As red men die

Captive! Is there a hell to him like this?
A taunt more galling than the Huron's hiss?
He--proud and scornful, he--who laughed at law,
He--scion of the deadly Iroquois,
He--the bloodthirsty, he--the Mohawk chief,
He--who despises pain and sneers at grief,
Here in the hated Huron's vicious clutch,
That even captive he disdains to touch!

Captive! Butnever conquered; Mohawk brave
Stoops not to be to anyman a slave;
Least, to the puny tribe his soul abhors,
The tribe whose wigwams sprinkle Simcoe's shores.


Another Acrostic In the style of Father William

"Are you deaf, Father William!" the young man said,
"Did you hear what I told you just now?
"Excuse me for shouting! Don't waggle your head
"Like a blundering, sleepy old cow!
"A little maid dwelling in Wallington Town,
"Is my friend, so I beg to remark:
"Do you think she'd be pleased if a book were sent down
"Entitled 'The Hunt of the Snark?'"


"Pack it up in brown paper!" the old man cried,
"And seal it with olive-and-dove.
"I command you to do it!" he added with pride,


An Ode to Master Anthony Stafford to hasten Him into the Country

Come, spur away,
   I have no patience for a longer stay,
   But must go down
   And leave the chargeable noise of this great town:
   I will the country see,
   Where old simplicity,
   Though hid in gray,
   Doth look more gay
   Than foppery in plush and scarlet clad.
   Farewell, you city wits, that are
   Almost at civil war--
'Tis time that I grow wise, when all the world grows mad.

   More of my days
   I will not spend to gain an idiot's praise;
   Or to make sport


An Emu Hunt

West of Dubbo the west begins
The land of leisure and hope and trust,
Where the black man stalks with his dogs and gins
And Nature visits the settlers' sins
With the Bogan shower, that is mostly dust.
When the roley-poley's roots dry out
With the fierce hot winds and the want of rain,
They come uprooted and bound about
And dance in a wild fantastic rout
Like flying haystacks across the plain.

And the horses shudder and snort and shift
As the bounding mass of weeds goes past,


An Aboriginal Mothers's Lament

An Aboriginal Mother’s Lament
Charles Harpur


------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------

[About the year 1842 a party of stockmen, several of whom were afterwards hanged for the crime, made a wholesale slaughter of a small tribe of defenceless blacks; one woman only, with her infant, escaped from the murderers.]

Still farther would I fly, my child,
To make thee safer yet,
From the unsparing white man,
With his dread hand murder-wet!


Always for the First Time

Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occurring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness


Alone

The abode of the nightingale is bare,
Flowered frost congeals in the gelid air,
The fox howls from his frozen lair:
Alas, my loved one is gone,
I am alone:
It is winter.

Once the pink cast a winy smell,
The wild bee hung in the hyacinth bell,
Light in effulgence of beauty fell:
I am alone:
It is winter.

My candle a silent fire doth shed,
Starry Orion hunts o'erhead;
Come moth, come shadow, the world is dead:
Alas, my loved one is gone,
I am alone;
It is winter.


Ailsie, My Bairn

Lie in my arms, Ailsie, my bairn,--
Lie in my arms and dinna greit;
Long time been past syn I kenned you last,
But my harte been allwais the same, my swete.

Ailsie, I colde not say you ill,
For out of the mist of your bitter tears,
And the prayers that rise from your bonnie eyes
Cometh a promise of oder yeres.

I mind the time when we lost our bairn,--
Do you ken that time? A wambling tot,
You wandered away ane simmer day,
And we hunted and called, and found you not.


After Reading Antony And Cleopatra

I

As when the hunt by holt and field
Drives on with horn and strife,
Hunger of hopeless things pursues
Our spirits throughout life.
II
The sea's roar fills us aching full
Of objectless desire -
The sea's roar, and the white moon-shine,
And the reddening of the fire.
III
Who talks to me of reason now?
It would be more delight
To have died in Cleopatra's arms
Than be alive to-night.


After the Hunt

Underneath the windy mountain walls
Forth we rode, an eager band,
By the surges and the verges and the gorges,
Till the night was on the land—
On the hazy, mazy land!
Far away the bounding prey
Leapt across the ruts and logs,
But we galloped, galloped, galloped on,
Till we heard the yapping of the dogs—
The yapping and the yelping of the dogs.
Oh, it was a madly merry day
We shall not so soon forget,
And the edges and the ledges and the ridges


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