Jim the Splitter

The bard who is singing of Wollombi Jim     Is hardly just now in the requisite trim     To sit on his Pegasus fairly;     Besides, he is bluntly informed by the Muse     That Jim is a subject no singer should choose;     For Jim is poetical rarely.     But being full up of the myths that are Greek     Of the classic, and noble, and nude, and antique,     Which means not a rag but the pelt on;     This poet intends to give Daphne the slip,     For the sake of a hero in moleskin and kip,     With a jumper and snake-buckle belt on.     No party is Jim of the Pericles type     He is modern right up from the toe to the pipe;     And being no reader or roamer,     He hasnt Euripides much in the head;     And let it be carefully, tenderly said,     He never has analysed Homer.     He can roar out a song of the twopenny kind;     But, knowing the beggar so well, Im inclined     To believe that a par about Kelly,     The rascal who skulked under shadow of curse,     Is more in his line than the happiest verse     On the glittering pages of Shelley.     You mustnt, however, adjudge him in haste,     Because a red robber is more to his taste     Than Ruskin, Rossetti, or Dante!     You see, he was bred in a bangalow wood,     And bangalow pith was the principal food     His mother served out in her shanty.     His knowledge is this he can tell in the dark     What timber will split by the feel of the bark;     And rough as his manner of speech is,     His wits to the fore he can readily bring     In passing off ash as the genuine thing     When scarce in the forest the beech is.     In girthing a tree that he sells in the round,     He assumes, as a rule, that the body is sound,     And measures, forgetting to bark it!     He may be a ninny, but still the old dog     Can plug to perfection the pipe of a log     And palm it away on the market.     He splits a fair shingle, but holds to the rule     Of his fathers, and, haply, his grandfathers school;     Which means that he never has blundered,     When tying his shingles, by slinging in more     Than the recognized number of ninety and four     To the bundle he sells for a hundred!     When asked by the market for ironbark red,     It always occurs to the Wollombi head     To do a mahogany swindle.     In forests where never the ironbark grew,     When Jim is at work, it would flabbergast you     To see how the ironbarks dwindle.     He can stick to the saddle, can Wollombi Jim,     And when a buckjumper dispenses with him,     The leather goes off with the rider.     And, as to a team, over gully and hill     He can travel with twelve on the breadth of a quill     And boss the unlucky offsider.     He shines at his best at the tiller of saw,     On the top of the pit, where his whisper is law     To the gentleman working below him.     When the pair of them pause in a circle of dust,     Like a monarch he poses exalted, august     Theres nothing this planet can show him!     For a man is a man who can sharpen and set,     And he is the only thing masculine yet     According to sawyer and splitter     Or rather according to Wollombi Jim;     And nothing will tempt me to differ from him,     For Jim is a bit of a hitter.     But, being full up, well allow him to rip,     Along with his lingo, his saw, and his whip     He isnt the classical notion.     And, after a night in his humpy, you see,     A person of orthodox habits would be     Refreshed by a dip in the ocean.     To tot him right up from the heel to the head,     He isnt the Grecian of whom we have read     His face is a trifle too shady.     The nymph in green valleys of Thessaly dim     Would never jack up her old lover for him,     For she has the tastes of a lady.     So much for our hero! A statuesque foot     Would suffer by wearing that heavy-nailed boot     Its owner is hardly Achilles.     However, hes happy! He cuts a great fig     In the land where a coat is no part of the rig     In the country of damper and billies.