New Zealand Verse/A Colonist in his Garden

XII.

A Colonist in his Garden.

He reads a letter.

“Dim grows your face, and in my ears,
Filled with the tramp of hurrying years,
Your voice dies, far apart.
Our shortening day draws in, alack!
Old friend, ere darkness falls, turn back
To England, life and art.

“Write not that you content can be,
Pent by that drear and shipless sea
Round lonely islands rolled:
Isles nigh as empty as their deep,
Where men but talk of gold and sheep
And think of sheep and gold.

“A land without a past; a race
Set in the rut of commonplace;
Where Demos overfed
Allows no gulf, permits no height,
And grace and colour, music, light,
From sturdy scorn are fled.

“I’ll draw you home. Lo! as I write
A flash—a swallow’s arrow-flight!
O’erhead the skylark’s wings
Quiver with joy at winter’s rout:
A gust of April from without
Scents of the garden brings.

“The quickening turf is starred with gold;
The orchard wall, rust-red and old,
Glows in the sunlight long.
The very yew-tree warms to-day,
As the sun-dial, mossed and grey,
Marks with a shadow strong.

“Tired of the bold, aggressive New,
Say, will your eyes not joy to view,
In a sedater clime,
How mellowing tones at leisure steal,
And age hath virtue scars to heal,
And beauty weds grey Time?"

He speaks.

Good wizard! Thus he weaves his spell.
Yet, charm he twenty times as well,
Me shall he never spur,
To seek again the old, green land,
That seems from far to stretch a hand
To sons who dream of her.

For is my England there? Ah, no.
Gone is my England, long ago,
Leaving me tender joys,
Sweet, fragrant, happy-breathing names
Of wrinkled men and grey-haired dames,
To me still girls and boys.

With these in youth let memory stray
In pleasance green, where stern to-day
Works Fancy no mischance.
Dear pleasance—let no light invade
Revealing ravage Time hath made
Amid thy dim romance!

Here am I rooted. Firm and fast
We men take root who face the blast,
When, to the desert come,
We stand where none before have stood
And braving tempest, drought and flood,
Fight Nature for a home.

Now, when the fight is o’er, what man,
What wrestler, who in manhood’s span
Hath won so stern a fall,
Who, matched against the desert’s power,
Hath made the wilderness to flower,
Can turn, forsaking all?

Yet that my heart to England cleaves
This garden tells with blooms and leaves
In old familiar throng,
And smells, sweet English every one,
And English turf to tread upon,
And English blackbird’s song.

“No art?” Who serve an art more great
Than we, rough architects of State
With the old Earth at strife?
“No colour?” On the silent waste,
In pigments not to be effaced,
We paint the hues of life.

“A land without a past?” Nay, nay.
I saw it, forty years this day.
—Nor man, nor beast, nor tree:
Wide, empty plains where shadows pass
Blown by the wind o’er whispering grass
Whose sigh crept after me.

Now when at midnight round my doors
The gale through sheltering branches roars,
What is it to the might
Of the mad gorge-wind that o’erthrew
My camp—the first I pitched—and blew
Our tents into the night?

Mine is the vista where the blue
And white-capped mountains close the view.
Each tapering cypress there
At planting in these hands was borne,
Small, shivering seedlings and forlorn,
When all the plain was bare!

Skies without music, mute through time,
Now hear the skylark’s rippling climb
Challenge their loftier dome.
And hark! A song of gardens floats,
Rills, gushes clear,—the self-same notes
Your thrushes flute at Home.

See, I have poured o’er plain and hill
Gold open-handed, wealth that will
Win children’s children’s smiles,
—Autumnal glories, glowing leaves,
And aureate flowers, and warmth of sheaves,
’Mid weary pastoral miles.

Yonder my poplars, burning gold,
Flare in tall rows of torches bold,
Spire beyond kindling spire.
Then raining gold round silver stem
Soft birches gleam. Outflaming them
My oaks take ruddier fire.

And with my flowers about her spread
(None brighter than her shining head),
The lady of my close,
My daughter, walks in girlhood fair.
Friend, could I rear in England’s air
A sweeter English rose?

William Pember Reeves.