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Sydney Harbour

by Henry Kendall

Where Hornby, like a mighty fallen star,

Burns through the darkness with a splendid ring

Of tenfold light, and where the awful face

Of Sydney's northern headland stares all night

O'er dark, determined waters from the east,

From year to year a wild, Titanic voice

Of fierce aggressive sea shoots up and makes,

When storm sails high through drifts of driving sleet,

And in the days when limpid waters glass

December's sunny hair and forest face,

A roaring down by immemorial caves,

A thunder in the everlasting hills.

But calm and lucid as an English lake,

Beloved by beams and wooed by wind and wing,

Shut in from tempest-trampled wastes of wave,

And sheltered from white wraths of surge by walls

Grand ramparts founded by the hand of God,

The lordly Harbour gleams. Yea, like a shield

Of marvellous gold dropped in his fiery flight

By some lost angel in the elder days,

When Satan faced and fought Omnipotence,

It shines amongst fair, flowering hills, and flows

By dells of glimmering greenness manifold.

And all day long, when soft-eyed Spring comes round

With gracious gifts of bird and leaf and grass

And through the noon, when sumptuous Summer sleeps

By yellowing runnels under beetling cliffs,

This royal water blossoms far and wide

With ships from all the corners of the world.

And while sweet Autumn with her gipsy face

Stands in the gardens, splashed from heel to thigh

With spinning vine-blood yea, and when the mild,

Wan face of our Australian Winter looks

Across the congregated southern fens,

Then low, melodious, shell-like songs are heard

Beneath proud hulls and pompous clouds of sail,

By yellow beaches under lisping leaves

And hidden nooks to Youth and Beauty dear,

And where the ear may catch the counter-voice

Of Ocean travelling over far, blue tracts.

Moreover, when the moon is gazing down

Upon her lovely reflex in the wave,

(What time she, sitting in the zenith, makes

A silver silence over stirless woods),

Then, where its echoes start at sudden bells,

And where its waters gleam with flying lights,

The haven lies, in all its beauty clad,

More lovely even than the golden lakes

The poet saw, while dreaming splendid dreams

Which showed his soul the far Hesperides.