Sydney Harbour
Where Hornby, like a mighty fallen star,Burns through the darkness with a splendid ringOf tenfold light, and where the awful faceOf Sydney’s northern headland stares all nightO’er dark, determined waters from the east,From year to year a wild, Titanic voiceOf fierce aggressive sea shoots up and makes,—When storm sails high through drifts of driving sleet,And in the days when limpid waters glassDecember’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 shieldOf marvellous gold dropped in his fiery flightBy some lost angel in the elder days,When Satan faced and fought Omnipotence,It shines amongst fair, flowering hills, and flowsBy dells of glimmering greenness manifold.And all day long, when soft-eyed Spring comes roundWith gracious gifts of bird and leaf and grass—And through the noon, when sumptuous Summer sleepsBy yellowing runnels under beetling cliffs,This royal water blossoms far and wideWith ships from all the corners of the world.
And while sweet Autumn with her gipsy faceStands in the gardens, splashed from heel to thighWith spinning vine-blood—yea, and when the mild,Wan face of our Australian Winter looksAcross the congregated southern fens,Then low, melodious, shell-like songs are heardBeneath proud hulls and pompous clouds of sail,By yellow beaches under lisping leavesAnd hidden nooks to Youth and Beauty dear,And where the ear may catch the counter-voiceOf Ocean travelling over far, blue tracts.
Moreover, when the moon is gazing downUpon her lovely reflex in the wave,(What time she, sitting in the zenith, makesA 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 lakesThe poet saw, while dreaming splendid dreamsWhich showed his soul the far Hesperides.