SOURCE: Green, H. M. “Verse, Satire, Drama; Essays and Criticism.” In A History of Australian Literature: Pure and Applied, Volume I, 1789-1923, pp. 98-120. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1961.

[In the following excerpt, Green examines the poetic works of Charles Harpur and summarizes the careers of several lesser Australian poets and verse dramatists.]

[Charles] Harpur's poetry cannot quite be said to belong to the literature of exile. He was not, like other Australian poets of his day,¹ a transplanted Englishman, but on the way to becoming an Australian, though he had not got very far: he did his best to throw aside the veil that reading, tradition, custom, habit of mind had hung between the new country and its white inhabitants, and if he was unable to throw it aside entirely, at least he wore it thinner here and there; here and there he succeeded in approaching, though not in seizing, the essence of time and place, and in so doing he opened up some paths that his successors were able to develop into roads. At least he came nearer than other writers of verse to perceiving the face of Australian nature as it really was, and approaching it as such, and for the romantic poet of those days, when, indeed, almost every poet was a romantic, that was extremely important: Harpur at least tried to throw away his foreign spectacles, though he didn't do very well without them. Paradoxically, it was what most helped Harpur's talent that most hindered it from achieving a completeness that should be at once individual and Australian: he was quite unable to break away from the spirit and expression of the great English poets under whom he studied his art and craft. His situation as high priest of poetry in a world that he despised too much to try to interpret it, and that he would have been unable to interpret if he had tried, drove Harpur at once in upon himself and his books and out upon “nature”: his rejection of the human world made it difficult to relate what he thought and felt about life; it encouraged the bookishness to which he was in any case inclined, and that was bad both for the man and for his work. In this connection it is noteworthy that many of his best poems were produced and many improvements made to earlier poems at Euroma during a period in which he was in touch with men of a simple and straightforward type with whom he was more in sympathy than with the sophisticated city dwellers; to the miners, adventure mattered as well as the gold for which they sought; the others had valued merely money and its material advantages. Harpur's defects as a poet are due to three things: literary influences from which he could not break free; a world that was extremely unfavourable, particularly in a man of his temperament, to the production of poetry; and inability to capture the feeling and atmosphere of the landscapes in which he tried to embody his moods.

Charles Harpur (Windsor, N.S.W., 1813²-1868), was of Scottish and northern Irish descent; his birthplace was not far from the home of another, though far lesser, native-born poet, Charles Tompson, who had been born eleven years earlier: one would have imagined there had been a far greater distance of time and space between them, for, as will be seen, Tompson's verse belongs wholly to the school of Pope and the eighteenth century, while Harpur's belongs as definitely to the age of Wordsworth and Shelley and to the first stage of the revival of romanticism. As a further indication of the part played in early Australian literature, though in this case it was at one remove, by the convict element in the population, it is worth noting that both Harpur's parents had been “prisoners of the crown”;³ but this, as has been seen before in another connection, was not necessarily to their discredit, and both were, according to the introduction to the collected poems, the possessors of “remarkable moral and intellectual qualities”. Harpur, who was third in a family of seven, had a happy home life, and it is clear that he honoured as well as loved his father, who had been superintendent for Macarthur during his absence from the colony, and was parish clerk and in charge of the Windsor district school at which Harpur got his early education. Some idea of the nature and scope of that education may perhaps be gathered from the quality of the translations from the Iliad which Harpur made in later life and which will be referred to later; no doubt he increased his knowledge of Greek afterwards, but a good grounding in the classics is at least suggested. In the Windsor district, on the fringes of settlement as it then was, Harpur grew up, as he tells us in Wordsworthian fashion,

                    … with a glorious brood
Of hopes then glowing round me;

sometimes with

                                                                                                                        … a band
Of schoolmates and young creatures of my blood,

or sometimes

A lonely boy, far venturing from home
Out on the half-wild herd's faint tracks …
'Mid rock-browed mountains, which with stony frown
Glare into haggard chasms deep adown.

Here he wandered,

                                                                                                                        … musing
Of glory and grace by old Hawkesbury's side;

here, with the guidance of Wordsworth and Shelley, he explored “song's bright mysteries”

With a lone and eager studiousness,
While toiling along the plough's first tracks,
          Or 'twixt the strokes of the felling axe;

here he determined to be the Muse's

First high priest in this bright southern clime,(4)

so that, in “riper days” at least, Australia's

better sons shall learn to prize
My lonely voice upon the past.

But the family was poor, and Harpur had to earn his own living as early as possible; he went to Sydney, where for some years he was a clerk at the General Post Office, is said to have worked in a solicitor's office. Here he was in touch with the few literary men there were in Sydney in that day, and he continued his reading. His favourite authors were Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Shelley, and the influence upon him of the last two is evident, though there are also traces of Marvell, Coleridge, Poe and Tennyson, and of Pope here and there; Browning he read but did not care for. In 1842, when he was twenty-nine, tired of “the sordid generation of which I am unfortunately a member”,⁵ he was drawn to the country again. He went to live with a brother who was farming on the Hunter, and once more, as in his boyhood, he ploughed, hunted, felled timber, and wandered about the bush. It was during this period of his life that W. H. Duncan, a Sydney editor who had printed some of his early verses, published his first book, Thoughts; A Series of Sonnets (Sydney, 1845); it shows promise, but hardly more. By this time he had met Parkes, who also published much of his early verse in the Empire, Deniehy, who thought very highly of his poetic talent, and Stenhouse, Maecenas to the Australian literature of the day. Now he became a teacher, and in 1850, while in charge of the State school at Jerry's Plains, he met and married the daughter of a local farmer, by whom he had five children: their married life was happy; his widow helped in the preparation of his collected poems, and its cost was borne by two of her relations. For a year or two after his marriage Harpur went in for sheep-farming at various places on the Hunter River; at the last of them, according to his son,⁶ he helped Sir John Robertson to frame the Bill to allow of “free selection before survey” which attempted, when it became law, to establish the farming industry at the expense of the station-owner. Two years after his marriage, Harpur published his second book, The Bushrangers: A Play in Five Acts, and other Poems (Sydney, 1853), which will be referred to later. The play is of no importance, but the poems include some that are and at least one that certainly should be included in his collected poems: this was “A Poet's Home”, which was published separately in Sydney in 1862; it is clear from the various versions of this poem that Harpur thought highly of it. In 1859, when he was forty-six, Robertson had him appointed Gold Commissioner at Araluen; he held this position, being transferred to the scenes of succeeding gold rushes in the district, until 1866, when the office was abolished: as Commissioner he had a good salary and almost absolute power, which he is said to have used wisely and with success; at Euroma, the South Coast farm that was his home during this period, there was a comfortable house and a fine garden and orchard; and here some of his best poems assumed their final form. The years at Euroma were also not without excitement, for there was a threatened attack by bushrangers, whom Harpur and others pursued all one night, exchanging shots with them at intervals, though the country was so rugged that they escaped before daylight. But these happy years came to an end with the loss of the commissionership, disappointment at the failure of a project for the publication of Harpur's poems in England, and, worst of all, the death of his second son as the result of a gun accident. Robertson had promised to appoint Harpur a police magistrate, but his health failed him, he was consumptive, and a wet winter and anxiety over damage done to his farm by floods probably hastened his death; he died poor and intestate, and his widow had to appeal to Stenhouse for assistance. Fifteen years later however she was able, with the help of two of her relations, to bring out a collected edition of her husband's poems, and by this edition, Poems by Charles Harpur (Melbourne, 1883), Harpur is known to most of the few who read him today; it is unfortunate that nothing better should be available. There remains in manuscript a mass of unpublished poems three or four times as great as those in the 1883 edition,⁷ its anonymous editor admits to supplying those “final revisions which the author had been obliged to leave unmade”, and there are also the poems which have not been reprinted from The Bushrangers or from newspapers: each of these sources supplies, as will be seen, one of Harpur's best poems, and there may be many more worth republishing: it is quite time that all the poems, manuscript or anywhere in print, were analysed, a text established, and a standard edition brought out.

Unfortunately for Harpur, though not for Australian poetry, Kendall overtopped and quite overshadowed him, and this would have happened even if all Harpur's best poems had been easily available, Harpur himself helped Kendall to overtop him, for, without Harpur, Kendall could hardly have done what he did, he stood in fact on Harpur's shoulders. Yet, granted Kendall's superiority as a poet, Harpur deserves much more attention than he has yet received. Broadly speaking, he was a poet of the same kind as Kendall and subject to similar literary influences, except that Kendall's extended further in the direction of modernity; these influences met in Tennyson, who was only beginning to be famous during Harpur's middle age, but who throughout Kendall's life reigned over the world of poetry. Yet Harpur's verse has marked qualities of its own, and the best of it is still worth reading. He was a man of stronger character than Kendall, and his verse is stronger than Kendall's, though it is far inferior in melody and poetic insight and imagination; and he was the first to break through the tough crust of a crude materialistic age and compel the attention of at least a few to the fact of poetry's emergence in this new country, for even in the best of the other verse-makers of the time there were after all no more than glimmerings and undeveloped possibilities of poetry.

Harpur's was a nature which though not strong enough to conquer was yet not weak enough to submit to the conditions that hampered and stunted his talent: what could be done by a man of considerable poetic ability who was also no weakling, that he did; but nothing less than genius combined with great force of character and personality could have approached full poetic realization in the Australia of his day, and in any case such a personality would almost certainly have found outlet in the practical world, and dragged the genius with it, or if it had still preferred the world of literature it would probably have expressed itself oftener in the form of satire. Harpur felt very strongly the incompatibility with poetry of the world into which he had been born; he complained⁸ how during the best years of his life he had been obliged “to mix daily with men whose natures could value nothing in mine that I valued myself”; he could perceive only the worst aspects of an age that had no place for his ideal or its prophet, and he failed to realize that in the circumstances it must aim at conquest not in the ideal but in the material world, and must favour not beauty but strength. Yet if Harpur's nature and that of the world about him were such that he must resist rather than endeavour to transmute, and if his complaint strikes, especially when read in full, a note of weakness, or at least of weariness, his resistance was by no means merely negative: even in the world of affairs he achieved something, and could at least boast that he could now “contend with it on its own terms, and admit therefore that it is well enough, even in its sum total, this our poor rich, polluted Australia”; and in the literary world also his achievement was positive. Whatever he might think of the Australian of his day, he had a warm faith in humanity in general; he had a deep love of nature, even if he could not interpret in its own terms the Australian countryside; and he aimed neither to attack nor to stand wholly aloof from life, but to represent something of the moods of man in contact with nature and by means of descriptions of nature, though not those moods which most closely reflected the temper of the age. But it is hard to maintain a direct and vigorous relationship with any aspect of life if one dislikes and despises its principal local manifestations; and it is hard for a poet whose teachers and models are the great poets of the past to interpret nature satisfactorily when it presents itself in colours and forms that are entirely without literary association or traditional significance. To many, therefore, Harpur's poetry has a bookish, antiquated, and abstracted air, so that we find it difficult to come in intimate contact with his visualizations and his ideals. In what some have called his finest poem, “The Creek of the Four Graves”, he wishes to tell how four men, looking for a suitable run, are smoking one night by their camp-fire; this is how he does it:

                                                                      … they all gathered round
About the well built fire, whose nimble tongues
Set up continually a strenuous roar
Of fierce delight, and from their fuming pipes
Drawing rude comfort, round the pleasant light
With grave discourse they planned their next day's deeds.
Wearied at length, their couches they prepared
Of rushes …

It is a good enough description, in a way, but it gives the impression of coming out of an old book that never was really new; we certainly don't smell the smoke and feel the heat of the camp-fire. In this and in other descriptive poems Harpur was unable to take advantage of an opportunity out of which a nature poet of his ability a couple of generations later would have made something much more characteristic and infinitely more real; his eye might have been truer and his language more appropriate if he had done his wandering without a Wordsworth in his pocket, or if he had put life first and books second, like Alexander Harris, though Harris also, when he turned to fiction, was hampered by a literary convention. Of Harpur's artificialities of diction it is not necessary to give many examples, but he can speak of “resplendent morn”, of a “death-charged tube”, and even of “love's dream turtles”! But the defects of Harpur's poetry are far outweighed by its merits. In the first place Australian literature gained substantially by the early appearance of a poet of high ideals, deep reverence for his art, and considerable craftsmanship, who was yet determined to be a poet of Australia and no other country; to draw upon at least some aspects of the world about him, rather than almost entirely upon literature and tradition; to become himself an ancestor, rather than the last descendant of a remote ancestral line. To appreciate what this meant for the literature whose foundations he was thus helping to lay, it is necessary only to consider the conceivable alternative origins of poetry in this country: a folk-verse, rooted in life indeed, but so crude and formless that nothing worth while could have come out of it for generations; and a thin and lifeless following of oversea precedent; between these two no cross-breeding would have been possible. As things were, poetry in Australia had such a beginning that when there appeared, within a generation, amid conditions that were a little less unfavourable, a finer poetic talent, it was able to base itself upon local precedent and a definite local achievement, and it found some readers prepared for it. And on the other hand, when, a generation later again, there appeared a talent homely enough to find something in common with the rough folk-verses, it was able to draw strength and colour from them, to benefit by their popularity without losing all connection with poetry and readers of poetry, and to create one of the most characteristically Australian elements in Australian literature. It is not, of course, suggested that all this was determined by Harpur's decision, but a different decision would almost certainly have delayed and handicapped the development of Australian verse. It is not only that without Harpur there could hardly have been the Kendall that we know; Harpur and Kendall played their part in creating a demand for Australian verses and a feeling that they should be rooted in the country in which they were written. Most important of Harpur's characteristics is the sincerity that pervades everything he wrote; as he says in “The End of the Book”, that charming little poem whose tone is so curiously reminiscent of Chaucer, throughout the pages that have been his

… only solace for this many a day

he has never

Written one wilfully misleading word,
Or traced one feeling that (his) heart ignored.

Harpur's favourite medium, at least when he wished to express himself with the sonorous dignity that came naturally to him and upon a subject worthy of his best powers, was blank verse; he had an ear for rhythm and was a careful craftsman, so that in this form he never falls below a certain level; his blank verse is never

          … mere prose madly
Striving to be poetry:

but it never rises far above that level; though he had at command the conventional variations and was able to express his personality through this medium, he was unable to avoid monotony in it, still less to create a blank verse of his own. His dignity, moreover, tended towards stiff heaviness, which the regularity of blank verse reinforced; livelier measures, on the other hand, relieved these qualities, and in such measures his best work was done.

Harpur's blank verse is at its height in “The Witch of Hebron”, for “The Tower of the Dream”,⁹ though it has a dreamlike charm and contains some fine images, lacks both substance and structure; and though there are substance, structure, and images as well in “The Creek of the Four Graves”, the measure is no more suited to the subject than the words are. The subject of “The Witch of Hebron” required a certain degree of detachment from the world of reality, with which, in spite of his efforts, Harpur was seldom quite at home, yet it gave scope for vigour of treatment, and Harpur can be vigorous enough. The poem is well constructed, and it tells a definite and interesting story; it contains plenty of action, some vivid pictures and some melodic passages, and also a richness of which Harpur was only occasionally capable; but after all it is an artificial poem: the versification of a legend based upon the shadowy past and the storehouse of world literature, to which only a stronger creative imagination than Harpur's could have given life. Yet Harpur was by no means always safe in lighter measures. Better poets than he, as in Australian literature Kendall for instance, have failed occasionally to realize that a favourite rhythm which is good in itself may be inappropriate to a particular subject. Harpur is fond of the anapaestic tetrameter, as in the line next quoted; and in “The Dream by the Fountain”, “The Emigrant's Vision”, and other poems he uses this or some other cantering or galloping rhythm when the subject demands something quieter. But in the verses introductory to the Poems, which begin

And wonder ye not if his speech be uncouth,

tone and rhythm correspond as in the other poems mentioned they do not, and in “Dora” and “Early Summer” the rhythm suits the subject: “Dora” especially has a simple, melodic charm which will almost certainly be better appreciated some day than in a generation which though it can suffer the crooner is afraid of what it considers sentimentality in poetry. But Harpur is at his best in metres which, though livelier and less liable to monotony and the submergence of individuality than blank verse, yet allow scope for dignity: this applies in particular to “Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest”, “A Poet's Home”, and “A Basket of Sun Fruit”.¹⁰ In all three of these poems Harpur steps out of the atmosphere of books and dreams and into that of actual life, observes with his own eyes, absorbs something of the spirit of Australian subject and occasion, and expresses it simply and melodiously. In “A Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest” he opens a theme which has attracted later Australian poets as unlike Harpur and one another as Dorothea Mackellar and Christopher Brennan. This is Harpur's most “Australian” poem, but in richness it is far surpassed by “A Basket of Sun Fruit”, which also turned the first Australian furrow in a field that has been ploughed by later poets, here as elsewhere; since this poem is unavailable except to readers in a few libraries it may be quoted almost in full:

First see these ample melons!—brinded o'er
          With a green mingled brown, is all the rind;
For they are ripe and mealy at the core,
          And saturate with the nectar of their kind.
And here their fellows of the marsh are set
          Covering their sweetness with a crumpled skin;
And here pomegranates, dull without, and yet
          With vegetable crystals stored within.
Then mark those brilliant oranges, of which
          A bygone poet(11) fancifully said,
Hanging, unflecked, the orchard they enrich
          Like golden lamps in a green night of shade.
And here are peaches, with their rosy cheeks
          And ripe transparency. Here nectarines bloom,
All mottled as with discontinuous streaks,
          And spread a fruity fragrance through the room.
With these are cherries mellow to the stone,
          Into such ripeness hath the summer nurst them
The velvet pressure of the tongue alone
          Against the palate were enough to burst them.
And lastly bunches of red blooded grapes
          Whose vineyard bloom even yet about them clings,
Though even in the handling it escapes,
          Like the fine down upon a moth's bright wings.

“Their fellows of the marsh”, “the nectar of their kind”, and “vegetable crystals” take us back to Darwin and Crabbe, and “the velvet pressure of the tongue … against the palate” takes us as far back as Keats at any rate; but why not? And the appropriate adaptation of Marvell, the cherries “mellow to the stone” and the loveliness of the last verse, with its moth image, make this poem among the finest of its kind that has been written in Australia. In two or three verses of the third poem, “A Poet's Home”, Harpur returns again to the orchard; here also there is something of the sensuous zest—a rare thing in Harpur—of “A Basket of Sun Fruit”. There is also some likeness to “Midsummer Noon”; but essentially this poem is quite different from the other two: it is very unequal and there is less gold in its rifts; it wells gently and beautifully, like a clear romantic stream, out of the peaceful and happy days of his early married life, and again at Euroma; here are three of its verses:¹²

Here in this lonely rill-engirdled spot,
The world forgetting, by the world forgot,
          With One vowed to me with beloved lips,
How sweet to draw as hiddenly from Time,
          As from a rock yon shaded fountain slips,
                                        My yet remaining prime!
Here early rising from a sinless bed,
How sweet it were to view Aurora shed
          Her first white glances o'er the dusky wood!
When powdered as with pearls the green boughs gleam
          Through the grey dawn, like prophecies of good
                                        In Nature's morning dream!
“What might be deeper than the heavens o'erbending
Or rarer—richer than the colours blending
          Beyond the green cones of the misty hill?
What gladder than the runnel's silvery fall?
          And yet my spirit asketh something still—
                                        'Tis thee—the crown of all!”

Harpur's intellect was sound, but not penetrating, and his imagination did not often take fire, so that the mass of his work amounts to no more than competent verse which is of little intrinsic interest today; but just as he wrote a few fine poems, so here and there well-digested reading or experience crystallized in a piece of gnomic wisdom, as in the following:

A simple proverb tagged with rhyme
May colour half the course of time;
How shrewd that knave is who can play the fool;
Though she should be a teacher, still the Muse
To be a mere schoolmistress should refuse;
A little light, heat, motion, breath;
Then silence, darkness, and decay;
This is the change from life to death
                              In him that weareth clay.

It is true that the first is a poetic convention whose truth it would be hard to establish, and that the virtue of the others lies rather in their conciseness than in their profundity; but they are effective all the same. Throughout Harpur's work also there are scattered lines and images that would not disgrace a far greater poet, as when he tells of

                    … that fierce life whose spirit lightens wide
Round freedom, seated on her mountain throne;

or how

                                                            … the stars,
Those golden children of eternity,
Have all withdrawn within the Invisible.

In “The Creek of the Four Graves”, in spite of the defects of the poem as a whole, some of the images are striking; for example,

                                                                                                    … silence there
Had recomposed her ruffled wings, and now
Deep brooded in the darkness;

the hostile blacks, are

Duskily visible beneath the moon;

and, an original and most telling image, a sentinel against attack in the bush listens

With a strange horror gathering in his heart,
As if his blood were charged with insect life
And writhed along in clots.

Two of Harpur's images might have been Kendall's:

Fair as the night—when all the astral fires
Of heaven are burning in the clear expanse;

and

Some yearning excellence, intense and far,
Coming and going like a clouded star.

Finally, here are some images that are essentially Australian:

The fierce refracted heat flares visible;
Why roar the bull-frogs in the tea-tree marsh?;
The woods are whitened over by the jolly cockatoo;
… these forest shadows that now fall
In sombre masses mixed with sunny gleams;
… upward tapering feathery swamp-oaks,
The sylvan eyelash always of remote
Australian waters;

and, though this, of course, is not peculiarly Australian, it is an image that has obviously been suggested by Australian conditions,

Solidly black the starless heaven domed.

Harpur's translations from the Iliad have been referred to already. At the end of the 1883 Poems appear four versions of “The Famous Night Scene in the Eighth Book of the Iliad”, in Homeric hexameters, in blank verse, in heroic rhyme and, “very literally”, in irregular verse; there are also three versions of the “Battle Piece from the Eighteenth Book of the Iliad”, omitting the heroic rhyme. Tennyson published versions of the same passages a few years later; this is not so strange when one remembers that these passages are popular among readers of Greek, and such as to an English poet might naturally suggest themselves as suitable for translation; what is important is that not only are Harpur's versions poetic and sufficiently accurate, but they contain more than one line which Tennyson might have been glad to use; for example:

And not a breath under all heaven is blown,

and

That terrible indefatigable flame,
Which from the head of the great-souled Achilles
Rose burning.

Harpur made many other translations which have not been published, and these also contain some fine lines and passages. It is a nice point whether, as Percival Serle believed,¹³ “eventually Harpur's position will be higher than Gordon's in the roll of early Australian poets”. Gordon published rubbish of which Harpur could never have been guilty, but he was at his best a far better poet than Harpur; apart from that, just as Harpur opened the door to Australian poetry in general, so Gordon opened the door to the Australian ballad. At any rate there can be no doubt that Harpur as a poet is at present underestimated, and that it is time there was a standard collection of his poems.

Viewed through a high-powered critico-historical telescope, seven or eight of the multitude of lesser versifiers emerge as tiny figures; the rest are individually invisible, and none have any but historical importance. The odes of Michael Massey Robinson (1747-1826) are notable merely because they were the first Australian verses to be published separately: there were twenty-one of them; all were published in the Sydney Gazette, beginning in 1810, and twenty at least were republished individually as leaflets, but they were never collected. Robinson was an Oxford man who became an attorney but developed weaknesses for blackmail, perjury, forgery, and versifying; in 1798 he was transported for life for blackmail, but on the voyage to Australia he made the acquaintance of the Judge-Advocate of the colony, who got him a conditional pardon and gave him a clerkship in his office in Sydney; he also practised in Sydney as an attorney. He went on, however, to commit the offences mentioned, and was sent to Norfolk Island; after his return to Sydney, except in the matter of versifying he seems to have become a reformed character, and when, in the words of the editor of a contemporary magazine, “the torpor of death silenced the harmony of his lyre”, he was Principal Clerk in the police department. The odes celebrated the birthdays of King George III and the Queen, though a good deal of space was devoted also to Wellington's victories, Princess Charlotte, and the virtues of Robinson's “chief rever'd”, Macquarie. Robinson used to recite these odes at the royal birthday celebrations, and the Sydney Gazette always reported him most favourably,¹⁴ telling how “for his services as Poet Laureat” he was granted, not the traditional butt of sack, or even, what might have seemed more appropriate to the circumstances of the colony, a barrel of rum, but two cows from the government herd; perhaps it was taken for granted that, like everyone else, he possessed already enough of the national currency and beverage. The odes, in their least un-Australian passages, tell how

Where yon Blue Mountains, with tremendous Brow,
Frown on the humbler Vales that wind below,
Where scarcely human Footsteps ever trac'd
The craggy Cliffs that guard the lingering Waste.

They also call the South Head Lighthouse a

… tall Tow'r, that with aspiring Steep,
Rears its proud Summit o'er the trackless Deep.

Their expressions of loyalty seem sycophantic to modern taste, but they are not much worse than was the general fashion in those days; and, stilted and lifeless echoes of the eighteenth century in England as these odes are, it was with them that Australian poetry began. The second versifier, in point of time, was Barron Field (London, 1786-1846), Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Field claimed to be the first “Austral Harmonist”, but it is as noteworthy that he happened to be the “B.F.” of Lamb's “Mackery End” and “Distant Correspondents”; he published, however, six poems, if they may be called poems: two in a tiny volume entitled First Fruits of Australian Poetry (Sydney, 1819), and these with four more in a second edition in 1823. A couple of years later, “in consequence”, Field says, “of the approbation which some of them have received from several of the first poets and critics of our times”, the six were republished as “Botany Bay Flowers” as an appendix to Field's Geographical Memoirs. The verses are fresher and freer and more modern than Robinson's, but they are marked by the most excruciating faults of poetic taste and run sometimes into sheer doggerel, as for example in the absurd lines about the

Kangaroo, kangaroo
Thou spirit of Australia
To reduce to utter failure
This fifth part of the earth;

still, in spite of Field's opinion that in Australia “nature is prosaic, unpicturesque, unmusical”, there are traces of local colour as well as poetic feeling in the lines about the fringed violet, the

… floss-edged lilac flower
That opens only after rain.

Wentworth's Australasia, an ode, which was published in London in 1823, was written in the place and year of its publication, in competition for the Vice-Chancellor's medal at Cambridge. Nobody could have had a deeper love of his country than Wentworth, but the ode was written also in order to distinguish himself, though he said he would not have competed if a different subject had been set. Modern judgment would probably disagree with the academic verdict that awarded the prize to W. M. Praed, afterwards famous as a wit and ironist, but Wentworth's poem, though far superior to anything of Robinson's or Field's, has little but historical importance; it is a piece of eighteenth-century rhetoric, rugged and forcible, whose stiff and heavy couplets bang down like slabs of Australian hardwood: instinct with Wentworth's vital and compelling personality, and by no means lacking in his ardour and imagination, it seldom kindles into poetry; yet there are a few fine lines, as “The icy horrors of the Antarctic wave”, and the poem ends with an eloquent prophetic vision of the new Britannia that is to arise in the south. The principal interest in the verses of Charles Tompson (Sydney, 1806-83), is in their quite unexpected projection of a level eighteenth-century smoothness into his rough, uncultivated Australian world. Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel was published in Sydney in 1826, when Tompson was only twenty, and one of the poems it contains, an ode To Spring, was written, according to Tompson himself, when he was a schoolboy; that was in 1818, before Wentworth's Australasia and before Field's first booklet: the schoolboy ode does not differ in style or craftsmanship from the later poems, though of course it may have been rewritten afterwards. Tompson's father¹⁵ was a well-off farmer on the Hawkesbury near Windsor; Tompson was educated on the Hawkesbury, at a school that was one of the best in the State. After leaving school he farmed for a while on the river, and in 1830 he married a Windsor lady; about this time he entered the government service and eventually became Clerk of the Legislative Assembly. His notes are very far from wild; on the contrary they are so polished and urbane that their appearance in such a place and time is something of a marvel; they represent the eighteenth century in its Popeian aspect as clearly as Australasia represents it in its Johnsonian; they are dedicated to Tompson's schoolmaster, the Reverend Henry Fulton,¹⁶ “beneath whose kind and fostering tuition I lived the rosy hours of childhood, and imbibed those qualities which were erewhile the early promptures of my muse”. Except that Tompson has a curiously defective ear for rhyme, unless of course we assume that he was a hundred years before his time, his verses are almost perfect in craftsmanship: on the other hand they show no imagination, but merely a tasteful echoing of commonplace Popeian conventions; they show no passion, even in his “wooddove's am'rous coo” to “Sylvia”, whom he celebrates five times; and, except in the occasional mention of place or person, they show no reaction whatever to the Australian scene. The verses of John Dunmore Lang,¹⁷ … are worth mentioning only as an illustration of the fact that several of the early colonial leaders wrote verse at times; because one of his poems is in unrhymed couplets; and because he translated a couple of aboriginal songs and appreciated the sound of the aboriginal names of places; once, indeed,¹⁸ though only in a single verse which was not included in any of his books of poems, he made an attempt to marshall them in rhyme, and this verse may be quoted: “For my own part”, Lang says,

I like the native names, as Parramatta,
                    And Illawarra, and Woolloomooloo;
Nandowra, Woogarora, Bulkomatta,
          Tomah, Toongabbie, Mittagong, Murroo;
Buckobble, Cumleroy, and Coolingatta,
          The Warragumby, Bargo, Monaroo;
Cookbundoon, Carrabaiga, Wingycarribee,
          The Wollondilly, Yurumbon, Bungarribee.

Henry Halloran (S. Africa, 1811-93), is perhaps more typical than the others; he is by far the least diaphanous of the poetic shadows that sprinkled over the newspapers, and, more thickly, the magazines of the Period with their sentimental echoings from overseas. His verses were not collected until towards the end of the succeeding Period, and others were published later still, but they are scattered throughout the periodicals from the forties onward; yet since he was a couple of years older than Harpur and thirty years older than Kendall, both of whom were intimate friends of his, it seems best to deal with him here. Halloran was brought to Sydney by his father, a Doctor of Divinity who was transported for forgery, educated at that doctor's excellent school, entered the Civil Service and ended as an Under-Secretary. He published about a dozen books or booklets of verse commemorative of events in the history of the colony or in the life of Queen Victoria, which are dignified and sometimes sonorous, but formal and quite unimaginative. His best work is in what Deniehy called his “domestic verse”, most of which is contained in A Few Love Rhymes of a Married Life (Sydney, 1890) and in an In Memoriam (also Sydney, 1890), to his wife. Halloran writes with skill and delicacy, and the feeling in the best of these verses is tender and graceful, but it catches hardly more than a faint poetic glow; this is at its brightest, perhaps, in the love lyric that begins,¹⁹

I wish thou wert a stem of roses
                    And I a golden bee to sip
The honey-dew that now reposes
                    In balmy kisses on thy lip.

Halloran's other work is not without powerful lines; he could write for example, in a sonnet on a wreck, of

                              … the arrogant wind
Proud of his might and fierce in his disdain,

and the man himself was by no means all gentleness and sentimentality: he was fond of boxing and was a lieutenant in the volunteers. But he was quite unable to break free from the conventionalities that ruled the minor poets of his day; it is only his representative capacity and the rarity during this Period of anything even approaching poetry that make his verses worth mention.

Robert Lowe's was a more appreciable talent. The best of his verse is satirical, and the most outstanding of his serious poems, “The Moon”, is heavily indebted to Shelley, but he writes gracefully, and without the prevailing sentimentalities; he makes an incidental attempt to describe some of Australia's natural features, but the attempt is not very successful, except for a graceful allusion to

… tree ferns, for whom Nature weaves
Her feathery coronet of leaves.

For the satirists of the day, a small but notable group, no high-powered historical telescope is necessary; almost all of them are enshrined in one of Australia's two leading magazine-newspapers, though it is true that few read even the Atlas²⁰ nowadays. Given some slight acquaintance with their historical background, the best of the satiric pieces of the Period are extremely entertaining, apart from the fact that they constitute living illustrations of history: unfortunately the satirists were few in number; of these few three may be mentioned. The best two were Lowe, the Atlas's founder and de facto editor, and Forster, who was one of its principal contributors. Lowe's verses,²¹ satirical and other, were not published in book form until 1885, but about two-thirds of them had first appeared in Australia forty years earlier: the butt of most of his satires was Governor Sir George Gipps, of whom Lowe wrote that

In ruining our constitution
Sir George has spoilt his own.(22)

But Lowe's attacks extended over the whole autocratic system of the colonial administration of the day; some of the most amusing satirized an expedition that had been sent out under a Colonel Barney in connection with a scheme of Gladstone's for a penal settlement in Queensland, as in

How blest the land where Barney's gentle sway
Spontaneous felons joyfully obey;
Where twelve bright bayonets only can suffice
To check the wild exuberance of vice.

The Songs of the Squatters, a collection of verses written when Lowe was supporting the squatters in their efforts after security of tenure, contains some very amusing pieces: there is the one for instance in which an amorous station-owner tells his lady-love of the advantages of his up-country estate, with its dusty plains, its dried-up creeks, its shadeless trees, and the mosquitoes and goannas that will welcome her, and how

… the snake o'er thy slumbers
                    His vigils shall keep;

he winds up with the comforting reassurance,

          So fear not, fair lady,
          Your desolate way,
Your clothes will arrive
          In three months with my dray.

Lowe's satiric verses are not of the first order, but his unusual personality and the high spirits that accompanied his indignation against autocratic authority separate them from the ordinary; there is a touch of the schoolboy about them, but it is a brilliant schoolboy, of something the type of Kipling's Beetle.

William Forster (Madras, India, 1818-82), was the cleverest of the Australian writers who helped Lowe make the Atlas what it was; like Lang and Wentworth, he is an example of a group of men of vigorous and varied ability whom the strong political current of the age swept away with it, but who possessed also a marked literary talent that found expression incidentally. Brought to Australia by his father at the age of eleven, he became first squatter and then politician (he was several times in office, once as Premier), but wrote in his spare time for the Melbourne Review, the Sydney University Review, and other periodical publications, as well as for the Atlas. He published several plays, which will be referred to later, but by far his best work is in his political satires, and particularly in “The Devil and the Governor”, which appeared in the Atlas. Reader, thinker, less subtle and sophisticated than Lowe, more rugged and with a little less art, he could strike a heavier if not a keener blow, which was backed though not suffused with humour. It was however a cynical, if not a bitter humour; it was said of him that it seemed to be his nature to say unpleasant things, and he was once described as “disagreeable in opposition, insufferable as a supporter, fatal as a colleague”. “The Devil and the Governor”²³ made a great stir at the time, and that is not surprising, for with the doubtful exception of Deniehy's “How I Became Attorney General of New Barataria”, which belongs to the next Period, Australia produced until the twentieth century no satire that could compare with it. The Devil visits his friend Sir George Gipps to chat over passing events, and, as he says,

To render you thanks for the mischief you're brewing …
And also to offer—excuse my freedom—
A few words of advice should you chance to need 'em.

The Devil grants that

The blighting touch of a despot's rod
Kills in man's spirit the breath of God. …
But forgive me for hinting your zeal is such
That I'm only afraid you'll do too much …
Already, I warn you, your system totters,
They're a nest of hornets, those rascally squatters,
Especially when you would grasp their cash—
Excuse me, George, but I think you're rash.

Governor:

Rash! d——n it, rash!

Devil:

                                                            Don't fly in a passion,
In higher circles 'tis not the fashion …
This people I say will submit the more readily
If you've only the wit to grind them steadily. …

Another of Forster's satires, “The Genius and the Ghost”, is a dialogue between the genius of the city of Sydney and the ghost of transportation, which an attempt was then being made to revive; this satire is less personal and far more serious than the other, and its language “dates” more, but it contains a fine sonorous diatribe against the pharisaical attitude of some of Sydney's rich and free-born citizens towards the rest.

The third satirist appeared long before the other two, and his work was in prose. It has nothing like the force and fire of the Atlas satires, but it is still amusing, apart from the light it throws upon the social life of Hobart in the days of Governor Arthur. The Hermit of Van Diemen's Land (Hobart Town, 1829), was the work of Henry Savery, author of Quintus Servinton … ;²⁴ it was modelled upon a contemporary English work, The Hermit in London, but there is about it a far-off reminiscence of the Spectator, which is most marked in the names of some of the characters, Mr Cockatrice and Sir John Topewell for instance. In the guise of an English visitor to Tasmania, the “hermit” ridicules the leading personages of Hobart society; the book caused a considerable stir, and cost its publisher £50 as the result of a libel action: it was composed during Savery's imprisonment, and dictated to a fellow prisoner; this was Thomas Wells, whose life of Howe the bushranger has been mentioned in another place,²⁵ and for some time he was believed to be the author as well as the actual writer of the Hermit. Poor relations of the satires of the Period were its “pipes”. These were anonymous lampoons or pasquinades of well-known officials or other prominent persons, from the Governor downwards. They were usually written in verse—extremely bad verse—and left where their subject or some kind friend of his would be likely to discover them. They were called “pipes” because, according to Morris,²⁶ they were usually rolled in the shape of a pipe. One is known to have been Wentworth's and a couple of others are practically certain to have been written by officers of the New South Wales Corps.

The literary telescope, or microscope, discovers half a dozen playwrights, who produced among them about a dozen plays, almost all in verse: almost all are extremely dull, reflecting the stunted imagination, the fossilized conventions, and the cheap sentimental melodrama of the contemporary English stage, which was then passing through one of the worst periods of its history; they have a place here merely because they were the earliest Australian plays. Of the first in point of time no copy is known to exist. The Bandit of the Rhine, by Evan Henry Thomas …,²⁷ was, according to a Tasmanian newspaper,²⁸ published in Launceston in 1835; it was written in prose and produced in Launceston soon after its publication. Thomas helped to form several local dramatic societies, lectured on literature, and wrote at least one other play. The first Australian playwright whose work remains in existence was David Burn (Edinburgh?, 1799-1875), who arrived in Tasmania in 1825, and went in for sheep-farming, at the same time contributing to both English and Australian periodicals; he also paid a couple of visits to England, during which he was in touch with the theatrical world, and two of his plays are said to have been “successfully performed” in Edinburgh. Burn's farm was not a success; he turned to journalism, worked on the staff of several Sydney and Auckland newspapers, and died in New Zealand. Burn was said to have been “a man of high culture, a brilliant conversationalist, and an equally brilliant writer”, but in one respect at least this was a highly flattering judgment; besides plays, he published works on Van Diemen's Land, the navy, and the mercantile marine, and he contributed to the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania. Six of his plays, all written, if not wholly in Australia, at least after the date of his settlement in Tasmania, were published under the title Plays and Fugitive Pieces in Hobart in 1843, though the earliest was written as far back as 1828: all but one are melodramatic and sentimental blank-verse dramas, and that one is a nautical farce. The volume contains also verse and short stories, all of which are practically worthless; here is an extract from one of the stories: “‘Control these emotions, my adored one,’ said I, for the dear girl had given way to a painfully excited feeling, ‘let me learn the barrier that prevents our union.’” The farce also is practically worthless, but in the verse-plays there is some merit, if one cares to dig for it: they are capably constructed and written, in the bookish and pseudo-poetic manner of the day; the blank verse runs evenly enough, though it is a little stiff; and beneath the surface of Regulus and Queen's Love there is some really tragic feeling: the second is said to have been successfully produced in Sydney in 1845; the first was obviously not intended for stage presentation. There is nothing in the least Australian about any of these plays, nor is there anything Australian except the subject in another play of Burn's, The Bushrangers: melodramatic rubbish which still remains in manuscript.²⁹ Of the other playwrights of the Period, Conrad Theodore Knowles, an actor-manager of Sydney and Melbourne in the thirties and forties, who died in 1844, published in Sydney in 1842 Salathiel, or The Jewish Chieftain; a drama in three acts, it is said to have been produced with success, and that is not unlikely, for it has plenty of dramatic action, though no literary value. Samuel Prout Hill, marine painter, lecturer, journalist, and librarian of the Sydney School of Arts, published in Sydney in 1843 Tarquin the Proud and other Poems: it might be contended that Tarquin was a little better than Salathiel, but this would amount to a splitting of infinitesimals; it is certainly inferior to the best two of Burn's plays. Harpur's The Bushrangers, published with “other Poems” in Sydney in 1853, is as bad as the worst of the verse-plays in Burn's collection. Except for the subject and a few local terms, there is nothing Australian about this play either, nor has it any literary value: melodramatic and sentimental, weak in character drawing, it is bookish and entirely unreal, and its absurdly inappropriate Elizabethan names and mannerisms make it seem even weaker than it is; it is hard to understand how a man of Harpur's intelligence could have published it at the age of thirty-six. It is also strange that the author of The Devil and the Governor should have written and published three verse-dramas in the artificial fashion of the day; still, other men of brains and humour have complied, almost automatically, with the absurd conventions of a contemporary fashion. And Forster's plays, particularly the best of them, The Weirwolf, are less artificial in language, more modern in tone, and far superior dramatically to the other plays that have been mentioned; but it should be noted that none of Forster's plays was published until long after the conclusion of the Period: The Weirwolf in 1876, The Brothers in 1877, and Midas in 1884, after his death; they are mentioned in this place because Forster's connection with the Atlas, which published his most important work, brings him within the Period. The Weirwolf was written obviously for the study rather than the stage, and it is wordy and unconvincing, but its blank verse is flexible and comparatively modern and it is human and far easier to read than the rest; The Brothers has similar faults and virtues, but the faults are greater and the virtues less; Midas, which is written in various metres after a Greek model, is poor stuff.

The nearest approach to the essay during the period was The Australian Sketch Book (Sydney, 1838), a series of sketches written by a boy of eighteen, confessedly in imitation of Washington Irving: the boy was James Martin (Middleton, Ireland, 1820-86), who had been brought to Australia from Ireland as a baby, practised law and journalism, succeeded Lowe as editor of the Atlas, and later became Premier, Knight, and Chief Justice. The sketches, though boyish and bookish, are not unpromising, but, except for some satiric remarks about pseudo-poets which caused something of a stir at the time, that is the best that can be said of them; they are mentioned here only because of the early date of their appearance. The Lectures on the Poets and Poetry of Great Britain (Sydney, 1839) of William à Beckett, afterwards first Chief Justice of Victoria, is barely worth mention. As is not perhaps surprising, the only real criticism of the Period was that of its only real poet; it is scattered over newspaper articles contributed mainly to the Empire and the Sydney Morning Herald; to these may perhaps be added the apophthegms contained in “The Nevers of Poetry”. But Harpur's articles are hardly worth reading today, except by a student of the poet or of the time: they are wordy and amateurish, and though, like most competent poets, Harpur could say a good thing now and then, and more often a true thing which though hardly new was worth repeating in an individual fashion, like many a minor poet-critic of today he knew no critical standards except those which were applicable to his own kind of poetry. The rather academic and pretentious introductions to his lectures on poetry in general³⁰ are followed by nothing new or particularly interesting, and his articles on the leading English poets are not particularly penetrating; the best is that on Shelley,³¹ of whom what he says is true to far as it goes, and it is sincerely felt and individually expressed, but it is not new today and must always have been fairly evident. Harpur says that Shelley's poetry is

in its aggregate … too chaotical, like the cloudy grandeur of a sunset. It is always beautiful, but there is always too much of it … [It has] too little of rational purpose and actuality to be permanently valued by the solid and thoughtful readers.³²

It is curious that the critic who wrote this should, in his capacity as poet, have written that

… song has oft some beauty most divine,
Which well we feel, yet cannot well define—
Some yearning excellence, intense and far,
Coming and going like a clouded star—
Some awful glory we but half descry,
Like a strong sunset in a stormy sky—
Yet ne'er be murky of set purpose, since
You only thereby shall the more evince
That even the Sublime's but then made sure
When, like a morning Alp, it breaks from the obscure.

Harpur has, however, an interesting article on the sonnet, in which he describes, and illustrates with examples of his own composition, his invention of a new and rather effective sonnet form; it runs a b a b, b a a b, c d c, d d c. As might have been expected, he has a predilection for “plain poetry”; he was contemptuous of “Airy Fairy Lilian”, and declared that Browning, had “taken Obscurity into his poetical system, not merely as a sometimes welcome guest, but as a tenth Muse—to the exclusion very frequently of the whole orthodox nine”; he goes on, in words which seem to have a quite topical reference today:

For myself … I would as lief have my mouth charged with sawdust as be treated to poetry that I cannot make sense of, upon some ground either of fact or fable.

Notes

1. Except Wentworth.

2. Entry in the Register of Baptisms, St Matthew's church, Windsor. Harpur himself believed he was born about 1817, and this is the date given in the Preface to the 1883 Poems, but the register entry seems more reliable.

3. The facts were also checked by the late C. W. Salier.

4. It is worth noting that some of Harpur's early poems were entitled “Australian Lyrics” (the italics are mine).

5. Note to a poem published in the Empire, 19th August 1854. But Salier says that he found this note “annexed to the original manuscript” of the poem, so that it must have been written some time earlier.

6. Quoted by A. G. Stephens in his typed Autobiographies of Australian Authors, in the Mitchell Library.

7. For this estimate, and for a number of facts concerning Harpur, I am indebted to articles by and correspondence with the late Mr C. W. Salier, who made a special study of Harpur, and probably knew more about him than anybody. He identified the anonymous editor of the 1883 edition, who signed himself “M” merely, with H. M. Martin, a friend of a relation of Mrs Harpur and says that he was acquainted with neither the poet himself nor all of his published works; certainly “M” mentions only the first and least important in his Preface, and is not sure of the date of that. The whole Preface is vague, for that matter.

8. Note to poem published in the Empire, 19th August 1854.

9. This was also published separately, in 1865.

10. For some extraordinary reason the second of these poems, which had been included in The Bushrangers, and, almost doubled in length, had been published separately in 1862, was omitted from the Poems of 1883, and the third, which had appeared in the Empire, was not included in any book.

11. Marvell: “Like golden lamps in a green night” (“The Bermudas”).

12. Text from the 1862 booklet.

13. See his Introduction to An Australasian Anthology, London, 1927.

14. Perhaps because its editor also had been an involuntary immigrant.

15. Official documents show that both he and his wife (Tompson's mother) had been convicts; so here is another link with “The System”.

16. Another ex-convict, and none the less capable and estimable.

17. See pp. 54-7.

18. In his Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales, p. 115.

19. This poem is not included in either of the above collections. The quotation is from Douglas Sladen's Australian Poets, 1788-1888.

20. See pp. 125-6.

21. Poems of a Life, London, 1885.

22. In Poems of a Life it is “We fear he's hurt his own”. The lines here quoted are from the original Atlas version. In the book, the identity of the persons attacked is hidden, so that for the ordinary English reader the satires must have lost much of their point, as indeed they would for an Australian reader of today.

23. Text from the Atlas, 17th May 1845.

24. See pp. 85-6.

25. See p. 30.

26. E. E. Morris, Austral English, London, 1898. This derivation is approved by Partridge.

27. See p. 76.

28. The Cornwall Chronicle, 3rd October 1835.

29. With other prose work of Burn's in the Mitchell Library.

30. See, for example, the Empire, 3rd October 1859.

31. Sydney Morning Herald, 3rd October 1866.

32. Harpur is also shocked by the “moral unwholesomeness” of Shelley's poetry.