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     It speeds, with the cry of the streams of the fountains     It chained to its sides, and dragged down from the mountains!     But when it goes forth from the slopes with a sally     Being strengthened with tribute from many a valley     It broadens and brightens, and thereupon marches     Above the stream sapphires and under green arches,     With the rhythm of majesty careless of cumber     Its might in repose and its fierceness in slumber     Till it beams on the plains, where the wind is a bearer     Of words from the sea to the stately Narrara!     Narrara! grand son of the haughty hill torrent,     Too late in my day have I looked at thy current     Too late in my life to discern and inherit     The soul of thy beauty, the joy of thy spirit!     With the years of the youth and the hairs of the hoary,     I sit like a shadow outside of thy glory;     Nor look with the morning-like feelings, O river,     That illumined the boy in the days gone for ever!     Ah! sad are the sounds of old ballads which borrow     One-half of their grief from the listeners sorrow;     And sad are the eyes of the pilgrim who traces     The ruins of Time in revisited places;     But sadder than all is the sense of his losses     That cometh to one when a sudden age crosses     And cripples his manhood. So, stricken by fate, I     Felt older at thirty than some do at eighty.     Because I believe in the beautiful story,     The poem of Greece in the days of her glory     That the high-seated Lord of the woods and the waters     Has peopled His world with His deified daughters     That flowerful forests and waterways streaming     Are gracious with goddesses glowing and gleaming     I pray that thy singing divinity, fairer     Than wonderful women, may listen, Narrara!     O spirit of sea-going currents! thou, being     The child of immortals, all-knowing, all-seeing     Thou hast at thy heart the dark truth that I borrow     For the song that I sing thee, no fanciful sorrow;     In the sight of thine eyes is the history written     Of Love smitten down as the strong leaf is smitten;     And before thee there goeth a phantom beseeching     For faculties forfeited hopes beyond reaching.     .        .        .        .        .     Thou knowest, O sister of deities blazing     With splendour ineffable, beauty amazing,     What life the gods gave me what largess I tasted     The youth thrown away, and the faculties wasted.     I might, as thou seest, have stood in high places,     Instead of in pits where the brand of disgrace is,     A byword for scoffers a butt and a caution,     With the grave of poor Burns and Maginn for my portion.     But the heart of the Father Supreme is offended,     And my life in the light of His favour is ended;     And, whipped by inflexible devils, I shiver,     With a hollow Too late in my hearing for ever;     But thou being sinless, exalted, supernal,     The daughter of diademed gods, the eternal     Shalt shine in thy waters when time and existence     Have dwindled, like stars, in unspeakable distance.     But the face of thy river the torrented power     That smites at the rock while it fosters the flower     Shall gleam in my dreams with the summer-look splendid,     And the beauty of woodlands and waterfalls blended;     And often Ill think of far-forested noises,     And the emphasis deep of grand sea-going voices,     And turn to Narrara the eyes of a lover,     When the sorrowful days of my singing are over.