Today’s Poem: Bellbirds

Henry Kendall’s spot of Australian time

Ruth Sutherland, The Ruin and Trees, c. 1910 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Bellbirds

by Henry Kendall

By channels of coolness the echoes are calling,
And down the dim gorges I hear the creek falling:
It lives in the mountain where moss and the sedges
Touch with their beauty the banks and the ledges.
Through breaks of the cedar and sycamore bowers
Struggles the light that is love to the flowers;
And, softer than slumber, and sweeter than singing,
The notes of the bell-birds are running and ringing.

The silver-voiced bell birds, the darlings of daytime!
They sing in September their songs of the May-time;
When shadows wax strong, and the thunder bolts hurtle,
They hide with their fear in the leaves of the myrtle;
When rain and the sunbeams shine mingled together,
They start up like fairies that follow fair weather;
And straightway the hues of their feathers unfolden
Are the green and the purple, the blue and the golden.

October, the maiden of bright yellow tresses,
Loiters for love in these cool wildernesses;
Loiters, knee-deep, in the grasses, to listen,
Where dripping rocks gleam and the leafy pools glisten:
Then is the time when the water-moons splendid
Break with their gold, and are scattered or blended
Over the creeks, till the woodlands have warning
Of songs of the bell-bird and wings of the Morning.

Welcome as waters unkissed by the summers
Are the voices of bell-birds to the thirsty far-comers.
When fiery December sets foot in the forest,
And the need of the wayfarer presses the sorest,
Pent in the ridges for ever and ever
The bell-birds direct him to spring and to river,
With ring and with ripple, like runnels who torrents
Are toned by the pebbles and the leaves in the currents.

Often I sit, looking back to a childhood,
Mixt with the sights and the sounds of the wildwood,
Longing for power and the sweetness to fashion,
Lyrics with beats like the heart-beats of Passion; —
Songs interwoven of lights and of laughters
Borrowed from bell-birds in far forest-rafters;
So I might keep in the city and alleys
The beauty and strength of the deep mountain valleys:
Charming to slumber the pain of my losses
With glimpses of creeks and a vision of mosses. 
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This Sunday, January 26, is Australia Day, commemorating the 1788 landing of the British fleet at Sydney Cove and the discovery — at least by people who didn’t already know it was there — of the Australian continent. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Australia Day was known variously as “Anniversary Day,” “Foundation Day,” and at the behest of the Australian Natives Association, “ANA Day.” From the moment of its 1935 establishment, the holiday has been a source of contention, with its implied assumption that until 1788, Australia was a blank slate of a continent, empty and unpeopled, undiscovered by anyone until the British landed there.

Thomas Henry Kendall (1839–1882), author of Today’s Poem, “The Bellbirds,” belonged to that demographic of “Australian Natives” celebrated on “ANA Day.” The Australian Natives Association, or ANA, was a “friendly society” organized for the benefit of young Australia-born men of British descent (native, as distinct from aboriginal). Henry Kendall was born near Yatte Yattah, a pioneer settlement on the coast of New South Wales, and although he was the grandson of an English missionary, Australia was his world.

Henry Kendall (Wikimedia Commons)

Like so many poets’ lives we’ve revisited in Poems Ancient and Modern, Kendall’s was a career founded on struggle and failure. Unable to live by his writing, inept at any other work he undertook, he spiraled for a time into drunkenness, poverty, mental illness, and crime. At his absolute nadir, he was arrested and brought to trial for forging a check, but the charge was dismissed for reason of insanity. His marriage, never quite happy, broke down entirely.

The intervention of friends salvaged him for a time. But in 1882, fragile after years of hard living, his health began a steep decline which ended in his death late that summer, at the age of forty-three. In her own last years, his estranged wife received a pension in his name from the Commonwealth Literary Fund: a sad, final irony for a man who in his lifetime couldn’t live by his writing.

More happily, Kendall’s poem, “Bellbirds,” published in his 1869 debut collection, Leaves from Australian Forests, has entered Australia’s cultural canon in much the same way that Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” has entered America’s. “Bellbirds” is a poem that, even now, almost every Australian has heard of, if not actually read. Like the cadences of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” its variably anapestic tetrameter couplets, with their insistent music, invite memorization and recitation. But unlike “Paul Revere’s Ride,” this poem delivers no narrative. It simply dwells in details of the Australian landscape in the antipodean spring and summer, lush and scorched by turns as the seasons move forward, but filled always with the bellbirds’ song.

All this, for a speaker whose life has been smirched with suffering, becomes a “spot of time,” a memory carried and kept, the sweetness of a childhood world returning, like spring water bubbling from the mind’s depths, to wash the ugly present in its beauty. So may this poem, whatever conflicts surround the observance of Australia Day, remind its readers of that wild landscape, a reality mutable but enduring, to which the idea of a nation matters less than the call of a bird.

Elizabeth Gould, Crested Oreoica (Bellbird), 1848 (Wikimedia Commons)

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