IN LIGHTER VEIN.

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, Volume VII, Issue 3, 1 December 1902, Page 219

IN LIGHTER VEIN.

A Poet of the Commonwealth.

By " RUSTICUS."

W-N these strenuous days of colo|l| nial enterprise and activity, I i and this corrugated iron and JA record-breaking age of feveriskness and haste, it is gratifying in the extreme to find that our indigenous muse is not wholly neglected. " Slumbering in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave/" lies one who played a sturdy part in developing a literature racy of the soil and typical of the Australian character. I speak of Gordon. In bold contrast to Gordon's work is that of another of the A ustralian poets, Henry Kendall. Tn his " Lyrics of Leaf and Stream " we find a distinctive and sincere note, a careful and delicate construction, and a purity of thought which entitle him to a high place among- the poets of Australia. Then -there is Boake, the Australian Keats, Paterson, the Australian Kipling, and Lawson, the vigour and force of whose work mark him out for greater things. Nor may -we omit Brunton Stephens, who died in Brisbane on May the 30th. In his " Convict Once " we have the one sustained effort of Australian verse. Far be it from me to damn with faint praise, as does the Australian " Review of Reviews " for July in a short notice of Stephens. Australian literature is yet in its infancy, though the signs are present that a literature will be evolved worthy of the race.

Naturally, however, the merits of Australian poetry offer a ready

target for the witticisms of the English literary magazines, which revel in such impolite discussions as : — " Is Australian poetry the real thing V " Why is Canadian literature of a much higher type V " The best of our Australian poets/ a contemporary calmly informs us, " are melodious, but not profound, and the best of them have only the gifts of the ballad maker I" Now this may be very true. But wliat are we to expect ? We may not forget that a poet is to an unconscionable degree the product of his age and environment, and, as such, Australian poets have been allotted place in the realms of poesy. And again, as to Canadian verse, we doubt extremely if it can produce a group of poets of the calibre of Gordon, Stephens, or Kendall. Even in the realm of the novel we may not forget that Australia can lay good claim to the author of " The Seats of the Mighty," much of whose education was acquired on the deck of a Murray River steamboat, or while he was on the staff of a Sydney newspaper.

" Quoi qu'il en soit," we are not concerned here with the relative merits of the poetry and romance produced by the two countries. Our poet, " poeta noster," is one whose claim to a niche in the Commonwealth's Temple of the Muses has never been pressed ; who, nevertheless, is a poet in no mean sense of the word ; possesses a strong vein of humour which

chiefly moves him to lisp in numbers, and lias the knack of hitting off the objects of his fun in a telling line or two. His style is modelled on that of Bret Harte ; bristles with slang and colloquialisms ; is scant in its respect for metrical rules. And yet, perchance, " Hits ! Skits ! and Jingles !" will be read and chuckled over when " Sea Spray and Smoke Drift " has vanished in the thin air of commonplace, and the scholarly verse of " Convict Once " is thickly rust encrusted, spite all the " labor limae " bestowed upon it. For our poet's verse has a lilt not wholly unmusical and a harmony which rings pleasingly true. Especially is it in his favour that he is never tedious. His brevity appeals to us. It is no more certain, as Mr Birrell says, that Sairey Gamp liked her beer drawn mild, than that the average modern reader likes his poetry cut short, so that he who runs may read, in the following lines the " Impressionist School " is neatly hit off :— " I'd love to be an artist, An artist free from guile, And wear long hair And a great big stare, And a transcendental smile. " I'd love to paint a picture, A picture full of thrill, Of a knock-kneed horse On the Rand wick course, And the moon behind the hill. " I'd love to paint a landscape, A landscape bold and free, With a Vandyok cliff And a cvimson skiff On a lilac-tinted sea." Goodge's humour, be it granted, is glaringly patent ; but " Viator " too rarely has the time or inclination to unearth the thoughts of a Browning ; " thoughts/ as Wordsworth says, " that often lie too deep for tears." The^ following- " Ode to Maoriland " is a c?;e.ui, a cameo, a vignette. One can scarcely call it poetry. Yet it fulfils its purpose a*

bravely as many a more pretentious ode : — " Sweet Laud of the Maoii Where grows the tall Kaori, And ferns grow in splendour in dells that are flaori, Where the mountains are taori, And hot springs are shaori, And song birds sing blythe, sweet land of the Maori." Here we have Cook, Baedeker, or whoever caters for the übiquitous tourist in New Zealand, condensed and hydraulically compressed into some half-dozen lines. Considered as a purely descriptive effort, the ode is beyond criticism. As classics, certain odes by Keats, Shelley and Dryden may claim precedence. Lovers of " the weed " will, I fancy, agree with me that Goodge is particularly happy in the following hymn to the praise of " My Lady Nicotine :"— •■ When sorrows gather, troubles crowd, And when with grief the heart is bowed, What solace in thy fragrant cloud ! Immortal Weed, Tobacco. " Away with women and with wine ! What charms have they compai^ed with thine? Consoling, comforting divine, Immortal Weed, Tobacco. " No sonsie lass or winsome girl, That sets the senses in a whirl, Can match the joyous, upward curl Of gentle smoke, Tobacco. " To Hades with the flowing bowl That blights the mind and warps the soul ! But give me still my daily dole Of generous Tobacco. " What hurts, what ills, what woes, what harms, What worries, troubles, or alarms Can e'er withstand thy wondrous charms, Sweet soothing Weed, Tobacco ! " This is our poet at his best ; no lofty flight, no studied elegance ; a simple tribute in simpler words, a smoke ring for "my lady's " finger. It is that admirable essayist, Mr Augustine Birrell, in his " Obiter Dicta/ who, speaking of

Milton's " vesper smoke/ remarks : " It is pleasant to remember that one pipe of tobacco. It consecrates one's own." So here Goodge gives us " what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." Did he, I wonder, know his Rubaiyat ? I am convinced he did, and penned the above to counteract the effects of old Omar's incarnadined tribute to " The Grape that can with Logic absolute The two and seventy jarring sects confute : The sovereign Alchemist that in a trice Life's leaden metal into Gold transmutes."' /'The Olden Golden Days" consists of some eight verses with a musical swing, which state the case admirably for those contented souls who find this present passably supportable, spite the querulous plaint of our friend from Horace ' " Oh, some may sing of the Olden Days, Of the Days of Long Ago ! When the noble knight in his armour bright Went forth to meet the foe. And some may sing of the tournaments, And some find poeans of praise For the songs they sang when the earth was young, In the Olden Golden Days ! " But I will sing of the peasant's hut, And his earthen floor, a bog, And his couch of straw, and a bone to gnaw Like a Nineteenth Century Dog ! And the coarse rough cloak and the unkempt hair, And the dull and vacuous gaze, And the foetid smell from an earthly hell, In the Olden Golden Days. Who please may sing of the knights and squires, And the glittering helms of gold, And the prancing steeds and the daring deeds. In the brave old days of old ; But I'm not gone on the old romance, For a close survey betrays, They tell us a lot of ridiculous rot Of the Olden Golden Days ! " As Kipling is the prophet of the Tommy Atkins cult, so is Goodge

the poet of the shearer and the stockman. Several of his efforts portray these features of the Australian landscape with an entirely sympathetic and faithful pen. The measure is always suited to the theme ; the muse, a homely one, but eloquent. I vow there is something of Robbie Burns about our Goodge ; scarce all the freshness and upwelling of that little Valclusa Fountain, but a certain joyous irresponsiveness, which gladdens us immeasurably. And " que voulez vous 1" " A Shearer's Life is the Life for me, Hip, hip, hurrah ! From care and trouble a shearer's free As ever a man desired to be, No worry to worry about has he, Hip, hip, hurrah ! " He mounts his horse and away he'll go, Hip, hip hurrah ! (That's when he isn't on foot, you know, And travels a hundred miles or so, And then, perhaps there isn't a show) Hip, hip, hurrah ! " etc. In " The Great Colonial Adjective " Goodge apostrophizes a colonial epithet which graces conversation with monotonous frequency. The verses are inimitably funny, as irresistible to a colonial, I fancy, as " Scots Wha Hae " to a Scotsman. I commend their perusal to any one who can take his humour a little broad once in a while. This, at all events, runs no risk of being caviare to the general. The realistic freedom of " Come to Orange " reminds one of " Mandalay." " The sunshine and the palm trees and the tinkly temple bells " were very present in my mind as I read : — " If you're roasting up at Dubbo, if you're boiling up at Bourke, Come to Orange where the breezes are a-blowing ! If you're gasping up at Darling, -where it's sudden death to work, Come to Orange where the breezes are a-blowing ! If you live in any village on the other sideof H 1,

Where the average thermometer's a hundred in the well, And the stagnant air is reeking with an Asiatic smell, Come to Orange where the breezes are a-biowing ! Chorus. "There is dew upon the daises in the morning, There's a freshness and a sweetness in the air, And you feel the balmy breeze Come" a- wafting through the trees, As you can't feel it any other where ! " There is poetry in this ; it has local colour ; it has Australian atmosphere. In fact, Goodge has done nothing better ; and the verses will repay perusal. I quote, in conclusion, from an amusing three-versed effort entitled " Australian Literature," in which Goodge discusses the topic alluded to at the beginning of this article : " There's the everlasting swaggie with his bluey on his back, Who is striking out for sunset on the nevernever track ; O'er the flat and barren country we can hear him tramping still, And he's Billy from the Darling, or he's Murrumbidgee Bill ; And his togs are pretty rusty, and his blucher boots are brown, And his shirt ain't just the colour of the draper's clerk's in town, And he's looking for the station tank his water bag to fill, And wherever you may find him he's the same old Bill. " There is ' blanky ' this and ' blanky ' that, and more expressive terms, Indicative of the vigour of our literary germs ; And the Sydney Morning Herald musn't take us all for flats, We're a literary nation, and we ain't got Rats ! " Quite so ; I agree with Goodge. Doubtless he might put his finding more elegantly. But the fact remains. In other words there is as much real poetry in the " everlast-

ing swaggie with his bluey on his back/ as in the swain bucolic tootling away the leaden hours on oaten reed. Time has moulded and mellowed the latter into the current medium for the voicing of the pastoral strain. Is it over sanguine of us to expect that the unborn centuries of the rhetorician may detect in this " same old Bill " weary 'neath. the wattle boughs, a distinct if humorous resemblance to the much- travel led one of " The Odyssey," also weary and wise with the wisdom of the road, who has but lately suffered rehabilitation at the hands of Mr Stephen Phillips ? Can it be that the type is continuous though changing in outward guise ? Can it be that in the prefix "Ul " of Ulysses we have the earliest form of our abbreviated " Bill !" That allowing for difference in climatic and social conditions, the uncommercial traveller of the Epic days meets us again as " the same old Bill," hailing from the Darling or Murrumbidgee ? I venture to advance the theory.

Anyhow the fact remains that the nation which has produced in its literary infancy " Robbery Under Arms ** and Marcus Clarke's " For the Term of his Natural Life," styled by Lord Rosehery " the most terrible of all novels ;" in verse the works of Gordon, Stephens, Paterson, and even of such writers as Goodge can lay no mean claim to the title of a literary nation.

Ay, and the world can. very well do with its Goodges. We require all our poets, our singers. The lighter vein is oftimes as welcome as the more serious ; the " pilly willy winky, winky popp " of the banjo as cheery a marching strain in our "■ Wanderjahre " as softer Lydian airs and melancholy dirges. Our literature has many an " organ voice/* " many a name to resound for ages," many a singer of the eternal melodies. Surely in that goodly company elbow room can be

found for one whose song, if homely, is a right sturdy and manly one. Yes, I fancy, somewhere over there on Helicon Hill is a tiny green .slope where the G-oodges of song may walk together and hold sweet converse, winning now and then a kindly nod from the dwellers on the heights ; from

Sophocles and old Dan Chaucer and Shakespeare. For they're good fellows all of them, I ween, and will welcome a stave or two from a new land, a land whose past is not yet history ; whose present has all the charm of vigorous youth ; whose future is rich in promise ; rightly named the " Land of the Dawning 1 ."