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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
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