Great poems
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Australian Engineers
© Henry Lawson
Ah, well! but the case seems hopeless, and the pen might write in vain;
Address To A Child During A Boisterous Winter By My Sister
© William Wordsworth
WHAT way does the wind come? What way does he go?
He rides over the water, and over the snow,
The Never-Never Country
© Henry Lawson
By homestead, hut, and shearing-shed,
By railroad, coach, and track --
By lonely graves of our brave dead,
Up-Country and Out-Back:
The City Bushman
© Henry Lawson
It was pleasant up the country, City Bushman, where you went,
For you sought the greener patches and you travelled like a gent;
And you curse the trams and buses and the turmoil and the push,
Though you know the squalid city needn't keep you from the bush;
But we lately heard you singing of the `plains where shade is not',
And you mentioned it was dusty -- `all was dry and all was hot'.
The Fagot
© Jonathan Swift
Observe the dying father speak:
Try, lads, can you this bundle break?
Then bids the youngest of the six
Take up a well-bound heap of sticks.
O World Of Many Worlds
© Wilfred Owen
O World of many worlds, O life of lives,
What centre hast thou? Where am I?
O whither is it thy fierce onrush drives?
Fight I, or drift; or stand; or fly?
Past Carin'
© Henry Lawson
Now up and down the siding brown
The great black crows are flyin',
And down below the spur, I know,
Another `milker's' dyin';
Ben Duggan
© Henry Lawson
Jack Denver died on Talbragar when Christmas Eve began,
And there was sorrow round the place, for Denver was a man;
Jack Denver's wife bowed down her head -- her daughter's grief was wild,
And big Ben Duggan by the bed stood sobbing like a child.
But big Ben Duggan saddled up, and galloped fast and far,
To raise the longest funeral ever seen on Talbragar.
The Cockney Soul
© Henry Lawson
From Woolwich and Brentford and Stamford Hill, from Richmond into the Strand,
Oh, the Cockney soul is a silent soul as it is in every land!
But out on the sand with a broken band it's sarcasm spurs them through;
And, with never a laugh, in a gale and a half, 'tis the Cockney cheers the crew.
My Land and I
© Henry Lawson
They have eaten their fill at your tables spread,
Like friends since the land was won;
And they rise with a cry of "Australia's dead!"
With the wheeze of "Australia's done!"
The Ghost
© Henry Lawson
Down the street as I was drifting with the city's human tide,
Came a ghost, and for a moment walked in silence by my side --
Now my heart was hard and bitter, and a bitter spirit he,
So I felt no great aversion to his ghostly company.
Said the Shade: `At finer feelings let your lip in scorn be curled,
`Self and Pelf', my friend, has ever been the motto for the world.'
The Ships that Won't Go Down
© Henry Lawson
We hear a great commotion
'Bout the ship that comes to grief,
That founders in mid-ocean,
Or is driven on a reef;
Night On The Prairies
© Walt Whitman
NIGHT on the prairies;
The supper is over-the fire on the ground burns low;
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets:
I walk by myself-I stand and look at the stars, which I think now I
never realized before.
The Low Sky
© Robinson Jeffers
No vulture is here, hardly a hawk,
Could long wings or great eyes fly
Under this low-lidded soft sky?
The Artist. (Sonnet I.)
© Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nothing the greatest artist can conceive
That every marble block doth not confine
The Shearers
© Henry Lawson
No church-bell rings them from the Track,
No pulpit lights theirblindness--
'Tis hardship, drought, and homelessness
That teach those Bushmen kindness:
Waratah and Wattle
© Henry Lawson
Australia! Australia! so fair to behold-
While the blue sky is arching above;
The stranger should never have need to be told,
That the Wattle-bloom means that her heart is of gold.
And the Waratah's red with her love.
The Four Bridges
© Jean Ingelow
I love this gray old church, the low, long nave,
The ivied chancel and the slender spire;
No less its shadow on each heaving grave,
With growing osier bound, or living brier;
I love those yew-tree trunks, where stand arrayed
So many deep-cut names of youth and maid.
Up The Country
© Henry Lawson
Dreary land in rainy weather, with the endless clouds that drift
O'er the bushman like a blanket that the Lord will never lift --
Dismal land when it is raining -- growl of floods, and, oh! the woosh
Of the rain and wind together on the dark bed of the bush --
Ghastly fires in lonely humpies where the granite rocks are piled
In the rain-swept wildernesses that are wildest of the wild.
