قراءة كتاب Poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon

    At rest! Hard by the margin of that sea
    Whose sounds are mingled with his noble verse,
    Now lies the shell that never more will house
    The fine, strong spirit of my gifted friend.
    Yea, he who flashed upon us suddenly,
    A shining soul with syllables of fire,
    Who sang the first great songs these lands can claim
    To be their own; the one who did not seem
    To know what royal place awaited him
    Within the Temple of the Beautiful,
    Has passed away; and we who knew him, sit
    Aghast in darkness, dumb with that great grief,
    Whose stature yet we cannot comprehend;
    While over yonder churchyard, hearsed with pines,
    The night-wind sings its immemorial hymn,
    And sobs above a newly-covered grave.

    The bard, the scholar, and the man who lived
    That frank, that open-hearted life which keeps
    The splendid fire of English chivalry
    From dying out; the one who never wronged
    A fellow-man; the faithful friend who judged
    The many, anxious to be loved of him,
    By what he saw, and not by what he heard,
    As lesser spirits do; the brave great soul
    That never told a lie, or turned aside
    To fly from danger; he, I say, was one
    Of that bright company this sin-stained world
    Can ill afford to lose.

                They did not know,
    The hundreds who had read his sturdy verse,
    And revelled over ringing major notes,
    The mournful meaning of the undersong
    Which runs through all he wrote, and often takes
    The deep autumnal, half-prophetic tone
    Of forest winds in March; nor did they think
    That on that healthy-hearted man there lay
    The wild specific curse which seems to cling
    For ever to the Poet's twofold life!

    To Adam Lindsay Gordon, I who laid
    Two years ago on Lionel Michael's grave
    A tender leaf of my regard; yea I,
    Who culled a garland from the flowers of song
    To place where Harpur sleeps; I, left alone,
    The sad disciple of a shining band
    Now gone! to Adam Lindsay Gordon's name
    I dedicate these lines; and if 'tis true
    That, past the darkness of the grave, the soul
    Becomes omniscient, then the bard may stoop
    From his high seat to take the offering,
    And read it with a sigh for human friends,
    In human bonds, and gray with human griefs.

    And having wove and proffered this poor wreath,
    I stand to-day as lone as he who saw
    At nightfall through the glimmering moony mists,
    The last of Arthur on the wailing mere,
    And strained in vain to hear the going voice.

                  Henry Kendall.

PREFACE.

The poems of Gordon have an interest beyond the mere personal one which his friends attach to his name. Written, as they were, at odd times and leisure moments of a stirring and adventurous life, it is not to be wondered at if they are unequal or unfinished. The astonishment of those who knew the man, and can gauge the capacity of this city to foster poetic instinct, is that such work was ever produced here at all. Intensely nervous, and feeling much of that shame at the exercise of the higher intelligence which besets those who are known to be renowned in field sports, Gordon produced his poems shyly, scribbled them on scraps of paper, and sent them anonymously to magazines. It was not until he discovered one morning that everybody knew a couplet or two of "How we Beat the Favourite" that he consented to forego his anonymity and appear in the unsuspected character of a versemaker. The success of his republished "collected" poems gave him courage, and the unreserved praise which greeted "Bush Ballads" should have urged him to forget or to conquer those evil promptings which, unhappily, brought about his untimely death.

Adam Lindsay Gordon was the son of an officer in the English army, and was educated at Woolwich, in order that he might follow the profession of his family. At the time when he was a cadet there was no sign of either of the two great wars which were about to call forth the strength of English arms, and, like many other men of his day, he quitted his prospects of service and emigrated. He went to South Australia and started as a sheep farmer. His efforts were attended with failure. He lost his capital, and, owning nothing but a love for horsemanship and a head full of Browning and Shelley, plunged into the varied life which gold-mining, "overlanding", and cattle-driving affords. From this experience he emerged to light in Melbourne as the best amateur steeplechase rider in the colonies. The victory he won for Major Baker in 1868, when he rode Babbler for the Cup Steeplechase, made him popular, and the almost simultaneous publication of his last volume of poems gave him welcome entrance to the houses of all who had pretensions to literary taste. The reputation of the book spread to England, and Major Whyte Melville did not disdain to place the lines of the dashing Australian author at the head of his own dashing descriptions of sporting scenery. Unhappily, the melancholy which Gordon's friends had with pain observed increased daily, and in the full flood of his success, with congratulations pouring upon him from every side, he was found dead in the heather near his home with a bullet from his own