive transitions associated with the aesthetics of the infinite emerge in Harpur's presentation of the mountain range:

Before them, thus extended, wilder grew
The scene each moment—beautifully wilder!
For when the sun was all but sunk below
Those barrier mountains,—in the breeze that o'er
Their rough enormous backs deep fleeced with wood
Came whispering down, the wide upslanting sea
Of fanning leaves in the descending rays
Danced interdazzlingly, as if the trees
That bore them, were all thrilling,—tingling all
Even to the roots for very happiness:
So prompted from within, so sentient, seemed
The bright quick motion—wildly beautiful.
But when the sun had wholly disappeared
Behind those mountains—O what words, what hues
Might paint the wild magnificence of view
That opened westward! Out extending, lo,
The heights rose crowding, with their summits all
Dissolving, as it seemed, and partly lost
In the exceeding radiancy aloft;
And thus transfigured, for awhile they stood
Like a great company of Archeons, crowned
With burning diadems, and tented o'er
With canopies of purple and of gold!

(pp. 3-4)

The portrayal moves down, and then upwards, from the sun to the tingling trees and back to the celestial image of transfiguration, with the mountains mediating each transition. While the depiction conveys the rugged indomitability and magnitude of natural forms, it also stresses the presence of ubiquitous, incessant movement throughout this enduring landscape. The breeze ‘whispers down’, ‘descending rays’ cause ‘fanning leaves’ to dance and thrill. Ethereal currents are met by an answering terrestrial response, and the union is signalled by the prefix in ‘interdazzlingly’ and by the potentially cosmic image of the dance. Implicitly, the passage leads us to ask what causes this ‘thrilling’, this ‘very happiness’, which is prompted from within and without; to ponder what is the essence of the ‘wildly beautiful’. The scene of ‘barrier mountains’ has been transformed imperceptibly into one of ‘bright quick motion’, as the so-solid-seeming-mass ‘dissolves’ to admit the presence of irradiating Divinity. Well may the speaker wonder how he is to paint the ineffable. The cause is truly ‘lost / In the exceeding radiancy aloft’. It is not just the mountains, but our awareness of the poem's setting which is thus ‘transfigured’; and the closing image of Archeons clad in the purple and gold of kings unmistakably evokes the archetype of all presiding authority. The picturesque has been ennobled with the sublime. What began primarily as an aesthetic depiction has been infused with a moral and religious significance, felt again in Harpur's final allusion to the scene's picturesque qualities:

And thus awhile, in the lit dusk, they [the mountains] seemed
To hang like mighty pictures of themselves
In the still chambers of some vaster world.

(p. 5)

The concluding line lends a metaphysical dimension to the concept of ut pictura poesis by referring the whole tradition back to a Divine archetype. It should also alert us to view the action depicted in terms of a vaster order, presided over by an Unmoved Mover.

This notion of immanent Godhead is expressed most clearly at the beginning of Part II in the sublime evocation of the rising moon. Again the depiction is conveyed in picturable terms and yet is redolent with spiritual implications, for the greatest objects of nature are transformed by the presence of God's surrogate, the moon, elsewhere termed by Harpur ‘Infinitude's dark Spouse’ (p. 33):

Meanwhile the cloudless eastern heaven had grown
More and more luminous—and now the Moon
Up from behind a giant hill was seen
Conglobing, till—a mighty mass—she brought
Her under border level with its cone,
As thereon it were resting: when, behold
A wonder! Instantly that cone's whole bulk
Erewhile so dark, seemed inwardly a-glow
With her instilled irradiance; while the trees
That fringed its outline,—their huge statures dwarfed
By distance into brambles, and yet all
Clearly defined against her ample orb,—
Out of its very disc appeared to swell
In shadowy relief, as they had been
All sculptured from its substance as she rose.

(p. 7)

Here terrestrial and celestial, mountain and moon, are fused to create an emblem of life as Divine vesture. By implication, the natural world is always ‘inwardly aglow / With … instilled irradiance’: an idea rephrased in the concluding lines, where the image of external reality emanating from the source of light suggests both God's indwelling presence and His unmoved transcendence. Nature is at once, in Harpur's words, ‘nourished into being / Upon the bosom of Almighty Power / Illimitably active’ and formed ‘in strict / Coincidence with Eternal Verity’ (p. 33).¹² Again the scene hangs like a painting whose full significance depends on a Divine archetype, just as the relief-sculpture stands out from the underlying and supporting substance.

Traditionally, however, the natural sublime is not evoked for merely aesthetic ends, but as a stimulus to moral and religious speculation of the kind which Harpur introduces through his adaptation of Miltonic set-pieces, as in Egremont's first-night camp-site. Given the capacity of the ‘wildly beautiful’ countryside to assume aspects of a last Eden or a blemished paradise, the primary context almost inevitably evoked by the camp-site is the paradisial bower from Paradise Lost:

Thus talking, hand in hand alone they passed
On to their blissful bower; it was a place
Chos'n by the sovran Planter, when he framed
All things to man's delightful use; the roof
Of thickest covert was inwoven shade,
Laurel and myrtle, and what higher grew
Of firm and fragrant leaf; on either side
Acanthus, and each odorous bushy shrub
Fenced up the verdant wall; …
… Here, in close recess
With flowers, garlands, and sweet-smelling herbs
Espousèd Eve decked her first nuptial bed.

(IV. 689-97, 708-10)¹³

Harpur, however, is portraying life as it is experienced in a fallen world. As a result of man's original disobedience, Divinity is now only a sensed stellar presence, glimpsed through the interlacing growths of the explorers' ‘bower’:

The simple subject to their minds at length
Fully discussed, their couches they prepared
Of rushes, and the long green tresses pulled
Down from the boughs of the wild willows near.
Then four, as pre-arranged, stretched out their limbs
Under the dark arms of the forest trees
That mixed aloft, high in the starry air,
In arcs and leafy domes whose crossing curves
And roof-like features,—blurring as they ran
Into some denser intergrowth of sprays,—
Were seen in mass traced out against the clear
Wide gaze of heaven …

(p. 6)

Although the Edenic bower of Milton's depiction is richer and more intricately constructed, it shares the major characteristics of the natural shelter under which Egremont's party sleeps. Both consist of shady roof and walls formed by the ‘intergrowth’ of local vegetation; the whole furbished by a Divinely-inspired nature. And the putative parallel is strengthened by Harpur's final depiction of the camp-site, where it becomes, by ironic inference, the first-night ‘nuptial bed’ of mutilated corpses. God is absent from the immediate scene, but his surrogate, the moon, is described gazing

As peacefully down as on a bridal there
Of the warm Living—not, alas! on them
Who kept in ghastly silence through the night
Untimely spousals with a desert death.

(p. 14)

Nature's original order is here subverted. Man is at once the culprit and the victim of his primal pact with violent death.

Adaptation of Miltonic teleology is also evident at the commencement of Part II. There the ascent of the radiant moon is developed into a portrayal of the conflict between reason or truth and chaos-wreaking error:

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 dropt foldings of a lucent veil,
Chased mass by mass the broken darkness down
Into the dense-brushed valleys, where it crouched,
And shrank, and struggled, like a dragon doubt
Glooming some lonely spirit that doth still
Resist the Truth with obstinate shifts and shows,
Though shining out of heaven, and from defect
Winning a triumph that might else not be.

(pp. 7-8)

The assimilation of traditional material is complete. But the use of ‘conglobed’ and subsequent references to a brooding, wingèd spirit (to be quoted later) direct attention to what, for Harpur, would have been the familiar context of these images: Messiah's creation of the earth, as described in Book VII of Paradise Lost.

                                                                                … Darkness profound
Covered th' abyss; but on the wat'ry calm
His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread,
And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth
Throughout the fluid mass, but downward purged
The black tartareous cold infernal dregs
Adverse to life; then founded, then conglobed,
Like things to like, the rest to several place
Disparted, and between spun out the air,
And earth self-balanced on her center hung.

(VII. 233-42)

While recognition of the Miltonic original is not indispensable, it does underscore the burden of Harpur's portrayal, which invites us to see each rising of God's resplendence as a re-enactment of the miracle of creation; as a taming of chaos and all those forces ‘adverse to life’. ‘Dragon doubt’ may not be entirely routed, but its continued existence serves as a pretext for God to display His untiring benevolence and care for this world. Earth, however, is fallen; and from its defective condition the force of darkness may extort some sense of victory. Yet the very description of his actions as ‘shifts and shows’ suggests the insubstantiality of his gains, while his portrayal as a ‘lonely spirit’ implies a beleaguered rather than triumphant state. God's supremacy, then, is unassailable, but He does not exercise absolute control over every aspect of existence. The stars are watchful yet detached; and ‘Silence’, described with the attributes of Milton's ‘Spirit’, seems unconcerned by the impending triumph of error in the temporalized abyss:

                                                                      … Silence there
Had recomposed her ruffled wings, and now
Brooded it seemed even stillier than before,
Deep nested in the darkness …

(p. 8)

Here as elsewhere, recognition of Miltonic parallels highlights the broader significance of Egremont's tale. For Harpur, no less than Milton, is concerned with the grand issues of human community and universal order. In the initial camp-site scene he creates an image of domesticity, supportive fellowship, and reciprocal delight, surrounded by the threatening unknown of the wild. The fire is ‘well-built’, and conductive to a calming, ‘steadier mood’: positive values reinforced by the ‘fuming pipes’, described as ‘full charged’, and as giving off ‘tiny clouds over their several heads / Quietly curling upward’ (p. 6). These attributes will be played off against Egremont's ‘death-charged tube’, and a cloud of a more sinister sort:

Yea, thence surveyed, the Universe might have seemed
Coiled in vast rest,—only that one dim cloud,
Diffused and shapen like a mighty spider,
Crept as with scrawling legs along the sky;
And that the stars, in their bright orders, still
Cluster by cluster glowingly revealed
As this slow cloud moved,—high over all,—
Looked wakeful—yea, looked thoughtful in their peace.

(p. 7)¹⁴

Contrasts are thereby established between peaceful and threatening, or between constructive and destructive action, as epitomized by the shift from pipe to firearm; and a habit of mind revealed which can draw a metaphysical truth from both the upward path of pipe-smoke and the obscuring drift of a dark, ponderous cloud. The ‘tiny clouds’ are specifically designated ‘types’ of ‘comfort’ drawn from social activity, and this ‘comfort’ rests finally on the belief in a presiding universal order, imaged in the stars which ‘high over all— / … looked thoughtful in their peace’. Yet all around between man and the object of his faith lurks a world of uncontrolled instinct, whose type is the spider-cloud. For man, the problem posed is how to tame the forces within and without, so as to attain a permanent vision of, or access to, the ‘bright orders’ that lie beyond the wilderness.

With the sublime setting established, Harpur attempts to come to terms with the presence of evil and violence in the creation. Part II opens with an image of ongoing terrestrial struggle, subsumed within an all-embracing Divine order, and then portrays the reverberations of these hostilities within the human sphere. Specifically man, in the person of Egremont, moves from peace and fellowship to the position of blood-stained outcast, through the slaughter of his own kind. In Part III the sequence is reversed. The individual instance expands into the cosmic, as Egremont is saved and bloodshed averted through Divine intervention. Furthermore, both sections contain important references to loving domesticity and to sacred charity. These concepts are invoked to contrast with man's violent deeds, and to give the main action a redemptive outcome. The pessimism engendered by man's brutality is thus qualified by showing the survival of saving bonds between microcosm and macrocosm: bonds which enable Egremont to move from the condition of erring man in the wilderness of instinct to that of enlightened participation in supportive, human community.

As ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ was revised and expanded, its depiction of violence assumed a thoroughly Miltonic cast. In the 1853 version of the poem, Egremont is only an observer, not a participant in the murderous deeds. The original text reads:

                                                  Egremont, transfixt
With horror—struck as into stone, saw this,
Then turned and fled! Fast fled he, but as fast
His deadly foes went thronging on his track!(15)

In the final version he returns blood for blood, and the description of his gun as a ‘death-charged tube’ underscores the wider ramifications of his passionate deed. Moreover, this emphasis on unnatural, man-produced violence is elevated to a focal-point of terrestrial evil in a passage from Part III, which was also a later addition to the 1853 text:

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, of a surety, over all the earth
Spread out from Eden—or it were not so!

(p. 14)

Similarly, in Paradise Lost man's act of disobedience, the very partaking of the apple, is presented in terms of a mortal blow to creation.

Earth trembled from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan;
Sky loured and, muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completing of the mortal sin
Original …

(IX. 1000-1004)

This dire vision haunts successive scenes of the epic, until it culminates in Michael's historical panorama. As the archangel tells Adam, ‘from that sin derive / Corruption to bring forth more violent deeds’ (XI. 427-28), the first of which is the brutal slaying of Abel by Cain who

Smote him into the midriff with a stone
That beat out life; he fell, and deadly pale
Groaned out his soul with gushing blood effused.

(XI. 445-47)

Harpur, in an unpublished note entitled ‘Poetic Descriptions of Violent Death’, quoted and underlined the above passage, stating ‘I know of nothing so terrible in this kind, as Milton's account in Paradise Lost of the death of Abel’.¹⁶ And ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ reinforces this assertion. There, as in Paradise Lost, the archetypal transgression and its consequences are characterized by violent acts, which are antithetical to the love and unity, or community, informing God's original order.

The association of fallen existence with death and violence is dramatized through the encounter with the blacks. The description of the attacking aborigines is purposefully generalized, and teleological references are inwoven with colonial experience to drive home parallels between temporal and sacred history. This is both a local conflict and an acting-out of man's original errors:

But there again—crack upon crack! And hark!
O Heaven! have Hell's worst fiends burst howling up
Into the death-doom'd world? Or whence, if not
From diabolic rage, could surge a yell
So horrible as that which now affrights
The shuddering dark! Ah! Beings as fell are near!
Yea, Beings, in their dread inherited hate
And deadly enmity, as vengeful, come
In vengeance!

(p. 9)

Harpur, in revising the earlier version of this passage, added ‘death’ to ‘doomed world’, and expanded the line ‘Beings in their enmity as vengeful, come’ to include the concept of ‘dread inherited hate’. He thereby linked the assault with that hellish enmity which caused the loss of paradise; and created a complex structure of comparisons which expressly associates Satan's fiends and their black counterparts in terms of fellness and vengeance. Harpur's prime concern throughout, however, is not to denigrate the aborigines, but to make them representative. The blacks are called ‘Savages’, Egremont is termed ‘our sage friend’. These designations link them respectively with two broad human types, who are alike in their proclivity to violence: ‘Erring or wise, / Savage or civilised, still hath he [man] made / This glorious residence, the Earth, a Hell’. Yet Harpur's categories, despite his well-known sympathy for the mistreated aborigines, do reveal the bias of his age. To a man who affirmed contemporary beliefs in Western progress and Christianity, heathens, like hellish reprobates, are necessarily erring. Inherited cultural models are also discernible in the closing depiction of the marauders. Their conception of events is only ‘crude’, just as their benighted condition leaves them in a state of primitive fear when confronted with the apparently inexplicable:

His vanishment, so passing strange it seemed,
They coupled with the mystery of some crude
Old fable of their race; and fear-struck all,
And silent, then withdrew …

(p. 14)

Civilized and rational man, however, should know better. Consequently, attention is focused on Egremont's response to wild, untamed instinct; and on the Christian ideal of charity or mercy.

Through the reactions of Egremont, Harpur explores the conflict in man between rational and instinctive forces. These two sides of human nature first emerge in the description of Egremont on guard-duty, immediately before the fatal attack. The scene opens with his response to positive, loving values, centred on the image of home:

There standing in his lone watch, Egremont
On all this solemn beauty of the world,
Looked out, yet wakeful; for sweet thoughts of home
And all the sacred charities it held,
Ingathered to his heart, as by some nice
And subtle interfusion that connects
The loved and cherished (then the most, perhaps,
When absent, or when passed, or even when lost)
With all serene and beautiful and bright
And lasting things of Nature …

(p. 8)

A ‘subtle interfusion’ of ‘sacred charities’ is shown to link upper and lower, inner and outer realms. Far-reaching and invisible bonds are hinted at, which interlink man, God and nature; redeeming bonds which are always present, even though individuals may succumb to ‘dragon doubt’. Moreover, the ‘fall’ and eventual regeneration of ‘our sage friend’ are implicitly prefigured by the stressed passage in parentheses. As a prelude to this process, we then see Egremont shocked by a sudden noise into ‘wild surmise’, so that he seeks cover

Against the shade-side of a bending gum,
With a strange horror gathering to his heart,
As if his blood were charged with insect life
And writhed along in clots, he stilled himself,
Listening long and heedfully, with head
Bent forward sideways, till his held breath grew
A pang, and his ears rung …

(p. 8)

Here as so often in the poem, realistic psychological depiction has wider implications. The phrase ‘gathering to his heart’ clearly echoes the preceding ‘ingathered to his heart’, and so invites a comparison of his two mental states. Thought and sacred charities have been swept away by horror; the reference to his blood ‘charged with insect life’ perhaps suggests the ascendancy of the wild or instinctual; while the image of writhing clots is contrasted with the calm he is able to enforce on this occasion. This momentary usurpation of thought by instinct, moreover, foreshadows the temporary triumph of chaotic passion when ‘his blood again rushed tingling’, and he explicitly kills.

For Harpur, man remains the arbiter of his own destiny. All depends on his right and continued use of reason. Egremont is termed ‘their thoughtful Master’, and it is specifically this attribute which links mankind with the ‘thoughtful’ interstellar order. Yet defects do exist. The savage attack, for instance, erupts from beyond the bright circle of communal firelight, hinting at dire complicity between man and untamed nature.¹⁷ Egremont also feels this pull, and becomes morally one with the vengeful ‘murderous crew’, when he instinctively fires his ‘death-charged tube’ from within the shadows of the forest. Man is thus the battle-ground of rival forces. He may confirm the violent, unreasoning acts which transformed paradise into ‘the death-doom'd world’ or, by aligning himself with the ‘sacred charities’ of loving community, confirm the remaining bonds of the original covenant between man, God, and nature. The murderous encounter represents then, in the widest sense, a struggle between black and white for control of the fallen ‘garden’. While separate cultures clash for possession of the land, larger forces struggle for possession of man.

Counterbalancing the vision of man in the grasp of infernal instinct is Harpur's frequently neglected picture of humanity's indomitable striving after spiritual fulfilment. The onslaught of the blacks is swift and brutal. Three explorers are instantly clubbed to death; the fourth resists his fate in vain. It is not that he fears natural death, but he is unwilling to forego the ‘human good’ he has promised himself, and the legitimate hope of unselfish utility: ‘the consciousness of having shaped / Some personal good in being;—strong myself / And strengthening others’ (p. 10). At one level, of course, this poor child of misery, and the terse contrast drawn between his heroic response and that of ‘Fortune's pampered child’, reflect Harpur's democratic predilections, while there seems to be more than a little of the poet's own bitter experience in his description of the man's unappeased soul-hunger in an unappreciative world. Yet his final struggles against harsh reality have much in common with the ennobling Romantic ethic of eternal striving, and with Harpur's ideal of ever pushing ‘onward’ after related personal and spiritual fulfilment:

… against them still
Upstruggled, nor would cease: until one last
Tremendous blow, dealt down upon his head
As if in mercy, gave him to the dust
With all his many woes and frustrate hope.

(p. 11)¹⁸

The apparent despair of the concluding words is qualified arguably by the emphasis laid on mercy in the ensuing lines. In the 1853 text, the concept of mercy is evoked in this scene primarily as condemnation of the blacks, described as ‘merciless foes’ and ‘the merciless’. But as revisions gradually transformed a local into a universal conflict, these comments were deleted; and the onus of judgment placed on the reader through the added lines: ‘Fast! for in full pursuit, behind him yelled / Wild men whose wild speech hath no word for mercy!’ Implicitly a distinction is drawn between Egremont who, we are pointedly told, acts ‘from instinct more than conscious thought’ and the detached observer. To ‘wild men’, like the unenlightened blacks or the momentarily overthrown Egremont, whose deeds indicate no notion of mercy, the death-blow to the poor man must seem to ‘frustrate hope’. Harpur's text, however, is tantalizingly ambiguous concerning the man's spiritual state: ‘So should I [be] … / … more than now prepared / To house me in its [the grave's] gloom …’ (p. 10). Preparation is not entirely denied—only fulfilment and completion remain unachieved. This positive intimation is also supported by the man's devotion to selfless good and by his intuitive projection of the grave in homely and life-giving terms. Furthermore we, the readers, are explicitly reminded of the Christian concept of mercy, and thereby of the Pauline faith built upon the knowledge that man is dust and to dust will return. What appears only profound physical abasement may in fact be a precondition for the man's being raised a spiritual body. Nor should we forget the inference that salvation is perhaps most possible when it is apparently ‘absent, … passed, or even … lost’.

Themes of mercy and regeneration dominate the closing scenes between black and white. The opening of Part III presents the successive stages of Egremont's immersion in nature, as he is re-admitted into that ‘subtle interfusion’ which links all spheres of life. First he plunges ‘to his middle in the flashing stream’, then he is submerged below the very ground. This progression, moreover, is marked by constant references, implicit or explicit, to God's presence. In the description of the stream there is again an interlinking of earth and sky, and an echo of the earlier image of brooding spirit or ‘Silence’ in the qualifier ‘ruffled’:

Plunging right forth and shooting feet-first down,
Sunk to his middle in the flashing stream—
In which the imaged stars seemed all at once
To burst like rockets into one wide blaze
Of interwrithing light. Then wading through
The ruffled waters, forth he sprang …

(p. 12)

Throughout Egremont's helplessness is emphasized. He has ‘no time … for thought’; he is ‘blind’ in the profoundest sense. Only mercy can redeem the erring soul, and Harpur is at pains to stress that Egremont owes his salvation not to good fortune, but to Divine charity working through himself and the natural world, in response to an appeal from a far-distant, loving heart.

When in its face—O verily our God
Hath those in his peculiar care for whom
The daily prayers of spotless Womanhood
And helpless Infancy, are offered up!—
When in its face a cavity he felt,
The upper earth of which in one rude mass
Was held fast bound by the enwoven roots
Of two old trees,—and which, beneath the mould,
Just o'er the clammy vacancy below,
Twisted and lapped like knotted snakes, and made
A natural loft-work. Under this he crept,
Just as the dark forms of his hunters thronged
The bulging rock whence he before had plunged.

(p. 12)

Thus Egremont returns, to borrow Milton's phrase, to ‘earth's hallowed mold’ (V. 321)—except that this is nature in a postlapsarian world. The creation itself, like its prime creature, is ambivalently constituted: a point driven home by the passage added to the 1853 text which likens the overlapping roots to ‘knotted snakes’. Nonetheless, the place of refuge proves a second fertile ‘bower’, though subterranean, for Egremont will be reborn from this ‘cavity’ or ‘clammy vacancy’, like man from the womb or original clay, or like Earth itself from the abyss. Here in the microcosm God re-enacts the founding miracle repeated every day with the arising of His celestial effulgence. Egremont emerges ‘renewed’, and will take a further step towards redeeming his blood-deed by reintegrating himself with the ‘sacred charities’ centred on ‘Home’.

Egremont's dramatic escape leads to a final and traditional attempt to ‘justify the ways of God to men’. At the centre of the section lies Harpur's explicit statement of his Miltonic teleology. The primal pattern of fall and redemption is acknowledged, as is its recurrence in man's continual propensity to sin. Preceding events are recalled through references to ‘Erring or wise, / Savage or civilised’ (p. 14), and imaged in the contrasting choices open to mankind. Unenlightened ‘spousals’ with inherited violence produce a desert of death; the alternative ‘bridal’ between earth and heaven leads to Egremont's emergence from the rival bower of humid life. These dual images are then refracted and integrated into an all-embracing vision, which reaches from the highest ethereal beings to fallen souls in their most repulsive states:

For see the bright beholding Moon, and all
The radiant Host of Heaven, evince no touch
Of sympathy with Man's wild violence;—
Only evince in their calm course, their part
In that original unity of Love,
Which, like the soul that dwelleth in a harp,
Under God's hand, in the beginning, chimed
The sabbath concord of the Universe;
And look on a gay clique of maidens, met
In village tryst, and interwhirling all
In glad Arcadian dances on the green—
Or on a hermit, in his vigils long,
Seen kneeling at the doorway of his cell—
Or on a monster battle-field where lie
In sweltering heaps, the dead and dying both,
On the cold gory ground,—as they that night
Looked in bright peace, down on the doomful Forest.

(p. 15)

Here the concept of a surviving ‘unity of Love’ serves not only as a stark contrast with, but as a promise of possible redemption from, ‘Man's wild violence’. Various paths are open to mankind; and three alternatives are envisaged which find correlatives in Egremont's tale. Most obviously, the ‘monster battle-field’ recalls this ‘terrible hour / Of human agony and loss extreme’. This devastation is played off against two images of achieved spiritual harmony. The way of the hermit is one of self-denying asceticism. Fate may be seen to force on the fourth poor adventurer an analogous course: transfiguration bought at the cost of rigorous mortification of the flesh. The maidens' more joyous dance is a terrestrial manifestation of the original ‘sabbath concord’; and women, both here and elsewhere in the poem, are closely associated with sacred and life-affirming actions. Egremont's return ‘Home’ aligns him with the regenerative values centred on ‘the gay clique of maidens … interwhirling’, though the gap that separates him from their innocent pleasure is felt in the comparable whirling of wintry leaves that marks the graves of his companions:

                                                            … four long grassy mounds
Bestrewn with leaves, and withered spraylets, stript
By the loud wintry wingèd gales that roamed
Those solitudes, from the old trees which there
Moaned the same leafy dirges that had caught
The heed of dying Ages: these were all;
And thence the place was long by travellers called
The Creek of the Four Graves …

(p. 15)

God may be high above the creation; but Egremont's survival and the burial of the mutilated corpses testify to the existence of an enduring covenant. Following the lead of man, the seasons now deck the graves as a pledge of the remaining bond between man, God and nature, and as a sign of the ultimate powerlessness of that ‘dread Intelligence opposed to Good’. In a postlapsarian world of ‘dying Ages’, simple Arcadian delights may rarely be attainable; but Harpur affirms that violence and sin can be redeemed through the ever-present possibility of spiritual spring. The heavens maintain ‘their part’, the rest is up to individual man.

Like the sculptured relief standing out from the stone, the ‘freshness and authenticity’ of Harpur's vision in ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ rests on his profound sense of tradition.¹⁹ Archetypes inform not only his view of nature, but also his response to Australia. Unlike many of his later compatriots, Harpur sought to understand colonial experience in terms of great inherited concepts. These enabled him to acknowledge boldly the strangeness of events, and yet to find assurance and that larger prophetic vision which he felt to be so necessary to his native land. In this poem, adaptation and assimilation characterize his borrowings. Paradise Lost is used allusively to demonstrate the continual reenactment of the primal myth, while the familiar Romantic compact between man, God and nature becomes a means of drawing instructive patterns from pioneer-experience. Moreover, we chance observers have been involved, no less than the aborigines portrayed, in what Adrian Mitchell refers to as the ‘imaginative assimilation’ of events.²⁰ But unlike them, our concept of mercy provides a path beyond the ‘fear-struck’ condition of unreclaimed wilderness, as the savage reverence of terror is subsumed in an enlarged awareness of God's sublime benevolence. To receive this vision, Harpur leads his reader to an imaginative height similar to that enjoyed by Milton's Michael and Adam in paradise, except that now the prospects of Eden are in Australia; their fulfilment in the hands of each of us.

Notes

1. Quoted in J. Normington-Rawling, Charles Harpur, An Australian (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962), pp. 181-83.

2. Quoted in J. Normington-Rawling, ‘A Currency Lad Poet: The Significance of Charles Harpur’, Quadrant, 7 (1963), 18.

3. G. A. Wilkes, ‘Introduction’ to The Colonial Poets (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1974); and The Stockyard and the Croquet Lawn: Literary Evidence for Australia's Cultural Development (Melbourne: Arnold, 1981), p. 60.

4. Brian Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1967), pp. 68 and 70. Even Judith Wright, Harpur's most sympathetic commentator, claims that such verse ‘is, and is intended to be, descriptive and narrative only’ (Preoccupations in Australian Poetry [Melbourne: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965], p. 15).

5. Commentators have, of course, noted links between ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ and the works of these poets. Judith Wright, for instance, in Charles Harpur (Melbourne: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977) describes its landscape as a ‘Wordsworthian treatment’ (p. 26); Adrian Mitchell in his introduction to Charles Harpur (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1973) refers to ‘Miltonic aborigines’ (p. xxv); and Harry Heseltine, in his introduction to The Penguin Book of Australian Verse (Middlesex: Harmondsworth, 1972), suggests that the poem should be more carefully considered in terms of ‘Harpur's Miltonism’ (p. 31) and its use of ‘archetypal narrative’ (p. 32): issues to which this paper addresses itself directly.

6. Adrian Mitchell, ed., Charles Harpur (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1973), p. 14. Future page references to this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text. After its reprinting in 1853, Harpur extensively revised ‘The Creek of the Four Graves’ until it reached the expanded form preserved in Mitchell Library ms. A87. Mitchell's text is based on this handwritten copy, which is dated Euroma 1867, and designated ‘final copy’. At a still later date Harpur made minor alterations to the text; but Mitchell has apparently concluded that these brief emendations lack the authority of the full copperplate text, which Harpur had transcribed as part of a definitive collection of his poems. Throughout I have attempted to ensure that my case retains its validity irrespective of the ms. variant accepted. Thus, for instance, although Harpur later substituted ‘arose’ for ‘conglobed’ in II. 16, the Miltonic resonance is still present owing to the earlier use of ‘conglobing’ (II. 4) to describe the same scene. Readers interested in the revised Euroma 1867 text will find it reproduced in The Colonial Poets, pp. 16-27.

7. My concern in this paper is with their shared, general preoccupations, not with putative parallels between their works. Harpur's portrayal of the natural sublime was no doubt influenced by Wordsworth's, but then both their productions were also informed by a host of other eighteenth century works which dealt with sublime phenomena.

8. On the vogue of the picturesque see Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (1927; rpt. London: Cass, 1967); Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England (1925; rpt. London: Cass, 1965); and J. R. Watson, Picturesque Landscape and English Romantic Poetry (London: Hutchinson, 1970).

9. Jean Hagstrum provides a thorough survey of this tradition in The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958).

10. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1959).

11. Charles Cowden Clark, ed., Young's Night Thoughts (Edinburgh: Nichol, 1865), IX. 1064-66.

12. The lines are from ‘The Spouse of Infinitude’, while in ‘The World and the Soul’ the infinite heavens are described as being ‘bosomed all in Him!’ (p. 44).

13. All quotations from Paradise Lost are from Douglas Bush, ed., Milton: Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969).

14. The contrasting clouds are also linked verbally. For the participle ‘coiled’, although qualifying ‘universe’, is contextually associated with the spider-cloud, and recalls the ‘curling’ action of the smaller pipe-clouds. These contrasts, however, were not available to a reader of the early 1853 text of the poem. They were produced by revisions which introduced the references to both the ‘tiny clouds’ and the ‘death-charged tube’. Similarly, textual expansions were also responsible for the related contrast in Part II between Egremont's thoughts of ‘sacred charities’ and his horrified, instinctive reactions to an unexpected alarm.

15. Charles Harpur, The Bushrangers, A Play in Five Acts and Other Poems (Sydney: Piddington, 1853), p. 68.

16. Mitchell Library ms. C376, pp. 541-42.

17. This association is implied strongly in Part III, where the outlined trees are described in almost human terms, as ‘All standing now in the keen radiance there / So ghostly still, as in a solemn trance’ (p. 13); and the searching blacks are metaphorically linked with the surrounding forest in the phrase ‘till the fretted current boiled / Amongst their crowding trunks from bank to bank’ (p. 13).

18. See the poem ‘Onward’ in Charles Harpur, Poems (Sydney: Robertson, 1883), pp. 75-77.

19. The comment quoted is from Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, p. 71.

20. Mitchell, Charles Harpur, xxvi. Mitchell, however, seems to limit unduly the coherence and ambitious expansiveness of Harpur's thought when he concludes: ‘The attempt at acclimatization is both the subject and the process of the poem; the experiment is fascinating and not wholly a failure’ (xxvi).