SOURCE: Ackland, Michael. “Crosscurrents, Cross-purposes.” In That Shining Band: A Study of Australian Colonial Verse Tradition, pp. 114-33. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994.

[In the following excerpt, Ackland focuses on Henry Kendall's verse of the 1860s in which the poet thematically recast many of the works of his mentor, Charles Harpur, while offering a deeply pessimistic outlook on matters of faith in his writing.]

Charles Harpur died in June 1868, a bitterly disappointed man, with his meticulously revised poems still awaiting publication, though his work had not been without local admirers. Nicol Stenhouse had given it his discerning approbation, and Daniel Deniehy had singled out “The Creek of the Four Graves” for flattering comparison with epic compositions of the Old World. Their appreciative comments, however, pale before those paid by his direct successor in the next generation, Henry Kendall. 1862 saw the publication of Kendall's first volume of verse, as well as correspondence replete with unqualified admiration of his fellow-poet:

I feel already deeply indebted to you for the great good and large comfort I have derived from your writings. There is no living author to whom I could turn and say as much. This may be a necessary result of my Australian birth and education. But, strangely fascinated by almost everything you have published, I have always looked upon you as the man who alone could express what I had so often dimly thought.

(25 September, A159)

These initial overtures were completed by glowing commentaries on individual Harpur poems, and a desire for guidance in his reading, “being assured that, mentally, I shall gain much from your letters” (A159). Over the next six years their relationship altered subtly. The mentor became increasingly dependent on his Sydney supporter to arrange the placement and printing of individual pieces, while the acolyte grew to question the older man's taste and certain aspects of his poetic practice. But despite their divergences Henry, to the end, would give Charles's efforts their full due, even if his work was destined to call into question many of the certitudes upon which Harpur based his vision of national potential.

Kendall always projected his encounter with Harpur's writings as an enabling and instructive experience. Far from suffering from any “anxiety of influence” in finding an individual voice,¹ he hoped from the outset for a mutually supportive relationship, where both would work together towards shaping an indigenous verse tradition. Without a usable past, theirs was the immense task of origination, or as Kendall put it a decade after his friend's death: “Under favouring auspices he might have completed the statue—as it was, he left us only the foot of Hercules” (K190).² Then as earlier, the young man saw in Harpur a monitory example of what was possible to a native-born youth, living far away from the centre of empire. This assumed two major aspects. In the earlier phase, it demonstrated primarily that “Australian birth and education” were not an insuperable barrier to worthy compositions, and that his native landscape could provide the matter for original compositions. The confessional letter quoted above continues:

While looking round upon external Nature, some of us see and feel that which we afterwards lose sight of and forget, until we find it, photographed as it were, in the luminous ‘limning’ of the true poet. I think that there is a fearful gap between thought and language. Perhaps there is no rarer endowment of the poet than the gift of exact expression—the power of subjugating language to thought; so he can conscientiously feel that the whole truth which was in him has been laid before the World in all its unclouded simplicity. How often, burning with the secret power within, do men feel they are incapable of manifesting themselves except through the medium of a dim—a cloudy ambiguity of words, which either distort the idea they yearn to convey, or else give but its bloodless and inanimate outline! I feel there is little discrepancy between conception and execution in your poems, and am satisfied your Ideal, with all its delicate lights and shadows, could not, in any other dress, be presented to us in its entire integrity.

(A159-60)

In Harpur, as the young poet correctly surmised, the antipodean scene had found its first authentic white singer, in works which bore the stamp of an encompassing, authoritative vision. Kendall obviously shared these aspirations, and this chapter will focus on the 1860s during which he attempted to realize a comparable goal.

Fifteen years later, Harpur still enjoyed representative status, though this time of the blight and insufficiency that attended colonial literary endeavours. In an article of 1877 entitled “Old Manuscripts”, the sole survivor of the “shining band” of local singers argued that to see the light of day in Australia was, in effect, to be “born under an unlucky star”. “A community that is often in motion sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, is rarely in the mood for literature of high and exacting character … Certainly, we have a leisured class; but then, take it on the whole, it is not lettered” (K185). “The result of all this”, Kendall asserted, “must be obvious”. Genius is reduced to the level of a literary hack, or produces work like that of his deceased friend, now described as “nothing more than an adumbration of Charles Harpur”; whereas “if Harpur had been born in an old and settled society, and had been helped by favourable circumstances, he would have produced some everlasting work” (K186-87). There is an element of truth in this revised verdict, but more importantly the shift reflects the changes wrought by “the tyranny of circumstances” in the author's life during the intervening years. Of their hard lessons Harpur remained the chosen signifier. To the young man striving after poetic laurels he was an inspiring ideal, who denoted hope of future fulfilment. To the later, second self, he embodied a sense of personal failure and apparently ephemeral attainment, while retaining his strong identification with what to Kendall proved so elusive, “a faith, tested by and triumphant over all sorts of fires”.

Between these two appraisals falls “the Shadow of 1872”. With this phrase Kendall designated the period of intemperance and total collapse which brought him to the Gladesville Mental Asylum in 1871 and 1873.³ This had its origins in a difficult personal predicament, which began with the early death of his father, Basil, in 1852. Thereafter the children were divided amongst relatives, and young Henry tried diverse employment, including shepherding, errand boy, life on a whaling ship, and the more mundane existence of a clerk. It was in the latter capacity that he returned to Sydney in 1863, where he took up a post offered by Henry Halloran in the Surveyor General's Office. He also assumed the heavy responsibility of providing for his mother and sisters. A minor civil servant's salary did not go far, and the young poet soon found himself slipping into debt.⁴ By the mid-1860s his financial and familial situation was becoming desperate, or as he put it to the newly appointed Colonial Secretary, Henry Parkes: “I am just now living over again poor Evelyn's life of poverty, debt, ambition, and (worse than all) super sensitiveness. I want to pay my way and cannot do it” (24 January, 1866 [Kxvii]). Kendall was here seeking much needed patronage, but the economic respite it promised proved to be illusory. Instead, he found himself constantly beset by critics as well as by creditors, for Civil Service appointments secured through the favour of government poetasters like Parkes and Halloran raised the issue of cronyism, and attracted the caustic scrutiny of the Sydney Punch. Satiric broadsides were fired at the imagined antics of the “three Henrys”, as well as at the presumed autobiographical content of certain poems.⁵ Kendall's verse as a whole was identified unremittingly with self-indulgent “rhyming nonsense”, “obscurity” and “monotonous … Bosh” (K237-38), chiefly because of its confessional tone and its repeated concern with insubstantial or metaphysical issues. Beset on all fronts, Kendall would seek relief in 1869 in flight to Melbourne. His attempt to live by the pen there, however, was a hopeless failure, and he returned to Sydney destitute once again, only to be finally overwhelmed by “the Shadow of 1872”. These private and professional setbacks informed his last reminiscences on Charles Harpur, and on the thankless lot awaiting the colonial man of letters, while they also helped to produce poetic conceptions distinct from either the imperial or the republican versions of national destiny.

To move from the writings of the older man to those of his younger compatriot is to shift from an imaginative realm infused with faith and dreams of enlightened progress to one which registers their postponement or tragic reversal. Avowals of belief yield to struggles with doubt, and colonial leitmotifs are radically re-read. The seminal voyage is associated with storm and mishap, visionary damsels with thoughts of shortcomings and sorrow. Individual choice is displaced by fate, and the source of eternal lore, though fervently sought after, is usually beyond reach. In brief the land, from being the site of impending triumph, is often identified with a harsh countryside that checks or defeats human endeavour, as well as with a melancholy linked with mutability and the insoluable riddle of existence. The artistic counterpart of these human limitations is an awareness of linguistic or poetic shortfalls, already evident in the 1862 letter to Harpur, together with a sustained probing of individual and contemporary malaise through bold appropriation of the classical motif of metamorphosis.

The distance travelled by Kendall from Harpur's intellectual standpoint is readily observable in the young man's reworkings of certain of his mentor's poems. Given his thorough acquaintance with the latter's verse,⁶ it is significant that he recast works which contain the notion of recurrent and unalleviated suffering, rather than celebrations of benign, divine influence or redemptive love. His essay “Old Manuscripts” closes with an evocation of Harpur's final resting place: “Over this last home of his, the wild oak—that elphin harp of the solitudes—iterates its mysterious music year after year” (K189). Though we may question whether this “elphin harp” ever graced his grave, there is no doubting the prominence it assumed in his elegist's eyes. Many years prior to this in “The Voice of the Swamp Oak”, Harpur had used the ghostly sounds emitted by the tree to meditate on “Mournful things beyond our guessing” (p. 217). His listener-poet identifies these with human grief, and imagines the oak first as the lute of “some weird Spirit of the air”, and finally as the fit dwelling-place for a “weary Spirit that hath felt / The burthen of eternity”. Kendall turned to the same subject on two occasions, in “The Wail of the Native Oak” (1861) and “The Voice in the Wild Oak” (1874).⁷ Like his prose responses to Harpur, these poems reflect distinct phases of his personal experience, encapsulated by the tutelary spirit who is re-envisaged as an imprisoned soul (“pent amongst those tangled branches” [K6]),⁸ and later as the victim of an anguished metamorphosis:

No dazzling dryad but a dark
          Dream-haunted spirit, doomed to be
Imprisoned, crampt in bands of bark,
          For all eternity.

(K115)

Weariness and otherworldly unfathomability are replaced by an augmenting sense of impasse or entrapment in the here-and-now, while Kendall in the early work introduces a dismal, funereal mound into the scene as a figure for the intractable doom and loss which are the hallmarks of human existence.

The other distinctive feature of his adaptations is the inaccessibility of previous sources of illumination. The avowal of belonging to an “unquiet, unsettled generation”, made in his review of Gordon's verse, finds its imaginative counterpart here in baffled questioning and separation from potentially solacing nature. The first poem countenances a chilling confession of fading certitudes, as well as foregrounds a mythmaking dimension inherent in cognition:

In these woodlands I was restless! I had seen a light depart,
And an ache for something vanished filled and chilled my longing heart,
And I linked my thoughts together—‘All seemed still and dull today
But a painful symbol groweth from the shine that pales away!
This may not be idle dreaming! if the spirit roams,’ I said,
‘This is surely one, a wanderer from the ages which have fled!
Who can look beyond the darkness; who can see so he may tell
Where the sunsets all have gone to; where the souls that leave us dwell?’

(K6)

Life's mystery generates further surmises, which climax with a distinctive variant of the genius loci when Kendall vainly invokes a native “wild man”, hoping he can plumb this local enigma: “But he rose like one bewildered, shook his head and glided past” (K7). Finally, nature responds as one incensed or outraged by the speaker's intruding thoughts, and the poem ends with lines which come close to collapsing the identity of speaker and racked spirit: “Then I swooned away in horror. Oh! that shriek which rent the air, / Like the voice of some fell demon harrowed by a mad despair” (K8). Twelve years later this near identification is fulfilled. There the “dream-haunted spirit” is a direct correlative for the speaker, and creation's meaning and magnitude are forever beyond the fallen human word. As the earlier poem had demonstrated, landscape is inescapably refracted through the prism of individual consciousness. Hence it becomes a mirror of besetting doubts as well as of aspirations, or as the later speaker puts it, the object of a “dark translation” which apparently leaves Harpur's faith buried in an unmarked mound.

The perception of existence as ultimately unknowable, and of man as a tragically limited shaper of reality, emerges again in Kendall's other major reworking of stock Harpur themes in “The Glen of Arrawatta” (1865). Here selected elements are refashioned from the main action of “The Creek of the Four Graves”, such as the establishment of the campsite and the clubbing to death of a “poor man” who, in Harpur's words, “never yet was happy” (p. 168). These scenes are telescoped into the earlier part of Kendall's tale, and the narrative extended to include the thoughts of those who remained behind in England. Also the original notion of a divine compact is elided, so that the archetypal event now takes place in “the ruthless Australasian wastes” (K66), where potential surrogates for supernal presence, such as the moon, are likened to “a dream / Of Peace” (K69). The reality, however, is shattered plans, and a lot where death and hatred hold sway. Gone is the “subtle interfusion” between mankind and “all serene and beautiful and bright / And lasting things of Nature” (p. 166), and with it those saving “sacred charities” centred on home as the seat of love. Neither the soothing hand of natural regeneration nor the consolation of “the Christian's tear” (K70) mitigates the bleakness of the final resting-place of this colonial everyman. Instead, the vigil kept in vain for the absent loved-one in England is stressed, as is the subsequent act of imaginative compensation by which he is elevated into a “name” of hope, or an inspiring legend for coming generations:

                                                                                And he
Whose fate was hidden under forest leaves,
And in the darkness of untrodden dells,
Became a marvel. Often by the hearths
In winter nights, and when the wind was wild
Outside the casements, children heard the tale
Of how he left their native vales behind
(Where he had been a child himself) to shape
New fortunes for his father's fallen house;
Of how he struggled—how his name became,
By fine devotion and unselfish zeal,
A name of beauty in a selfish land,
And then, of how the aching hours went by,
With patient listeners praying for the step
Which never crossed the floor again. So passed
The tale to children; but the bitter end
Remained a wonder, like the unknown grave
Alone with God and Silence in the hills.

(K71)⁹

Naming, that central act of triumphant charting in “Australasia”, remains a quintessential human deed, but one which embodies man's relative powerlessness. The gulf between harsh fact and prayed-for fiction seems unbridgable; and the possibility of “marvel” or “wonder”, that word so redolent with religious faith for Harpur, becomes as ambivalent and enigmatic to mortal understanding as the postulated presence of “God and Silence in the hills”.

This massive thematic recasting, which challenges central tenets of Harpur's schema, goes hand in hand with an altered conception of verse. In earlier works of imperial and republican orientation, words ideally attain the status of transforming deeds. Through them, as Harpur asserted, mankind may “revolutionise or rear / A mighty state” (“Words Are Deeds”, [pp. 541-42]), and so realize a god-ordained plan of moral enlightenment.¹⁰ An antithetical recognition of often agonizing constraint informs Kendall's verse. The former idealistic union between language, intellectual striving and ultimate meaning is replaced by a sense of unavailing action or outright failure, as in “Mountains” (1862). There even momentary merging with the spirit of the place, depicted as a mystic landscape damsel, is no longer possible. From being a promise of glorious individual and national destiny in Harpur, her depiction testifies to insurmountable impediments which confine the poet-elect in alienating actuality. Fittingly, the tenuous encounter takes place at the speaker's window, suggestive of tantalizing but enforced separation from his best dreams:

‘Ere you quit this ancient casement, tell me, is it well to yearn
For the evanescent visions, vanished, never to return?’
But the Spirit answers nothing! and I linger all alone,
Gazing through the moony vapours where the lovely Dream has flown;
And my heart is beating sadly, and the music waxeth faint,
Sailing up to holy Heaven, like the anthems of a Saint.

(p. 5)

Despite the stock religious close, indications of estrangement predominate: “trees are moaning loudly” and the setting is populated by “dismal … shades”. The New World is no longer identified with utopian hopes, the former being associated now with “steeps like prison walls”, the latter with an ideal imaginable only beyond “this dreary world”. Once submissive or instructive, nature has become a dark and mantled other; communication is categorically denied, and the dominion conferred by reflective utterance is a thing of the past. The white poet remains alone with his burden of explication, in a realm where lost, sustaining ideologies are evoked through such intangible approximations as “a light depart[ed] / And an ache of something vanished filled and chilled my longing heart” (K6)—themselves a stark demonstration of the restricted nature of knowledge and speech.

Influencing these changes were dilemmas generated by the poet's complex personal predicament, traceable in part to the mid-century crisis of faith. Once again, an evocation of Harpur provides a convenient focal point for Kendall's own convictions, this time in an elegy of 1868:

The burden of a perished faith
          Went sighing through his speech of sweetness,
With human hints of Time and Death,
          And subtle notes of incompleteness.

(p. 100)

The description is accurate as far as it goes, except in one crucial particular. To Harpur, justifying the ways of God to man was indeed a burden, but the tag of “perished” applied to “faith” expresses, not Harpur's, but Henry Kendall's personal cross. For the young man longed, as he put it in 1864, for “the unquenchable conviction … [of] a great and good God beyond all entities” (K209). Instead, he found himself a victim of the widespread religious malaise:

Perhaps I am only undergoing an experience which is general. Christ sojourned in the glooms of Egypt before he triumphed in Palestine. Do you remember Goldsmith's Village Pastor? How serene the mind must have been that conceived that picture of elevated Faith.

(K209)

Kendall, moreover, was well aware of the discrepancy between divine and mortal potential, and of the gulf which separated him from the sheltered standpoint of Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. Severely worried by doubts as well as by Sydney philistines, who were bent on attacking his purse and his good name, he felt compelled to confess in January 1864: “I fear I have a long road to travel in the dark yet; and the hand of God has not been reached” (K207).¹¹ Kendall could respond to detractors with “The Bronze Trumpet” (1866), a withering blast against unappreciative literati and upstart “famous men”, but quelling the spectres of his own mind would not be so easy.

Although his problems were diverse, it is the mounting spiritual dilemma which figures most prominently in his work. Faith was a potential rock to which he might have clung in the increasingly stormy seas that menaced him. Without it, his situation would be grim. Hence indices of sustained spiritual probing recur in his writings from the mid-1860s, and inevitably colour his attitude towards poetry. His letters to Mrs. A. E. Selwyn clearly chart his faltering belief and irremediable uncertainty.¹² On 2nd January 1864 he recounted his “recent depression of spirit and body”, and placed hopes for eventual relief not in “human sympathy”, but in reaching “the everlasting hills of Faith” where “all shall be changed” (K207). Images of pilgrimage or trial resonate in ensuing correspondence.¹³ On 9th April he described himself as “a sorry Christian”, who “very often” caught himself “saying ‘there is nothing certain, but Doubt and Death’” (K209), and in subsequent correspondence he acknowledged the threat of ultimate bafflement:

We, the cheated—the deluded, turning from thankless thorny ways, straining half-gladly, half-fearfully, towards that which lies beyond the everlasting face of Death; we would be cast down indeed without these happy Assurances.

(K211)

A year later his faith was no firmer. Again he likened himself to “the wayfarer who would be steadfast but cannot”, or to a stranded ship menaced by approaching waves (K213). This time, however, in place of earlier trust in diurnal convictions which “point, however obscurely”, to a beneficent deity (K209), poetry is privileged as a means of insight. It has “very often been the means of a man's salvation … it has prevented me from falling many a time” (K212).¹⁴ Where conventional creeds faltered, there poetry could take over as a potential, secular source belief or, as he put it more exaltedly, a “revelation of Divinity beyond all revelations: a religion past religion” (K213).

Kendall himself was still far from composing such verse, and his works of this period provide a complementary record of his progress as an honest doubter. 1864-65 marks a definite turning-point. Prior to this his frequent religious utterances are conventional either in projecting the faint traveller struggling after the water of faith, or in their affirmative rhetoric, as in the concluding lines to “The Light Above”:

But if to the summit—to Heaven upturning,
We look with the eyes of religion and love
We may see where the day o'er the darkness, is burning
And pierce to the glitter and glory above.

(p. 255)

His publications of 1864, however, exhibit a far more personal grappling with issues of belief. Whether mediated in biblical or contemporary terms, the depredations of doubt afford recurring motifs. Unchained speculation is seen to transform existence into a black battlefield, where disputants “are hacking and hewing like madmen / Because of their sorrow and scorn” (“Elijah”, p. 300). Now “Heaven seems far, and Faith grows cold and pale” (“Eighteen Hundred and Sixty Four”, p. 298), or in the words of “Woolli Creek”: “Faith is faint, because of Truth; / Truth shines dead, because of Faith” (p. 305), or is rendered void in destroying the guarantee of its ultimate significance. Caught in this cycle of desolation, the poet turns for strengthening precept to a range of saviour figures, including Christ the deliverer in “Rizpah”, the strong prophet-poet Elijah, and the humanly fallible celebrator of “perfect Love”, Henry Halloran, who, despite “an alien darkness on the front of things”, is nonetheless conjured to sing “for Life, nor fall behind, / Like me, with trailing tired wings” (“To Henry Halloran”, p. 304). Evidently that faith which might have sustained Kendall in future crises was seriously undermined by the close of 1864, thereby preparing the way for the daringly speculative poems of ensuing years and contributing to his eventual breakdown.

The narrative verse published in 1865 affords firsthand evidence of that capacity, outlined to Mrs. Selwyn, of poetry to probe “towards that which lies beyond the everlasting face of Death” (K211). Externally few changes were to be witnessed in the author's situation. Mentally, however, it seems to have worsened, with the major works of this year dramatizing potent grounds for doubt. “The Glen of Arrawatta” foregrounds the delusiveness of hope and its basis in ignorance, while “A Death in the Bush” (April) points, at best, to the impotence of deity. There a wasted settler, brought to the verge of death by disease, exclaims feverishly “Where is God?—it is bitter cold” (p. 86). But no supernatural help is forthcoming for him or his widow, who is left without “The faintest token of Divinity / In this my latest sorrow”. Admittedly, the poem ends with her asserted return to faith. Yet the abiding impression created is of human existence as a series of setbacks ameliorated by dumb fellow-sufferers which, if viewed aright, would leave us, like the recently bereft wife, with “the sight which shuts and blinds, / And seems to drive me wholly, Lord, from Thee” (p. 87). Finally, in “On the Paroo” (September, 1865), which again uses the slaughter of whites by natives as a metonym for blighted human endeavour, divinity is bluntly challenged to provide solace:

O Master! Father! sitting where our eyes
Are tired of looking, say for once are we—
Are we to set our lips with weary smiles
Before the bitterness of Life and Death,
And call it honey, while we bear away
A taste like wormwood?

(p. 121)

The insistence on untimely death and the absence of godhead in these local settings chart a movement to the brink of disbelief, beyond which the poet would only venture in borrowed “trappings” that effectively concealed his motivation.

In the latter part of the decade, at the time when Harpur was working on his last major pieces, “The Tower of the Dream” and “The Witch of Hebron”, less qualified projections of an inhospitable universe were countenanced by Kendall, as he too moved away from Australian matter, which had found ready publishers and acclaim, to concentrate on classical and biblical subjects. The extent to which this shift of creative focus was influenced by Harpur's example is unclear. Certainly Kendall was highly appreciative of “The Tower of the Dream”, published in 1865, which he designated “the highest result of your genius” (ML [Mitchell Library manuscript] C199) and annotated approvingly. But this precedent in itself is inadequate as an explanation for the protracted and thematically consistent body of writings, which stretches from “The Voyage of Telegonus” (June, 1866) and “Merope” (November, 1866), through to “Syrinx” (November, 1868), “King Saul at Gilboa” (January), “Ogyges” (April), “Galatea” (April), “Daphne” (August) and “To Damascus” (October), all first published in 1869.¹⁵ Moreover, traces of debt or influence are effaced in Harpur's assimilations of Old World matter, whereas Kendall was at pains to foreground his sources. “The Voyage of Telegonus”, when first published, was prefixed by the following note from Lemprière's Classical Dictionary:

Telegonus, a son of Ulysses and Circe, was born in the island of Aeaea, where he was educated in the arts of hunting, war, & c. When he had reached the years of manhood, he went to Ithaca to make himself known to his father, but he was shipwrecked on the coast, and, being destitute of provisions, he plundered some of the inhabitants of the island. Ulysses and Telemachus came to defend the property of their subjects against this unknown invader; a quarrel arose, and Telegonus killed his father without knowing who he was.¹⁶

And the status of later poems as adaptations was equally obvious, creating an impression of accurate reworking and objectivity, attested to by commentary.¹⁷ This, from Kendall's point of view, had definite advantages. On the one hand, their ordered and dispassionate narrative drive spiked the guns of Mr. Punch, by affording a firm rebuttal to charges of self-indulgence and “mystical rigmarole”. On the other, as we shall see, the possibility of attributing indications of irreligion to source material permitted greater intellectual freedom, in works where it is not so much the “voice of Divinity” as of fallible and despair-torn humanity which predominates.

Here, then, was an ideal means of extending the metaphysical probings of the previous year. Overtly controversial material was avoided, and biographical speculation forestalled, by recourse to seemingly neutral, traditional material. The poet's already tarnished public image was thereby spared, and the risk of harming an impressionable readership by private expressions of doubt was minimized. Understandably, it is the latter motive which is urged in “On the Paroo” for “hiding” evidence of individual trials and soul-searching:

And we who taste the core of many tales
Of tribulation—we whose lives are salt
With tears indeed—we therefore hide our eyes
And weep in secret lest our grief should risk
The rest that hath no hurt from daily racks
Of fiery clouds and immemorial rains.

(p. 121)

This putative sense of social responsibility aside, evidence of a desire to prevent adverse public opinion is strong. Contrary to his normal practice, the poetic testimonies to wavering faith from 1864 were not reissued during his lifetime. This, given their ephemeral newspaper printing, amounted to their suppression by a man who acknowledged his own “super sensitiveness”; while an acute malaise, arising from a wide gamut of personal reverses and spiritual uncertainties, found veiled or oblique expression through poems based on Old World subjects. This was far removed from the youthful ambition, adumbrated to Charles Harpur, of laying “the whole truth which was in him … before the World in all its unclouded simplicity” (A160). But it did permit a covert, imaginative working through of intensely pressing dilemmas, whose resolution was a precondition for personal well-being, and for fulfilling his earlier goals. In effect, literature became the “crutch” to which he referred years later.¹⁸ It afforded an essential means of support, but could not provide of itself a long-term solution. That had to come from within and from improving his family situation—with verse offering a refracted manifestation of its author's current state, and a record of intensifying foreboding and gloom.

Strong support for this reading is provided by the poems themselves, and in particular by Kendall's repeated recourse to Ovid-related material. For metamorphosis as a literary motif has characteristics which distinguish it from change, and provide important clues to the poet's underlying concerns. Specifically, metamorphosis has often been employed to signify arrested development, as well as a continued state or integrity of identity. Lycaon's transformation into a wolf realizes his rapacious traits, while Ovid's Daphne, having assumed silvan form, still expresses revulsion at the undesired advances of Apollo: “Embracing the branches as if they were limbs he kissed the wood: but, even as a tree, she shrank from his kisses” (p. 43).¹⁹ Furthermore, metamorphosis may bring joy, as in the case of Pygmalion. But the Australian's recastings display a decided preference for material which projects a dark, fatalistic vision of creation, replete with indices of physical and psychological foreclosure appropriate to his own circumstances, as in “Syrinx.” Ovid's scant yet suggestive details (“chill mountains,” “pathless forest”) are expanded into a terrifying nightmare landscape, complete with anticipatory mourning “for the sake / Of Ladon's lovely daughter” (p. 118). Her lustful assailant, apparently drawn from Lemprière, is a satyr not Ovid's Pan: a suppression of explicit reference to deity reiterated in the omission of Ovid's river spirits, who respond to Syrinx's plight.²⁰ These minor but crucial emendations transform the pantheistic original into a drama played out between the gods above and mortal participants beneath, preparing for the interpolation of savage Olympian intervention (“Caught up the satyr by the heels / And tore his skirts in sunder” [p. 119]), and precluding productive metamorphosis. Whereas Syrinx in Ovid becomes the melodious reed-instrument of pastoral tradition, here the effective human loss is unqualified (“Her life was hidden wholly”)—ostensible salvation reducing her as shining, singing reeds to another soft voice in the “moaning” of creation. Though tragedy is muted, the portrayal of existence as a brutal struggle below, and of mankind as a hapless victim of forces beyond its control, renders this and related reworkings of Old World sources the direct sequel to Kendall's explicit crisis-depictions of the mid-1860s.

The supposition that these poems may represent more than lively recastings of traditional material is confirmed by the disquieting preamble to “The Voyage of Telegonus,” which ushers in this whole phase of creative adaptation. There the poet-speaker, although dealing with established matter, identifies his forthcoming account with “spiting the gods,” “sinning,” and estrangement from “fathers of the high and holy face” (p. 93). In context, these are clearly tropes for the alienation unavoidably associated with the pursuit of a thankless calling:

… his days shall know
The plaintive front of Sorrow; level looks
With cries ill-favoured shall be dealt to him;
And this shall be that he may think of peace
As one might think of alienated lips
Of sweetness touched for once in kind warm dreams.

(p. 93)

The narrative anxiety so evident here is linked with received criticism, emotional severance and social ostracism, as well as with a challenging of ruling orthodoxies. Moreover, the transition from avowed alienation to its narrative figuring and reaffirmation takes place without a break—intriguingly through the act of recounting familiar classical matter in which we, nevertheless, are invited to discern a projection of the otherwise unspeakable:

But thou to whom these things are like to shapes
That come of darkness—thou whose life slips past
Regarding rather these with mute fast mouth—
Hear none the less how fleet Telegonus …

(p. 93)

The parallels between the narrator's and Kendall's own situation are striking, and while they do not constitute proof of identity, at the very least they emphasize analogous quandaries. Hence, when the speaker's dilemma is subsumed within Telegonus's fate, the possibility is raised that this account, and indeed ensuing adaptations of classical matter, may have a precise, though veiled, application to the author's own deteriorating predicament.

Where more is at stake or being dramatized in a poem than the well-documented fate of its protagonist, the best guide to authorial preoccupations becomes recurrent motifs or thematic elements shared by diverse works. In the case of the adaptations of 1866, “The Voyage of Telegonus,” although not a story of shape changing, is nonetheless the companion-piece of “Merope,” especially in its association of the unrelenting operation of destiny with a problematical birthright, and in its emphasis on hopeless estrangement. Telegonus, the natural son of Ulysses by Circe, sets off with “a loyal heart” in quest of his unknown father whom he is destined to slay unwittingly, thereby conforming to a timeless paradigm of thwarted human hopes and implacable deity, recalled when his attack on unsuspecting shepherds

Made waste their fields and throve upon their toil—
As throve the boar, the fierce four-footed curse
Which Artemis did raise in Calydon
To make stern mouths wax white with foreign fear,
All in the wild beginning of the World.

(p. 96)

The allusion to the Calydonian boar evokes Meleager, its slayer, whose heroic action, like that of Telegonus, unleashes a reverberating doom which culminates in a fatal encounter with an enraged parent (Metamorphoses, Bk. VIII). Similarly Merope, forgetting her divine origins and marrying a mortal, “sins” unintentionally for humanly understandable motives, and pays with the permanent loss of her beloved when changed into a pale, distant star. Also the individual's doom is again not treated in isolation, but is integrated in a gallery of grief, encompassing Demeter, Dryope and Hyrie, to suggest both its representative and its heightened form: “Are they as one with this woman? … / These have their bitterness … / … but thou above all art an alien” (p. 138). And the series of thematic correspondences is completed when Telegonus undergoes a kind of life in death. He is transformed, like his half-brother Telemachus, from a bold actor into a musing watcher. The final scene shows him mute, helpless, “outside the fume of funeral rites” (p. 97), before a fatalistic insight which is shared and articulated by Sisyphus, Merope's husband, as “who may set lips at the lords and repine?” Obviously metamorphosis is here no longer a leitmotif loosely linking separate vignettes, nor are its circumstances a matter of indifference or even amusement, as is at times the case in Ovid. Rather it becomes a synecdoche for human suffering and inescapable restraints, which challenges accepted theodicies, and provides an unqualified dramatization of that contemporary, existential malaise which Kendall in 1864 had identified with “an alien darkness on the front of things” (“To Henry Halloran”, p. 304).

On another level, these poems afford extended figures for their narrator's dilemma, as the prelude to Telegonus's story suggests. This longer work deals, we are told, with “things … like to shapes / That come of darkness” (p. 93), that is, it projects what would otherwise remain an inarticulable menace. Relatedly, the character of Merope's exemplary alienation is to be “Girt with the halos that vex thee, and wrapt in a grief beyond name” (p. 138) which, for Charles Harpur's direct successor, would have stood as a potential figure for the saintly martyrdom called forth by devotion to poesy.²¹ Specifically, what the complementary and iterated motifs of these works reveal is indeed a secret dread too dark for explicit utterance: the presentiment of irremediable, personal discomfiture and the utter failure of his literary aspirations.²² A poetic calling emerges as a baneful and unrelenting given of birth. It is to be pursued with loyal, loving heart, but over its repercussions the individual has little or no control. The foreseeable consequences are severance from accepted supports (figured as an unavoidable contravention of origins), and socially punishable error or “sin.” Ultimately the negative rebound may lead to a diminution or crippling of potential, presented variously as Merope “deprived of her dowery of light” (Kendall's phrase, p. 137), or Telegonus, reduced by “sharper pains than swords,” to “lay at wait, / With fastened mouth” (p. 97), with the quester-lover finally alienated both from his former self and from the object of his desire. In short, even the purest devotion miscarries to end in tragedy in unresponsive, incomprehensible surroundings—a verdict fully justified by the lot of colonial writers whom Kendall admired, such as Harpur, Deniehy and Michael (“men set out to work the ends of Fate / Which fill the world with tales of many tears,” p. 95); and a prospective destiny which the younger man, in coming years, would try desperately to elude.

Although the poems of this period offer little promise of being the “means of a man's salvation,” they do provide another order of revelation, though perhaps not always of what Kendall would have wished. For the poet, faced like his personae with the dearth of explanatory power in inherited creeds, and with deteriorating external circumstances, was negotiating a difficult course between the generally applicable and the locally specific, in ways which served rather to confirm than to alleviate his dilemmas. Yet the alternative of choosing silence and perhaps avoiding additional suffering was beyond him. He could only project it admiringly in Telemachus who, in stemming innate impulse, halts further tragedy and earns the epithet “wise.” Instead, he shared affinities with Sisyphus, the inconsolable spouse of Merope, who appropriates the language of Solomon and Christian salvation to celebrate desire maintained, in spite of destitution and an inveterately hostile environment:

‘Therefore,’ he saith, ‘I am sick for thee, Merope, faint for the tender Touch of thy mouth, and the eyes like the lights of an altar to me; But lo, thou art far, and thy face is a still and a sorrowful splendour! And the storm is abroad with the rain on the perilous straits of the sea.’

(p. 138)

The consequent risk of self-exposure and adverse findings left the poet feeling perilously vulnerable, and would lead to the omission of a later piece, “Galatea”, from Leaves from Australian Forests. But to understand this further instance of Kendall's uneasy involvement with works based on Old World material, we must follow in detail the movement they trace in the ensuing years of gathering crisis, from portrayals of failed heroic and imaginative endeavour, like “King Saul at Gilboa” and “Ogyges,” to an unremarked shift in “Daphne” and “To Damascus” to matter denoting new found belief.

By the late 1860s the poet's situation, despite his best efforts, had worsened. Having long supported his trying family, Kendall sought happiness, and presumably also escape, in marriage to Charlotte Rutter in 1868. The result was a complex family imbroglio, clouded by reciprocal and shifting recriminations, which cost him lodgings, furnishings, and further uncovered debts.²³ Disenchantment was swift and complete. The aspiring man of letters now found himself with compounded woes and new responsibilities which he could not meet. His prospective salary was consumed by crippling debts, avenues to career advancement seemed closed, and his very health and literary productivity were gravely threatened. Flight to Melbourne alone seemed to offer a chance of solvency and recovery in 1869, or as he put it bluntly to W. F. McCarthy on 20th May: “I saved my life by the step I took in leaving Sydney. There I had become a complete invalid. And what with official jealousy and family persecution, I had no chance to become better” (Kxx). Feeding into this sense of impending crisis was his ineffectual struggle for faith, of which he had written prophetically in “Eighteen Hundred and Sixty Four”:

God help us all! If that lone Faith we have
          Were reft from us by any ruthless fate,
Who, sisters, looking down a gloomy grave,
          Would have the strength to stay behind and wait?

(p. 299)

Then, like the narrator of “The Voyage of Telegonus”, he had found himself “as on hard hurtful hills” (p. 93), midway on a spiritual search for that “subtle strength” without which he would assuredly “halt, and faint, and fall” (p. 298). By April 1869, the quest seemed doomed to foreclosure, and personal debacle in Sydney inevitable.

These climactic events coincided with, and are arguably reflected in, the highpoint of his adaptation of non-Australian matter during 1868-69. Subtle shifts of emphasis in recurring motifs appear linked to his deteriorating circumstances. Less stress is laid on dilemmas arising from calling or birthright than on the continuity of heroic instinct in the face of morale-sapping reverses, and on supremely alienated figures threatened with unavoidable death, as in “King Saul at Gilboa”. There Saul's genuine remorse and repentance for the error of “vengeance stayed at Amalek” (p. 107) are set at nought by an inflexible destiny,²⁴ while “Ogyges” provides a complementary and climactic verdict on human impotence. Whereas Telegonus and Sisyphus are spatially but not emotionally separated from the object of love, in “Ogyges” Thebe remains beseechingly present. Yet Ogyges himself, although he does not literally take root, is effectively engulfed by debilitating psychological and physiological processes. Portrayed as a benumbed rock- or tree-like form, his very being is withered and almost crushed, atrophied to “casual eyes” and “careless mutterings” (p. 102). The pull of instinctual passion is still known to him in the hunter's glee, but he is unmoved by its highest manifestation in the tantalizingly physical projection of his beloved—tragically and comprehensively cut off from the presumed reason for his dire predicament, and from his noblest impulse:

Bethink you, doth the wan Aegyptian count
This passion, wasting like an unfed flame,
Of any worth now; seeing that his thighs
Are shrunken to a span; and that the blood
Which used to spin tumultuous down his sides
Of life in leaping moments of desire,
Is drying like a thin and sluggish stream
In withered channels—think you, doth he pause
For golden Thebe and her red young mouth?

(p. 104)²⁵

This more unsettling portrayal of loss is in keeping with Kendall's changing circumstances. In the mid-sixties, the poet's lot is envisaged as an arduous task, imposed by destiny and rendered virtually unfulfillable by local conditions. Events by the close of the decade, however, had generated a pessimistic sense of finality. Overtaxed physically, mentally and emotionally, he felt himself to be aging and sinking fast, and forebodings of imminent eclipse are conveyed through the unremitting demise of bold warrior figures. The creative, “secret power [burning] within” (A160) faced extinction; and Kendall could foresee a time when circumstances might reduce his past efforts to fading memories, and him to a broken, moping shadow of his former self.²⁶

A crisis point had clearly been reached which called for urgent remedial action, as is evident in testimonies to artistic impotence in the two poems of April 1869, “Ogyges” and “Galatea.” In the former, its portrayal of human bafflement and negation assumes specific prosodic reference through Apollo-like Octis, “that fair-haired prophet of the sun and stars” (p. 104). Like Thebe, with whom this shepherd would “count it sweet past all sweets of love / To die,” Octis is wedded to hopeless desires, suggested by the multiple resonances of “die.”²⁷ His ethereal craft, linked with saving mist or comforting dream, can neither ameliorate her longing nor achieve its own consummation: underscoring the same incapacity of art to avert individual tragedy which is depicted in “Galatea.” The original story, as transmitted by Ovid, focuses on violent passion and thwarted love. Its climax comes when the nymph Galatea, lying in the arms of young and handsome Acis, is suddenly disturbed by the musically accompanied addresses of the hideous Cyclops. These detail the material gifts by which he hoped to gain her: offering for beauty, in essence, a natural bounty of which his own attributes partake. His suit, however, is spurned, leading him to slay the successful lover with a huge rock. Kendall's version deftly transforms the rivalry of love into a paradigm of the unavailing efforts of poetry's disciples to attain their goals in the here and now. The young shepherd Acis is portrayed as a type of the supreme artist, whose reed-flute keeps pace with, and leads to the fulfilment of, his passion (“Then he who shaped the cunning tune, by keen desire made bolder, / Fell fainting, like a fervent moon, upon the sea-nymph's shoulder” [p. 219]). Galatea, like so many of the author's distant goddesses, embodies an ideal so fabulous as to defy and yet demand attainment (“the heart fell dead without her”): a reading confirmed by the fate of Acis, which shows consummation to issue in, or even be synonymous with death. Finally, the uncouth Cyclops emerges as a Kendall refraction or surrogate. The lengthy, elaborate song of proposal, which in Ovid rests happily within a corporeally bounded realm, is replaced by a singer who characteristically is pursuing the uncatchable, the inexpressible, but is doomed to failure by his physical limitations:

‘Ah, Galatê,’ said Polypheme, ‘I would that I could find thee
Some finest tone of hill or stream, wherewith to lull and bind thee!
‘What lyre is left of marvellous range, whose subtle strings, containing
Some note supreme, might catch and change, or set thy passion waning?—

(p. 220)

Earlier tell-tale similes, like “Hair balmy as the blossoming South” (p. 219), identified “Galatea” before final revision with a specifically colonial muse and local predicament. These underline links between the Cyclops' deformity and failings and a putative crisis in authorial confidence. In Kendall's case, longed-for personal resolutions and recompense for constant endeavours, figured here as loving fulfilment, remained out of reach. His verse, far from supplementing the teachings of faith, was affirming grounds for pessimism at a time when he most needed inner strength. Also the advancement which poetry could bring him was obviously limited in an unappreciative society where, as he fully recognized, letters counted for little compared to sporting or business acumen. “Galatea” encapsulated self-reproach and black despair, which could terminate in the crushing of imaginative impulse: a haunting fear reiterated obsessively in these reworkings of classical material through human figures reduced to either a “fastened mouth” or the quiet of silvan matter. Before a climactic, local version of the Cyclops' “stone of death” (p. 219), Kendall would seek escape as an all-round writer in Melbourne, and to confirm his professional profile through the publication of a second volume of verse. There the painful revelations of “Galatea” would have been out of place, leading to its postponed republication years later in Songs from the Mountains where, read out of context, it aroused neither controversy nor biographical interest.

The correlation of personal and poetic records achieves its logical climax in the second half of 1869. Recognition that his situation in Sydney was futile and untenable led, not to Ogygian resignation, but to the relinquishment of his post in the New South Wales Civil Service at the end of March, and to publication of “Galatea” a fortnight later in the Argus. The subsequent move to Melbourne represented a desperate staking of all on his one remaining resource, literary talent. Prospects of silence and impotence had to be put behind him, and determination shown to live down the falterings of the past. These needs are faithfully reflected in an abrupt movement away from tragic portrayals to accounts of individual salvation based on classical and biblical models in “Daphne” (August) and “To Damascus” (October). There neatly didactic structures dispel the prior sense of inexplicable doom, and the Pauline prototype of sudden conversion from sinful zeal in a false cause serves both as a recantation of previous, self-undermining poetic speculation, and as a manifesto of new-found resolve. Similarly, implications of predetermination are no longer negative, while, through the unexpectedly elected Saul, a fervent hope is signalled that individual erring or misconceptions need not permanently debar as God's advocate one “Who would think for the many, and fight for the mass” (p. 83). The reinstatement of redemptive themes goes hand in hand with reaffirmation of the putative public role of verse, and of hopes for a new start in life: ending by poetic fiat and individual action, if not by internal conviction, that threatening state of mute alienation which the poet seemed destined to share with his boldest protagonists. It was a desperate decision, and one doomed to miscarry. Lacking “happy Assurances” or the well-springs of “subtle strength”, he “would be cast down indeed”, as he had predicted prophetically to Mrs. Selwyn five years before, in the southern metropolis which would soon assume to him the aspect of a “gloomy, flinty-hearted city”.

Notes

1. The term is central to Harold Bloom's influential theory outlined in The Anxiety of Influence (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).

2. The figure, of course, suggests their mission as originators, in contradistinction to a standard image for the burden of precursor knowledge, the euphobe dwarfed beneath a colossal, sculptured form. The latter did not need to be whole, but even if only depicted as a towering head or limb, it represented the awesome grandeur of past achievements. A well known painting on this theme is reproduced, and its significance discussed, in W.J. Bate, The Burden of the Past: Romanticism and the Classical Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).

3. On the specific dates and circumstances of his admissions for psychiatric treatment see Donovan Clarke, “New Light on Henry Kendall”, Australian Literary Studies, 2 (1966), 211-13.

4. Kendall's salary increased during the decade, but so did his liabilities:

   At first the salary was not very great, being 35/- a week, but from 1st January 1864 it was raised to £150 per annum, when Kendall was appointed one of the permanent clerks in the Department. He remained in that position, and on the same salary, until the end of 1866 when he was transferred to the Colonial Secretary's Office under Henry Parkes, with an increase of £50 per annum.

   (T.T.Reed, The Life and Poetical Works of Henry Kendall. Unpublished Ph.D dissertation [University of Adelaide, 1952], p. 116. My text and page reference are based on a revised copy of the dissertation held at the Mitchell Library, Sydney. This page was originally numbered 119).

5. See, for instance, “Loves of the Poets” (1 October 1864), where the ridiculing attack is loosely based on “To Henry Halloran”.

6. Already is his letter of September 1862, Kendall rehearses an impressive list of titles read, and his work contains scattered reworkings of Harpur motifs or tableaux, such as the striking image of “Sydney Harbour”

   … like a shield
   Of marvellous gold dropt in his fiery flight
   By some lost angel in the elder days,
   When Satan faced and fought Omnipotence

   (p. 395),

   which was apparently inspired by a related description of “The Deep by that Isle embossed” from Harpur's “The Slave's Story”:

   Like a vast shield of fretted gold
   Dropt by some worsted Elder God,
   When on his track, where'er he trod,
   Jove's chasing thunders rolled.

   (p. 436)

7. A date following the title of an individual work refers to its first recorded publication.

8. Here and in subsequent paragraphs I quote from K: Ackland, ed., Henry Kendall: Poetry Prose & Selected Correspondence (1993) to make immediately clear to the reader which passages are Kendall's and which are Harpur's.

9. Compare this doom with Egremont's redemption, ushered in by the words: “O verily our God / Hath those in his peculiar care for whom / The daily prayers of spotless Womanhood / And helpless Infancy are offered up!” (p. 169).

10. On the widespread nature of this program, and on Harpur's crucial place in it, see George Nadel, Australia's Colonial Culture: Ideas, Men and Institutions in Mid-Nineteenth Century Eastern Australia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).

11. From a letter to Mrs. A.E. Selwyn, dated 2 January 1864, which is discussed below.

12. These important statements on belief have been neglected, apparently because Kendall's correspondent was the wife of a minster. While this circumstance may help to explain why these topics would have found in her a ready interlocutor, the fact that his intended audience was ecclesiastical renders, if anything, more striking his recurrent admissions of religious malaise. Words addressed to the clergyman himself are predictably conventional, whereas letters to his wife are confessional in nature, and place a number of the poet's abiding themes within the context of current spiritual debate.

13. This evidence, moreover, is not isolated. In a letter to the Reverend A.E. Selwyn of 7 May 1863, for example, he also reports his participation in another form of contemporary spiritual questing, this time spiritualism, which he dubbed, at best, a “wayside gloom emanating from the Great Central Truth” (ML C199).

14. Later in the same letter he elaborates on its capacity to pierce through to truths and render them “everlastingly new—everlastingly suggestive”, concluding: “Poetry is very often a potent means of good. An hour with Tennyson's ‘Idylls’ fits me for a week of storm afterwards” (K213).

15. Although this list of his mythopoeic productions could be considerably enlarged with an expansion of the time-frame, the works of these years include his highly acclaimed poems, and also provide important insights into his poetic practice. Moreover, given that Kendall apparently wrote for and achieved immediate newspaper or journal acceptance, an approximate correlation has been assumed between the date of composition and the first printed appearance of a piece.

16. Sydney Morning Herald, 11 June 1866, p. 93.

17. Vivian Smith, in the section on “Poetry” from The Oxford History of Australian Literature, ed. Leonie Kramer (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981), expresses well the accepted view that “the need to reinterpret an old story, yet to keep close to fact, seems to have had a salutary, disciplinary effect on Kendall's art” (p. 286), which virtually assumes a hiatus between personal and poetic concerns. For a survey of critical response to these poems see W. H. Wilde, Henry Kendall (Boston: Twayne, 1876), pp. 75-76.

18. From a letter of 1876 to J. Sheridan Moore, quoted in T.T. Reed, “Kendall's Satiric Humour”, Southerly, 42 (1982), 375.

19. Quotations of Ovid are from his Metamorphoses, trans. by Mary H. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955).

20. Lemprière's Classical Dictionary emphasizes the monstrous, fear-inspiring attributes of the satyr. See the entry entitled “Pan”.

21. The association of poetic calling with a torment or sorrow-engendering clasp is a recurring motif in Harpur, as in “The Dream by the Fountain”:

    Sighed—for the fire-robe of Thought had enwound thee,
    Betok'ning how much that the happy most dread,
    And whence there should follow, howe'er it renowned thee,
    What sorrows of heart, and what labors of head!

    (p. 265)

22. Other readings, of course, are possible. “The Voyage of Telegonus”, for instance, could be viewed as a refracted discourse on colonial origins, conveying an uneasy awareness that poetic self-reliance in this new realm demanded a traumatic rejection of enabling traditions. Similarly “Merope, lost to thyself and thy lover” (p. 137) could be read as a gendered trope projecting Kendall's sense of true art and its devotee deprived of fulfilment in an uncomprehending environment. These are, however, essentially related variants on the more private and chronologically precise interpretation offered here.

23. For Kendall's version of these events see his letter to Dr. J.E. Neild, dated 22 June 1869 (K219-22).

24. For further discussion of this work and its implications see Michael Ackland, “‘Towards the Shadow’: Henry Kendall and the mid-century Crisis of Faith”, Westerly, 35 (1990), 73-77.

25. The centrality of emotion to reading “Ogyges” has been noted by R. J. Dingley, “The Track of Ogygia: A Note on Henry Kendall”, Southerly, 46 (1986), 354-55, though he argues for ironic authorial detachment from a persona who has sealed his fate through a failure of true love. Sustaining this case, however, involves questionable privilegings of one aspect of the text over another, so that, for instance, allusions to Demeter and Dryope are dismissed as being “arbitrary and … largely decorative in function” (p. 358), and intransigent phrases become “lapses into obscurity” (p. 358). See Michael Ackland, “‘Behind the Veil’: Metamorphosis and Alienation in the Poetry of Henry Kendall”, Southerly, 51 (1991), 115-16 for a different reading of these figures.

26. Harry Heseltine has also remarked that this poem “is clearly a projection of his [Kendall's] situation at the time of its first appearance” (“The Metamorphoses of Henry Kendall”, Southerly, 41 [1981], 382), just as he notes the element of “wish-fulfilment dream” informing the later “To Damascus” (p. 380).

27. His name probably derives from the entry on “Ocnus” in Lemprière's Classical Dictionary (1788; rpt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984): “A man remarkable for his industry. He had a wife as remarkable for her profusion; she always consumed and lavished away whatever the labours of her husband had earned”, which gave rise to a proverb “applied to labour which meets no return, and which is totally lost” (p. 415).

Textual Note and Abbreviations

A number of page references in the text are accompanied by a symbol indicating the edition from which the quotation is taken. This has been done to avoid confusion and excessive footnoting. Wherever practicable, standard editions are cited, such as Elizabeth Perkins, ed., The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1984) or T.T. Reed, ed., The Poetical Works of Henry Kendall (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1966), though occasionally in the case of Charles Harpur, where variants abound and have been printed elsewhere, I have drawn on other editions.

A: Michael Ackland, ed., Charles Harpur: Selected Poetry and Prose (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1986)

K. Michael Ackland, ed., Henry Kendall: Poetry, Prose & Selected Correspondence (St. Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1993)

M: Adrian Mitchell, ed., Charles Harpur (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1973)

ML: Indicates a manuscript held at the Mitchell Library, Sydney

Q: John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (London: Cassell, 1910)

R: George Mackaness, ed., Odes of Michael Massey Robinson: First Poet Laureate of Australia (1754-1826) (Sydney: Ford, 1946)

W: William Charles Wentworth, Australasia. Facsimile edition introduced by G.A. Wilkes (Sydney: Department of English, University of Sydney, 1982)