Walter Murdoch (1874–1970). The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse. 1918.
By Sydney Jephcott51 . The Dreamers
H
All things, except mere Earth, are ours.
We pluck its passions for our flowers.
Dawn-dyed our great cloud-banners toss their streamers
Above its quaking tyrant-towers!
Making this stern grey planet shine with jewel-showers.
Like trees that fringe yon dark hill-crest
Alight against the molten west.
The great night shuddering yields her stress of story—
The dreams that stir the past’s long rest—
Strange, scented night-winds sighing on our naked breast.
By pathways we believed unknown—
Still thoughts immortal meet our own.
Ideas!—In innumerable legions!
Like summer’s stir in forests lone
Their various music merges in time’s monotone.
Through all the huge blind bulk of Earth;
He led the ship around its girth;
He plays, as on the pulses of the lightning,
The song that gives its workings worth,
The song foredained to bring man’s morrow to the birth.
Whose bodies engines are of toil!
Greasy with greed and lust they moil;
They cast lots for the dreamer’s garment seamless,
To rot among their useless spoil;
The fathomless infinity their breath does soil.
And let him from his bloody lair,
Across light’s bridge, that single hair,
Above th’ unpurposed, eyeless hell of ravage
That, beasts and men, the soulless share,
And left him, waking in thought’s temple, Heaven’s heir!
Of eyes, our angel-hopes embrance;
Or being’s shining trail retrace,
Through pregnant skies about our forms enfolden
In rapture of our kindred race,
Until the gaze of God consume us, face to face.
Wrought Thou our world, so strange and fair,
Afloat in Thy illusive air?—
Aye me! We know that dreaming is our duty!
These dreams more intimate than prayer;
For in Thy dream divine our laureate spirits share.