Facts and Fancies about Our "Son of the Woods", Henry Clarence Kendall and his Poetry/Part 2

by Agnes Maria Melville Hamilton-Grey

 

PART II.

 

KENDALL.

That a sad spirit breathes through most of Kendall's writings, from the earliest to the latest, cannot be denied. Sometimes it is a vague yearning after something indefinable, as in "Mountains":

"Yearning for a bliss unworldly,
Yearning for a brighter change,
Yearning for the mystic Aidenn
Out beyond the mountain range."

Sometimes it is because of the "faithless face of Rose." Here it may be mentioned that his mother attributed the misfortunes of his later life to a disappointment in love, which impression she expresses in verse:

"Then came to his heart a great first love,
Which could never be conquered by time,
Hence his muse was oft draped in sadness,
And he wore it sometimes in his rhyme.

A first disappointment is bitter,
And may bring in its train many woes,
Though it seems but a trifling matter,
To be baulked in just plucking a rose.

However that may be, the name of Rose is more than once introduced to the readers of his poems, and in Rose Lorraine he writes:

"No woman lives with power to burst
My passion's bonds and set me free,
For Rose is last where Rose was first,
And only Rose is fair to me."

In his earliest poems, published when he was little more than nineteen, be it remembered, and which (most of them) must therefore have been written when we has little more than a boy, the sadness of his song is sometimes from disappointed ambition, as in "Bells beyond the Forest."

"Like to one who, by the waters
Standing, marks the reeling ocean wave
Moaning, hide his head all torn and shivered,
Underneath his lonely cave.

So the soul within me glances at the tides
of Purpose where they creep—
Dashed to fragments by the yawning
ridges circling Life's tempestuous Deep!

Oh, the tattered leaves are dropping—
Dropping round me like a fall of rain,
While the dust of many a broken aspiration
Sweeps my troubled brain.

With the yearning after Beauty, and the
longing to be good and great,
And the thought of catching Fortune flying
on the tardy wings of Fate."

There is something of the same sort of sadness in the "Dark-haired Maid of Gerringong." And even in his happy reminiscences of Wollongong, most unexpectedly, in the midst of gladness, he brings in that exquisite image:

"Merry feet go clambering up the old
and thunder-shattered heap.
And the billows clamber after—
and the surges to the ocean leap—
Scattered into fruitless showers—
falling where the breakers roll,
Baffled—like the aspirations of a
proud, ambitious soul."

Poor Kendall! what did he know of disappointed ambition at his then time of life, being little more than seventeen or eighteen years of age, or thereabout. Had he some mysterious foreboding of what was awaiting him in his future life? Of the thorny path he would have to travel, and the neglect and the scant sympathy he would have to endure? Did he foresee "The lot austere ever pressing, with its hardship on the man of letters here?"

 

COOGEE.

In the stanzas on "Coogee"—our Coogee that every Sydneyite or visitor to Sydney knows so well—there is still the same strain of sadness, though written in early manhood, probably when residing in Sydney, which he did for some years after publishing his first book entitled "Poems and Songs," Sir John Robertson, then Premier of New South Wales, having given him a position as clerk in the Chief Secretary's office, or some Civil Service clerkship, which position he occupied when he married Miss Charlotte Rutter, the daughter of Doctor Rutter, then of Woolloomooloo, at that time one of the fairly fashionable suburbs of Sydney, though now quite out of date as "a choice suburb for private residence," Mr. and Mrs. Kendall's first meeting was at the Sydney School of Arts, where, after a lecture on "Love, Courtship and Marriage" by the poet (which old-fashioned subjects we don't trouble ourselves about now, for lectures), Mr. Rutter was introduced to his sister, in whom the poet became at once so warmly interested that is own courtship began and continued with such ardour that he and Miss Charlotte Rutter were married the following year, and in the first year of their marriage resided in one of our suburbs of Sydney called the Glebe. Whether he wrote "Coogee" before or after his marriage I do not know, but it was published in any volume until "Leaves from the Forests" was presented to the public in Melbourne (some few years after his marriage), where he and Mrs. Kendall were then residing. But he was always very fond of Coogee, and gives us verses that we who "know the place," and have wandered there in our own very young days, when it was much more beautiful than it is now, in its then purely natural state, with its growth of wild vines and foliage so near the sea, we know how faithful to Nature his picture really was of Coogee in those days when he wrote the stanzas:

"Sing the song of wave-worn Coogee—
Coogee in the distance white,
With its peaks and points disruptured—
gaps and fragments filled with light.
Haunts of glade and restless plovers
of the melancholy wail,
Ever lending deeper pathos to^{[errata 1]} the
melancholy gale.

Here, my brothers, down the fissures,
chasms deep and worn and wild,
Grows the sea-bloom, one that blushes
like a shrinking, fair, blind child.
And amongst the oozing forelands,
many a glad green rock-vine runs.
Getting ease on earthly lodges, sheltered
from December's sun.

Often, when a gusty morning, rising
cold and gray and strange,
Lifts its face from watery spaces,
vistas full of cloudy change,
Bearing up a glowing burden which anon
begins to wane,
Fading in the sudden shadow of a
dark, determined rain.

Do I seek an eastern window, so to
watch the breakers beat
Round the steadfast craigs of Coogee,
dim with drifts of driving sleet;
Hearing hollow, mournful noises
sweeping down a solemn shore,
While the grim sea waves are tideless,
and the storm strives at their core."

1. Original: of was amended to to

This is a faithful representation of Coogee as I knew it when a very young girl. "Extremes are ever neighbours," and Coogee was transcendently bright and hope-inspiring in the golden glow of sunshine, serenely sweet and beautiful under the silvery light of a bright Australian night, but lonely, mournful and melancholy under the shadow of "leaden coloured clouds," such as do not seem to affect, in the same way, the English coastal views, unless it is because of the usual brightness of our scenery that makes the contrast so sadly striking. So that our poetry (Australian poetry) cannot be judged by the same standard as that of other countries, and, therefore, no one can fairly judge our poetry who does not know Australia. But a close and careful study of Henry Kendall's works will enlighten the Englishman far more than any merely dying visit to some of our principal cities, with no travel through, or sojourn in places remote from the more largely populated areas. It will, at least, enlighten him as to Australia as a country, especially Australia as it was in Kendall's days; for much is already changed; yet the pictures still retain some of their leading characteristics—sometimes entrancingly bright, as if all Nature were joyous; sometimes, deeply, darkly, intensely melancholy—but always interesting. One of the very striking features of our coastal scenery in the early days was the luxuriance of wild flowers, and other foliage, so near the sea, even among the rocks, before the shores became popular resorts for every-day excursions.

It was also a very special feature of Manly; and only those who can remember the Manly of years gone by can have any idea of the fairy-like beauty that has passed away. There must have been a great lack of poetic sentiment and artistic culture in the community to have allowed her to become so "pillaged of her loveliness."

But to return to Coogee, the strain of sadness is more particularly marked in the last three verses, which we have not space to giv ehere.

We were comparing his sea-scapes, or rather seashores, and while on this theme we must not miss his lines on "Womberall," which place I drove out to see, with some difficulty, in those days, of getting a conveyance "just to see a bit of scenery," when visiting Gosford as a stranger. But as I had read "Womberall" then, I was determined not to miss it, and the recollection of it is very pleasant, and seems to bring one nearer to the poet in his work.

Kendall describes himself (or we draw that inference from his words) as picking up a shell somewhere near its native element; for it is still "glittering" and the companion of seaweed, and this shell awakens memories of distant Womberall:

Just a shell to which the seaweed
glittering yet with greenness clings,
Like the song that once I loved so
softly of the old-time sings,
Softly of the old-time speaketh, bringing
over back to me
Lights of far-off lordly forelands,
glimpses of the sounding sea.

Now the cliffs are all before me;
now, indeed, do I behold,
Shining growths, and cold, wet hill-head—
quiet pools of green and gold.
And across the gleaming beaches,
lo! the mighty flow and fall
Of the fast in-gathering waters
Thundering after Womberall.

Back there are the ponderous mountains,
there the dim, dumb ranges roam—
Ghostly shapes in dread, grey vapours,
Half-seen peaks august with gloam.

There the voice of troubled torrents
hidden in some fallen deep.
Known to moss and fain green
sunlight, wandering down the cozy steep.

There the lake of many runnels
nestles in a windless wild,
Far among thick-folded forests,
like a radiant, human child.

These are the only verses I have of "Womberall." There may be more. Womberall, if I remember rightly, is not in any of his published volumes mentioned here. But I cannot be certain on that point, as I have not the volumes to refer to at hand. Perhaps there may be many new editions of Kendall's poems that I know nothing of, as I have not been in touch with any libraries for many years, and am writing from old recollections, which, for my purpose, I prefer to do. If I have been anticipated in my work, and so thoroughly anticipated as to make any information or "facts and fancies" I have to offer quite superfluous, all the better for Henry Clarence Kendall and his poetry.