This evocative Australian
poem was introduced to BBC radio listeners by comedian (the late) Spike Milligan. It touched me in some lasting way,
and recently an Australian correspondent was kind enough to track the poem down for me:
NAMES UPON A STONE by Henry Kendall
(Inscribed to G. L. Fagan, Esq.)
Across bleak widths of broken sea
A fierce north-easter
breaks,
And makes a thunder on the lea -
A whiteness of the lakes.
Here, while beyond the rainy stream
The wild
winds sobbing blow,
I see the river of my dream
Four wasted years ago.
Narrara of the waterfalls,
The darling
of the hills,
Whose home is under mountain walls
By many-luted rills!
Her bright green nooks and channels cool
I
never more may see;
But, ah! the Past was beautiful -
The sights that used to be.
There was a rock-pool in a
glen
Beyond Narrara's sands;
The mountains shut it in from men
In flowerful fairy lands;
But once we found its
dwelling-place -
The lovely and the lone -
And, in a dream, I stooped to trace
Our names upon a stone.
Above
us, where the star-like moss
Shone on the wet, green wall
That spanned the straitened stream across,
We saw the waterfall
-
A silver singer far away,
By folded hills and hoar;
Its voice is in the woods to-day -
A voice I hear no more.
I
wonder if the leaves that screen
The rock-pool of the past
Are yet as soft and cool and green
As when we saw them
last!
I wonder if that tender thing,
The moss, has overgrown
The letters by the limpid spring -
Our names upon
the stone!
Across the face of scenes we know
There may have come a change -
The places seen four years ago
Perhaps
would now look strange,
To you, indeed, they cannot be
What haply once they were:
A friend beloved by you and me
No
more will greet us there.
Because I know the filial grief
That shrinks beneath the touch -
The noble love whose
words are brief -
I will not say too much;
But often when the night-winds strike
Across the sighting rills,
I
think of him whose life was like
The rock-pool's in the hills.
A beauty like the light of song
Is in my dreams,
that show
The grand old man who lived so long
As spotless as the snow,
A fitting garland for the dead
I cannot
compass yet;
But many things he did and said
I never will forget.
In dells where once we used to rove
The
slow, sad water grieves;
And ever comes from glimmering grove
The liturgy of leaves.
But time and toil have marked
my face,
My heart has older grown
Since, in the woods, I stooped to trace
Our names upon the stone.
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Flying Officer A.N.C.Weir DFC was killed in action during the
second year of the war. Almost a year later, in September 1941, his mother succeeded in getting his
collected poems published to his memory - here is one of the shorter poems from this collection:
HARVEST WAGES by Nigel Weir DFC
Water dripping from the rafters
patters sadly on her breast;
former
loves and former laughters
vanish as she goes to rest.
Now she will remain for ever
decomposing in the earth,
ill-remembered,
for she never
paid for life what life was worth.
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