Poetry
Leaves from Australian Forests
Henry Kendall · 1869
Opening lines
I purposed once to take my pen and write,
Not songs, like some, tormented and awry
With passion, but a cunning harmony
Of words and music caught from glen and height,
And lucid colours born of woodland light
And shining places where the sea-streams lie.
Text quoted from gutenberg.net.au
Synopsis
About sixty poems reprinted from the press, after a dedication and two sonnets. In a mountain forest, bellbirds hidden in the myrtles guide to water a traveller overcome by the heat of December, and the poet would like to carry into the city the beauty of the woods of his childhood. A shepherd is dying in the bush, watched over by his wife alone; an Aboriginal man holds himself to be the last of his people, whose disappearance the poet, according to the Oxford Companion, mourns. There are also verses to the memory of Charles Harpur and Daniel Henry Deniehy, and twelve sonnets, from Attila to Tennyson.
Context
The collection appeared in Melbourne in September 1869 from George Robertson, the year its author was trying to live by his pen in that city; he was working there with Marcus Clarke on the satirical weekly Humbug. Several pieces had first appeared in the press, including the one on the bell-birds, published by the Sydney Morning Herald in November 1867. The Australasian hailed a poet as Australian as Burns was Scottish; the Weekly Times found his blank verse too close to Tennyson. Well received, the book was nonetheless a commercial failure.
Who it is for
More than a hundred and sixty pages of English verse, often long and musical; the vocabulary of the country's plants and birds benefits from an annotated edition.
Prizes and reception
Praised by the Melbourne press in 1869 but neglected by booksellers; several of its poems have become anthology pieces.
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