The Poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon | Page 3

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Poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon
[British-born Australian
Steeple-Chase Rider and Poet -- 1833-1870.]

[Note on text: Italicized stanzas will be indented 5 spaces. Italicized
words or phrases will be capitalized.
Lines longer than 75 characters
have been broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented
two spaces. Also,
some obvious errors, after being confirmed against
other sources, have been corrected.]
[Note: This etext was transcribed from an 1893 edition
published in
Melbourne.]
POEMS
by
ADAM LINDSAY GORDON
Sea Spray and Smoke Drift
Bush Ballads & Galloping Rhymes

Miscellaneous Poems
Ashtaroth: A Dramatic Lyric
In Memoriam.
(A. L. 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