The Waterfall

The song of the water
Doomed ever to roam,
A beautiful exile,
Afar from its home.

The cliffs on the mountain,
The grand and the gray,
They took the bright creature
And hurled it away!

I heard the wild downfall,
And knew it must spill
A passionate heart out
All over the hill.

Oh! was it a daughter
Of sorrow and sin,
That they threw it so madly
Down into the lynn?

.    .    .    .    .

And listen, my Sister,
For this is the song
The Waterfall taught me
The ridges among:

Oh where are the shadows
So cool and so sweet
And the rocks, saith the water,
With the moss on their feet?

Oh, where are my playmates
The wind and the flowers
The golden and purple
Of honey-sweet bowers,

Mine eyes have been blinded
Because of the sun;
And moaning and moaning
I listlessly run.

These hills are so flinty!
Ah! tell me, dark Earth,
What valley leads back to
The place of my birth?

What valley leads up to
The haunts where a child
Of the caverns I sported,
The free and the wild?

There lift me, it crieth,
I faint from the heat;
With a sob for the shadows
So cool and so sweet.

Ye rocks, that look over
With never a tear,
I yearn for one half of
The wasted love here!

My sister so wistful,
You know I believe,
Like a child for the mountains
This water doth grieve.

Ah! you with the blue eyes
And golden-brown hair,
Come closer and closer
And truly declare:

Supposing a darling
Once happened to sin,
In a passionate space,
Would you carry her in

If your fathers and mothers,
The grand and the gray,
Had taken the weak one
And hurled her away?

Henry Kendall

Henry Kendall was an Australian poet born on April 18, 1839, known for his lyrical and descriptive poetry reflecting the natural world and the colonial experience of Australia. He faced personal and financial difficulties throughout his life, which deeply influenced his works. His poetry collections include 'Leaves from Australian Forests' and 'Songs from the Mountains'. Kendall passed away on August 1, 1882, leaving a lasting impact on Australian literature.

Henry Kendall

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Bill the Bullock-Driver

Henry Kendall, Simple Poetry

English

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The strong sob of the chafing stream
That seaward fights its way
Down crags of glitter, dells of gleam,
Is in the hills to-day.

But far and faint, a grey-winged form
Hangs where the wild lights wane
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A ghost of wind and rain.

The soft white feet of afternoon
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The fierce, disastrous, flying fire,
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The air is full of mellow sounds,
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The Song of Arda

Low as a lute, my love, beneath the call
Of storm, I hear a melancholy wind;
The memorably mournful wind of yore
Which is the very brother of the one
That wanders, like a hermit, by the mound
Of Death, in lone Annatanam. A song
Was shaped for this, what time we heard outside
The gentle falling of the faded leaf
In quiet noons: a song whose theme doth turn
On gaps of Ruin and the gay-green clifts
Beneath the summits haunted by the moon.
Yea, much it travels to the dens of dole;
And in the midst of this strange rhyme, my lords,
Our Desolation like a phantom sits
With wasted cheeks and eyes that cannot weep
And fastened lips crampt up in marvellous pain.

A song in whose voice is the voice of the foam
And the rhyme of the wintering wave,
And the to...

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Narrara Creek

From the rainy hill-heads, where, in starts and in spasms,
Leaps wild the white torrent from chasms to chasms
From the home of bold echoes, whose voices of wonder
Fly out of blind caverns struck black by high thunder
Through gorges august, in whose nether recesses
Is heard the far psalm of unseen wildernesses
Like a dominant spirit, a strong-handed sharer
Of spoil with the tempest, comes down the Narrara.

Yea, where the great sword of the hurricane cleaveth
The forested fells that the dark never leaveth
By fierce-featured crags, in whose evil abysses
The clammy snake coils, and the flat adder hisses
Past lordly rock temples, where Silence is riven
By the anthems supreme of the four winds of heaven
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It cha...

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Kiama Revisited

We stood by the window and hearkened
To the voice of the runnels sea-driven,
While, northward, the mountain-heads darkened,
Girt round with the clamours of heaven.
One peak with the storm at his portal
Loomed out to the left of his brothers:
Sustained, and sublime, and immortal,
A king, and the lord of the others!
Beneath him a cry from the surges
Rang shrill, like a clarion calling;
And about him, the wind of the gorges
Went falling, and rising, and falling.
But I, as the roofs of the thunder
Were cloven with manifold fires,
Turned back from the wail and the wonder,
And dreamed of old days and desires.
A song that was made, I remembered
A song that was made in the gloaming
Of suns which are sunken and numbered
With times that my heart hath no h...

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The Voice in the Wild Oak

(Written in the shadow of 1872.)


Twelve years ago, when I could face
High heavens dome with different eyes
In days full-flowered with hours of grace,
And nights not sad with sighs
I wrote a song in which I strove
To shadow forth thy strain of woe,
Dark widowed sister of the grove!
Twelve wasted years ago.

But youth was then too young to find
Those high authentic syllables,
Whose voice is like the wintering wind
By sunless mountain fells;
Nor had I sinned and suffered then
To that superlative degree
That I would rather seek, than men,
Wild fellowship with thee!

But he who hears this autumn day
Thy more than deep autumnal rhyme,
Is one whose hair was shot with grey
By Grief instead of Time.
He has no need, like m...

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The River and the Hill

And they shook their sweetness out in their sleep,
On the brink of that beautiful stream,
But it wandered along with a wearisome song
Like a lover that walks in a dream:
So the roses blew
When the winds went through,
In the moonlight so white and so still;
But the river it beat
All night at the feet
Of a cold and flinty hill
Of a hard and senseless hill!

I said, We have often showered our loves
Upon something as dry as the dust;
And the faith that is crost, and the hearts that are lost
Oh! how can we wittingly trust?
Like the stream which flows,
And wails as it goes,
Through the moonlight so white and so still,
To beat and to beat
All night at the feet
Of a cold and flinty hill
Of a hard and senseless hill?

River, I ...

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