The Bush Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABABCCADAD EAEAFFGHGG IJKJLMNJNJ ODODJJAJAJ POPOQQGRGR SDSDDDJGJT OJAJDDUFUF VOVOWWQJQJ JJJJOOQOQO JXJYUUODOD UOUODDADAD JVJVZZAA2AA2 B2AB2AC2C2QD2QD2 JDJDAAQJQJ OAOAJE2E2JE2J ODODDDDVDV JAJAOOQDQDOJO AAQVQV OGOJI wonder if the spell the mystery | A |
That like a haze about your silence clings | B |
Moulding your void until we seem to see | A |
Tangible Presences of Deathless Things | B |
Patterned but little to our spirits' woof | C |
Yet from our love or hate not all aloof | C |
Can be the matrix where are forming slowly | A |
Troy tales of Old Australia to refine | D |
Eras to come of ordered melancholy | A |
'Neath lily pale Perfection's anodyne | D |
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For Troy hath ever been and Homer sang | E |
Its younger story for a lodging's fee | A |
While o'er Scamander settlers' axes rang | E |
Amid the Bush where Ilium was to be | A |
For Cretan Art dim centuries before | F |
Minoan Dream times some Briseis bore | F |
Sumerian Phoebus by a willowed water | G |
Song built a Troy for far Chaldea where | H |
The sons of God beholding Leda's daughter | G |
Bartered eternal thrones for love of her | G |
- | |
Across each terraced aeon Time hath sowed | I |
With green tautology of vanished years | J |
Gaping aghast or webbed with shining lode | K |
Achilles' anger's earthquake rift appears | J |
The towers that Phoebus builds can never fall | L |
Desire that Helen lights can never pall | M |
Yea wounded Love hath still but gods to fly to | N |
When lust of war inflames Diomedes | J |
Must some Australian Hector vainly die too | N |
Captives in ships change that omen Trees | J |
- | |
Yea Mother Bush in your deep dreams abide | O |
Cupids alert for man and maid unborn | D |
Apprentice Pucks amid your saplings hide | O |
And wistful gorges wait a Roland horn | D |
Wallet of Sigurd shall this swag replace | J |
And centaurs curvet where those brumbies race | J |
That drover's tale of love shall greaten duly | A |
Through magic prisms of a myriad years | J |
Till bums Isolde to Tristram's fervour newly | A |
Or Launcelot to golden Guinevere's | J |
- | |
The miner cradling washdirt by the creek | P |
Or pulled through darkness dripping to the plat | O |
The navvy boring tunnels through the peak | P |
The farmer grubbing box trees on the flat | O |
The hawker camping by the roadside spring | Q |
The hodman on the giddy scaffolding | Q |
Moths that around the fashion windows flutter | G |
The racecourse spider and the betting fly | R |
The children romping by the city gutter | G |
While baby crows to every passer by | R |
- | |
From these rough blocks strewn o'er our ancient stream | S |
Sculptors shall chisel brownie fairy faun | D |
Any myrmidons of some Homeric dream | S |
From Melbourne mob and Sydney push be drawn | D |
The humdrum lives that now we tire of then | D |
Romance shall be and 'we heroic men | D |
Treading the vestibule of Golden Ages | J |
The Isthmus of the Land of Heart's Desire | G |
For lo the Sybil's final volume's pages | J |
Ope with our Advent close when we expire | T |
- | |
Forgetful Change in one 'antiquity' | O |
Boreal gleams shall drown and southern glows | J |
Out of some singing woman's heart break plea | A |
Australia's dawn shall flush with Sappho's rose | J |
Strong Shirlow's hand shall trace Mantegna's line | D |
And Soma foam from Victor Daley's wine | D |
Scholars to be our prehistoric drama | U |
From Esson's 'Woman Tamer' shall restore | F |
Or find in Gilbert's 'Lotus Stream and Lama' | U |
An Austral Nile and Buddhas we adore | F |
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The sunlit Satyrs follow Hugh McCrae | V |
Quinn spans the ocean with a Celtic ford | O |
And Williamson the Pan pipe learns to play | V |
From magpie songs our schoolboy ears ignored | O |
A sweeter woe no keen of Erin gave | W |
Than Kendall sings o'er Araluen's grave | W |
Tasmanian Wordsworth to his chapel riding | Q |
The Burning Bush and Ardath mead shall pass | J |
Or from the sea coast of Bohemia gliding | Q |
On craft of dream behold a shepherd lass | J |
- | |
Jessie Mackay on Southern Highlands sees | J |
The elves deploy in kem and gallowglass | J |
Our Gilbert Murray writes 'Euripides' | J |
Pirani merges in Pythagoras | J |
Marsyas plunges into Lethe flayed | O |
From Rhadamanthine Stephens' steady blade | O |
While Benvenuto Morton drunk with singing | Q |
Sees salamanders in a bush fire's bed | O |
And Spencer sails from Alcheringa bringing | Q |
Intaglios totems and Books of the Dead | O |
- | |
On Southern fiords shall Brady's Long Snakes hiss | J |
Heavy with brides he wins to Viking troth | X |
O'Reilly's Sydney shall be Sybaris | J |
While Melbourne's Muses sup their Spartan broth | Y |
Murdoch Zenobia's counsellor in time | U |
Redacts from Burke his book on The Sublime | U |
By Way was Homer into Greek translated | O |
And Shakespeare's self is Sophocles so plain | D |
They know the kerb whereon the Furies waited | O |
Outside the Mermaid Inn in Brogan's Lane | D |
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Vane shall divide with Vern Eureka's fame | U |
Tillett and Mann are Tyler then and Cade | O |
Dowie's entwines with Cagliostro's name | U |
And in Tarpeia's lo those fair forms fade | O |
Who drug the poor for social bread and wine | D |
And lift the furtive latch to Catiline | D |
There where the Longmore featured Gracchi hurry | A |
And Greek browed Higinbotham walks anon | D |
The 'wealthy lower orders' leap the Murray | A |
Before the stockwhip cracks of Jardine Don | D |
- | |
Cleons in 'Windsor dress at Syracuse | J |
Their thin plebeians' promised meal delay | V |
And Archibald begets Australia's Muse | J |
Upon an undine red of Chowder Bay | V |
Paterson's swan draws Amphitrite's car | Z |
And Sidon learns from Young what purples are | Z |
Rose Scott refutes dogmatic Cyril gaily | A |
Hypatia turns the anti suffrage flank | A2 |
And Herod's daughter sools her 'morning daily' | A |
On John the Baptist by the Yarra Bank | A2 |
- | |
Yon regal bustard fading hence ere long | B2 |
Shall seem the guide we followed to the Grail | A |
This lyre bird on his dancing mound of song | B2 |
Our mystagogue of some Bacchantic vale | A |
Where feathered Pan guffaws 'Evoe ' above | C2 |
And Maenad curlews shriek their midnight love | C2 |
That trailing flight of distant swans is bearing | Q |
Sarpedon's soul to its eternal joy | D2 |
This ibis from the very Nile despairing | Q |
Memnon our own would warn from fatal Troy | D2 |
- | |
Primeval gnomes distilled the golden bribes | J |
That have impregnated your musing waste with men | D |
But shall the spell of your pathetic tribes | J |
Curl round in time our fairer limbs again | D |
Through that long tunnel of your gloom I see | A |
Gardens of a metropolis to be | A |
Out of the depths the mountain ash is soaring | Q |
To embryon gods of what unsounded space | J |
Out of the heights what influence is pouring | Q |
Thin desolation on your haunted face | J |
- | |
Many there are who see no higher lot | O |
For all your writhing centuries of toil | A |
Than that the avaricious plough should blot | O |
Their wilding burgeon and the red brand spoil | A |
Your cyclopean garniture to sow | J |
The cheap parterres of Europe on your woe | E2 |
They weave all sorceries but yours and borrow | E2 |
The tinkling spells of alien winds and seas | J |
To drown the chord of purifying sorrow | E2 |
Bom ere the world that pulses through your trees | J |
- | |
For save when we in not o'er subtle mood | O |
Hear magpies warbling soft November in | D |
Or hand in hand with Love a dreaming wood | O |
Or bouldered crest of crisper April win | D |
Your harps unblurred by glozing strings intone | D |
The dirges that behind Creation moan | D |
'Where riding reinless billows new lives dash on | D |
The souring beach of yesterday's decay | V |
Where Love's chord leaps from mandrake shrieks of passion | D |
And groping gods mould man from quivering clay | V |
- | |
Is Nature deaf and blind and dumb A cruse | J |
Unfilled of wine Clay for an unbreathed soul | A |
Alien to man till his desires transfuse | J |
Their flames through wind and water leaf and bole | A |
And each crude fane elaborately fit | O |
With oracles that echo all his wit | O |
The living wilds of Greece saw death returning | Q |
When Pan that men had made fell from his throne | D |
Till through her sap our very blood is churning | Q |
The Bush her lonely alien woe shall moan | D |
Or is she reticent but to be kind | O |
Whispers she not beneath her mask of clods | J |
'Who asks he shall receive who seeks shall find | O |
Who knocks shall open every door of God's ' | - |
Dumb Faith's blind Hope's eternal consort she | A |
Gravid with all that is on earth to be | A |
Corn wine and oil in hungry granite hiding | Q |
All Beauty under sober wings of clay | V |
All life beneath her dead heart long abiding | Q |
Yea all the gods her sons and she obey | V |
- | |
What sin's wan expiation strewed your Vast | O |
With mounded pillage of what conquering fire | G |
Slumbering throes of what prodigious Past | O |
Exhale thes | J |
Bernard O'dowd
(1)
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