Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Walter Murdoch (1874–1970). The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse. 1918.

By Bernard O’Dowd

79 . Proletaria

THE SUNNY rounds of Earth contain

An obverse to its Day,

Our fertile Vagrancy’s domain,

Wan Proletaria.

From pole to pole of Poverty

We stumble through the years,

With hazy-lanterned Memory

And Hope that never nears.

Wherever Plenty’s crop invites

Our pitiful brigades,

Lurk cannoneers of Vested Rights,

Juristic ambuscades;

And here hangs Rent, that squalid cage

Within which Mammon thrusts,

Bound with the fetter of a wage,

The helots of his lusts.

With palsied Doubt as guide, we wind

Among the lanes of Need,

Where meagre Hungers scouting find

But slavered baits of Greed.

The wet-lipped Lamias of Caste,

Awaiting our advance,

Our choicest squadrons’ fealty blast

With magic smile and glance:

Delilah-limbed temptations flit

Among our drowsy rows,

And on our willing captains fit

The badges of our foes.

What wonder sometimes if in stealth

Our starker outposts wait,

And, in the prowling eyes of Wealth,

Dash vitriol of Hate;

Or if our Samsons, ere too late,

Their treasons should make good

By whelming in the temple’s fate

Their viper owners’ brood!

Our polyandrous dam has borne

To Satan and to God

The hordes of Night, the clans of Morn,

That through our valleys plod.

Ah, motherhood of misery

For Christ-child as for pest!

The greater her fertility

The drier grows her breast!

Too many linger on the track;

A few outstrip the time:

Some, God has tattooed yellow, black,

And some disguised with crime.

Art’s living archives here abound,

Carraras of Despair,

And those weird masks of Sight and Sound

The Tragic Muses wear.

Tho’ blind and dull, ’tis we supply

The Painter’s dazzling dreams;

The rolling flood of Poetry

From our dumb chaos streams.

Nay, when your world is over-tired,

And Genius comatose,

Our race, by Nemesis inspired,

Old Order overthrows:

With earthquake-life we thrill your land,

Refill the cruse of Art,

Revitalize spent Wisdom, and—

Resume our weary part.

The palace of successful Guilt

Is mortared with our shame;

On hecatombs of Us are built

The soaring towers of Fame.

We are the gnomes of Titan works

Whose throbbings never cease;

Our unregarded signet lurks

On every masterpiece.

The floating isles, that shuttling tie

All peoples into one

By adept steermen’s sorcery

Of magnet, steam, and sun;

Religion’s dolmens, Sphinxes, spires,

Her Biblic armouries;

The helot lightning of the wires

That mesh your lands and seas;

The viaducts ’tween Near and Far,

Whereon, o’er range and mead,

Bacchantic Trade’s triumphant car

And iron tigers speed;

The modern steely crops that rise

Where technic Jasons sow:

—All these but feebly symbolize

The largesse we bestow.

And our reward? In this wan land,

In clientage of Greed,

Despised, polluted, maimed and banned,

To wander and—to breed.