Page 15 - eMuse Vol.9 No.03_Classical

A Dream of the Orient

With a resplendent Eastern bride,
Like a houri at my side,
And music round us swelling,
’Mid odours of so rare a steam
That like a breath of love they seem,
Dwell I through a radiant dream
In an orient dwelling.
Near a fair fountain flashing high
In the pleasure court we lie,
Each on a gorgeous pillow;
The columned water mounting breaks
In outward curves and falling flakes,
Till the whole a picture makes
Of a crystal willow.
Wide round us galleried walls extend,
Pierced with arcs and aisles that bend
On wreathen pillars slender;
While hung in every vista—lo!
Charles Harpur Such clouds of blazoned banners glow
As in very semblance show
A constant sunset splendour .
23 January 1813 — 8 June 1868
And virgin faces, darkly bright
Charles Harpur was born at Windsor, New South Wales, the son Like the countenance of night
of emancipated convicts. His father, Joseph Harpur, was a school- Seen in its starry glory,
master and clerk at Windsor, who encouraged his children’s educa- All ministrant, around us throng,
tion, and Charles Harpur would later describe his youthful study of And breathe their pathos into song,
Shakespeare, claiming that his own decision to become a poet was Or in tones as rich prolong
made in his early teens . Some wild melodious story.
The loss of family property as a consequence of drought in the Till, hark! Through many voices, one
late 1820s saw Harpur travel to the Hunter Valley in search of em- Like a gush of gold doth run—
ployment, and by 1833 he had moved to Sydney, where he worked “Why, why should kindred sever?
at a series of odd jobs. While in Sydney, Harpur began a lifetime of Our life is this perpetual feast
contributing poems to local newspapers and periodicals. Of being, from all care released—
In the early 1840s, Harpur returned to the Hunter Valley, where Sunny souls are for the East;
he continued to subsist on haphazard employment. At Jerry’s Plains Then dwell with us for ever.”
in 1843, he met Mary Doyle, the daughter of a wealthy farmer, and Charles Harpur
after a long courtship, the two were married in July 1850. Harpur
spent most of the 1850s as a grazier on property owned by his fa- A Coast View
ther-in-law. In 1853, he published his most significant collection of
poetry, The Bushrangers, a play in five acts, and other poems. The High ’mid the shelves of a grey cliff, that yet
play, a tragedy in blank verse, was the first by an Australian-born Riseth in Babylonian mass above,
writer to be printed in the country, though its literary merits are In a benched cleft, as in the mouldered chair
generally considered superior to its dramatic qualities. Of grey-beard Time himself, I sit alone,
In 1859, Harpur was appointed assistant gold commissioner at And gaze with a keen wondering happiness
the goldfields in southern New South Wales and spent the next Out o’er the sea. Unto the circling bend
seven years acting in that capacity. After his appointment expired That verges Heaven, a vast luminous plain
in 1866, Harpur retired to his farm on the Tuross River, but met with It stretches, changeful as a lover’s dream—
a series of misfortunes; one of his sons died in an accident and the Into great spaces mapped by light and shade
farm was devastated by flooding. Harpur himself became ill with In constant interchange—either ‘neath clouds
tuberculosis and died on 8 June 1868. The billows darken, or they shimmer bright
Harpur was the first Australian writer to attempt to deal serious- In sunny scopes of measureless expanse.
ly with local realities, producing tragedies and epics on Australian ’Tis Ocean dreamless of a stormy hour,
subjects at a time when it was generally assumed that Australian Calm, or but gently heaving;—yet, O God!
material was unsuitable for work in the higher literary genres. Yet What a blind fate-like mightiness lies coiled
he was also one of the most accomplished of those writing comic In slumber, under that wide-shining face!
and satirical poems on political and other local events. While o’er the watery gleam—there where its edge
At almost the opposite pole from Harpur’s often savage satires Banks the dim vacancy, the topmost sails
are his love poems, especially the series of sonnets initially ad- Of some tall ship, whose hull is yet unseen,
dressed to ‘Rosa’ (in reality Mary Doyle). Like English writers of the Hang as if clinging to a cloud that still
period, Harpur also produced long historical and philosophical po- Comes rising with them from the void beyond,
ems based on biblical and classical subjects, such as his The Witch Like to a heavenly net, drawn from the deep
of Hebron and The Tower of the Dream. And carried upward by ethereal hands.
Charles Harpur
March 2020 eMuse 15