Poetry
Sea Spray and Smoke Drift
Adam Lindsay Gordon · 1867
Opening lines
Am I waking? Was I sleeping?
Dearest, are you watching yet?
Traces on your cheeks of weeping
Glitter, ’tis in vain you fret;
Text quoted from gutenberg.net.au
Synopsis
The author's first collection, twenty-seven poems: a dying warrior who speaks to his beloved with figures from the Iliad (“Podas Okus”), the Melbourne statue of a man who died alone in the desert (“Gone”), a rider beside a horse killed by a fall (“The Last Leap”), a ballad of a murdered knight (“Fauconshawe”), and the five-part sequence “Hippodromania”, according to Project Gutenberg Australia. The Oxford Companion notes in it ballads and melancholy poems on the follies of youth.
Context
Published in Melbourne by George Robertson in 1867, the book went unnoticed: in 1909, The Australasian called it entirely unknown to the Australian public and saw in its author the poet of the horse and the golden wattle. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature makes of “Hippodromania” the sign of the place of the horse and of racing in his work and in the country. A bust of the author was unveiled in 1934 in the London abbey, among the poets.
Who it is for
Poems of uneven length in English, including several poems on horse racing; no French translation.
Prizes and reception
Ignored on publication, before its author was admitted to Poets' Corner at Westminster in 1934.
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