How The Land Was Won Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABABCDCD EFEFGHGH IJIJHKHK ALALMNMN OPOPQRSR TUVULNLN GUGUWNXN YZA2ZVB2HB2The future was dark and the past was dead | A |
As they gazed on the sea once more | B |
But a nation was born when the immigrants said | A |
Good bye as they stepped ashore | B |
In their loneliness they were parted thus | C |
Because of the work to do | D |
A wild wide land to be won for us | C |
By hearts and hands so few | D |
- | |
The darkest land 'neath a blue sky's dome | E |
And the widest waste on earth | F |
The strangest scenes and the least like home | E |
In the lands of our fathers' birth | F |
The loneliest land in the wide world then | G |
And away on the furthest seas | H |
A land most barren of life for men | G |
And they won it by twos and threes | H |
- | |
With God or a dog to watch they slept | I |
By the camp fires' ghastly glow | J |
Where the scrubs were dark as the blacks that crept | I |
With nulla and spear held low | J |
Death was hidden amongst the trees | H |
And bare on the glaring sand | K |
They fought and perished by twos and threes | H |
And that's how they won the land | K |
- | |
It was two that failed by the dry creek bed | A |
While one reeled on alone | L |
The dust of Australia's greatest dead | A |
With the dust of the desert blown | L |
Gaunt cheek bones cracking the parchment skin | M |
That scorched in the blazing sun | N |
Black lips that broke in a ghastly grin | M |
And that's how the land was won | N |
- | |
Starvation and toil on the tracks they went | O |
And death by the lonely way | P |
The childbirth under the tilt or tent | O |
The childbirth under the dray | P |
The childbirth out in the desolate hut | Q |
With a half wild gin for nurse | R |
That's how the first were born to bear | S |
The brunt of the first man's curse | R |
- | |
They toiled and they fought through the shame of it | T |
Through wilderness flood and drought | U |
They worked in the struggles of early days | V |
Their sons' salvation out | U |
The white girl wife in the hut alone | L |
The men on the boundless run | N |
The miseries suffered unvoiced unknown | L |
And that's how the land was won | N |
- | |
No armchair rest for the old folk then | G |
But ruined by blight and drought | U |
They blazed the tracks to the camps again | G |
In the big scrubs further out | U |
The worn haft wet with a father's sweat | W |
Gripped hard by the eldest son | N |
The boy's back formed to the hump of toil | X |
And that's how the land was won | N |
- | |
And beyond Up Country beyond Out Back | Y |
And the rainless belt they ride | Z |
The currency lad and the ne'er do well | A2 |
And the black sheep side by side | Z |
In wheeling horizons of endless haze | V |
That disk through the Great North west | B2 |
They ride for ever by twos and by threes | H |
And that's how they win the rest | B2 |
Henry Lawson
(1)
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