Barcroft Henry Thomas Boake

Barcroft Henry Thomas Boake Poems

Drip, drip, drip! It tinkles on the fly—
The pitiless outpouring of an overburdened sky:
...

I've a kiss from a warmer lover
Than maiden earth can be:
She blew it up to the skies above her,
And now it has come to me;
...

Hark, the sound of it drawing nearer,
Clink of hobble and brazen bell;
Mark the passage of stalwart shearer,
Bidding Monaro soil farewell.
...

You say we bushmen cannot love—
Our lives are too prosaic: hence
We lose or lack that finer sense
That raises some few men above
...

A Valentine The Bree was up; the floods were out
Around the hut of Culgo Jim:
The hand of God had broke the drought
...

Out on the wastes of the Never Never -
That's where the dead men lie!
There where the heat-waves dance forever -
That's where the dead men lie!
...

Adown the grass-grown paths we strayed,
The evening cowslips ope’d
Their yellow eyes to look at her,
The love-sick lilies moped
...

The fight was over, and the battle won
A soldier, who beneath his chieftain’s eye
Had done a might deed and done it well,
And done it as the world will have it done—
...

Now the squatters and the “cockies,”
Shearers, trainers and their jockeys
Had gathered them together for a meeting on
the flat;
...

Brookong station lay half-asleep
Dozed in the waning western glare
('Twas before the run had stocked with sheep
And only cattle depastured there)
...

A sweat-dripping horse and a half-naked myall,
And a message: ‘Come out to the back of the run—
Be out at the stake-yards by rising of sun!
...

Will she spring with a blush from the arms of Dawn,
When the sleepy songsters prune
Their dewy vestments on bush and thorn,
...

She was born in the season of fire,
When a mantle of murkiness lay
On the front of the crimson Destroyer:
And none knew the name of her sire
...

Far reaching down's a solid sea sunk everlastingly to rest,
And yet whose billows seem to be for ever heaving toward the west
...

Yes, there it hangs upon the wall
And never gives a sound,
The hand that trimmed its greenhide fall
Is hidden underground,
...

Easter Monday in the city -
Rattle, rattle, rumble, rush;
Tom and Jerry, Nell and Kitty,
All the down-the-harbour “push,”
...

The rum was rich and rare,
There were wagers in the air,
The atmosphere was rosy, and the tongues were
wagging free;
...

On Nungar the mists of the morning hung low,
The beetle-browed hills brooded silent and black,
Not yet warmed to life by the sun's loving glow,
As through the tall tussocks rode young Charlie Mac.
...

Do I know Polly Brown? Do I know her? Why,
damme,
You might as well ask if I know my own name?
It's a wonder you never heard tell of old Sammy,
...

'Tis a song of the Never Never land—
Set to the tune of a scorching gale
On the sandhills red,
...

Barcroft Henry Thomas Boake Biography

Barcroft Henry Thomas Boake, surveyor, stockman, drover and poet, was born on 26 March 1866 at Waterview Bay, Balmain, New South Wales, eldest son of Barcroft Capel Boake (b. Dublin, 1838), professional photographer, and his wife Florence Eva, née Clarke (1846-1879). His parents had married on 7 March 1865; three of their nine children died in infancy. He was an active child, fond of sport, but showed early signs of depression, forerunner to that melancholia which was to oppress him for much of his life and ultimately to cause his death. Childhood Young Barcroft’s childhood was spent in Sydney, and for two years in Noumea, where he spent time with a friend of the family. When living in North Sydney, which was then mainly bush, he had to ride his pony to Milson’s Point before going to school across the harbour. Later he was to be described "a good horseman, and a first class bushman" and it was said "he looked infinitely better on a horse than off." His father, though an agnostic, profoundly distrusted state schools and had the boy educated at private institutions. From 8 to 9 he attended a school run by the Misses Cook at Milson's Point. He spent the next two years with Allen Hughan and his wife, friends of the family, in Noumea, where he picked up some French. On his return he had two terms at Sydney Grammar School and then five years at the private school of Edward Blackmore in Hunter Street. Barcroft had four younger sisters, Adelaide, Violet, Clare and Evie. When he was thirteen Barcroft’s mother died in childbirth and his grandmother took over her role in the household. One of Adelaide’s children, Doris Kerr, later became a published author, writing under the pseudonym of Capel Boake. Adulthood Barcroft trained as a surveyor in Sydney before taking up a surveyor’s assistant position in 1886, based at Rocklands Farm, near Adaminaby in the Monaro district of New South Wales. He spent two happy years in this district, becoming friends with the McKeahnie family, and in particular their two daughters, Jean and May. Their brother Charlie, who features in some of Barcroft’s poems, was an excellent horseman and was said to be one of the men on whom Banjo Paterson based the Man from Snowy River . Barcroft’s experiences at this time, which were later to feature in his poems, included chasing brumbies in the Snowy Mountains and skiing at Kiandra. In July 1886 he began as assistant surveyor to E. Commins near Adaminaby in the Monaro district, where he was to remain for two years. There at Rocklands station on the evening of 14 July 1888 his celebrated mock-hanging took place. For a prank he and a friend hanged themselves from a beam. The friend's performance was tentative, but Boake's was almost fatal. After two days he wrote a rueful account of it to his father. A more imaginative version was published in the Bulletin nearly four years later. At the end of his term he rode some three hundred miles (483 km) to Mullah station, near Trangie in the Narromine district, where he stayed as a stockman until mid-1889. Then he moved north and by June had crossed the Queensland border. His experiences as a drover began about this time, and in October he ended up with cattle at Burrenbilla, near Cunnamulla. There he spent some weeks waiting for his next job, and for the first time read in their entirety the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon. Some comments he made in letters are revealing enough: 'Gordon is the favourite—I may say only poet of the back-blocker; and I am sorry to say Emile Zola is his favourite prose writer … I am afraid after all the bushman is not a very fine animal; but at any rate, even in his most vicious moments, he is far above many of the so-called respectable dwellers in towns'. This attitude finds sharper expression: 'If I could only write it, there is a poem to be made out of the back-country. Some man will come yet who will be able to grasp the romance of Western Queensland … For there is a romance, though a grim one—a story of drought and flood, fever and famine, murder and suicide, courage and endurance … I wonder if a day will come when these men will rise up—when the wealthy man…shall see pass before him a band of men—all of whom died in his service, and whose unhallowed graves dot his run—the greater portion hollow, shrunken, burning with the pangs of thirst'. At the time Boake could not foresee that he was to be essentially that poet, commemorating in a bitter threnody the never-sleeping drover and in its two final stanzas condemning the absentee owner. At the end of his term at Rocklands, Barcroft headed north to seek adventure and work as a stockman and a drover. He initially worked on a sheep station at Trangie (near Narromine) then headed north again, droving cattle on the main Queensland-Victoria stock route from the Diamantina and then working at Burrembilla Station, near Cunnamulla, in Western New South Wales. On returning to Bathurst in 1890 he lost all his savings when his droving boss splurged his cheque in a drunken spree. He had little choice but to return to surveying in the Riverina where he began to write poetry based on his bush experiences. His work first appeared in the "Sydney Mail" in 1890, and in 1891 his first verses were published in the "Bulletin". Death In December 1891, at the end of his term of engagement in the Riverina, he returned to Sydney where he was caught by the effects of the 1891-1893 financial depression. His last five months were the gloomiest. He returned home at the end of 1891 to find it a place of grief. His father was practically bankrupt, having lost the last of his money in Melbourne land speculations. Boake contributed his savings, some £50, to cover immediate household expenses. His father sums up the position: 'His grandma was invalided and confined to her bed and his eldest sister had found marriage a failure and was domiciled with me her husband being a helpless creature was dismissed from the Railway Dept., I myself was hopeless about everything and quite unfit to cope with the fiend melancholia that I plainly saw was oppressing him'. He mentions a blow that Boake received: 'About this time he received a letter from the country, and in reference to it said to one of his sisters: “I hear that my best girl is going to be married”.' A return to the outback might have saved Boake, but he seemed to have lost the capacity to make up his mind about anything. A few attempts to find work in the city proved futile and he sank into brooding inactivity. On 2 May 1892 he left the house. Eight days later his body was discovered in the scrub at Long Bay, Middle Harbour, hanging by his stockwhip from a bough. Physically tough, emotionally sensitive, temperamentally unstable, financially inept, Boake may appear a predestined victim. This picture, however exaggerated, is closer to the record than one of him reasonedly rejecting materialistic civilization, finding God dead in Australia, and accordingly hanging himself. Modern drugs might have postponed Boake's suicide for years. His extant prose, neither extensive nor very effective, remains unpublished. Nearly all his published verse was collected and issued by A. G. Stephens in 1897, with a 'Memoir' by Stephens, a critical biography on which any later account of Boake's life is almost wholly dependent. The memoir, in its turn, was almost wholly dependent on an account written for Stephens by the poet's father, together with some letters from Boake himself. In a second edition in 1913 some poems were added, the notes were fewer, the first appearance of each poem was not given and Stephens's acknowledgment of his debt to Boake's father was omitted. Boake's reputation with the general reader rests on Where the Dead Men Lie (first printed in the Bulletin 19 December 1891 and signed 'Surcingle'). Critics have since pointed to other poems and have speculated on Boake's possible development had he lived longer. But his temperament does not afford any rosy prognosis; and it is at least arguable that he died when he had written his best poetry. The story of Barcroft’s brief but interesting life is told in the form of a novel in Hugh Capel’s book, “Where the Dead Men Lie , The Story of Barcroft Boake, Bush Poet of the Monaro .” While the story cannot be entirely “true” historically, it is told in a way that seeks to be true to the spirit of what happened. The nature of Barcroft’s relationships with the McKeahnie girls is a key feature in this story. In 1896 Barcroft’s father wrote a detailed Memoir about his son.)

The Best Poem Of Barcroft Henry Thomas Boake

A Song From A Sandhill

Drip, drip, drip! It tinkles on the fly—
The pitiless outpouring of an overburdened sky:
Each drooping frond of pine has got a jewel at its tip—
First a twinkle, then a sprinkle, and a drip, drip, drip.

Drip, drip, drip! They must be shearing up on high.
Can't you see the snowy fleeces that are rolling, rolling by?
How many bales, I wonder, are they branding to the clip?
P'r'aps the Boss is keeping tally with this drip, drip, drip.

Drip, drip, drip! while the sodden branches sigh:
The jovial jackass dare not laugh for fear that he should cry:
The merry magpie's melody is frozen on his lip;
He glowers at the showers, with their drip, drip, drip.

Drip, drip, drip! and one's ‘nap' is far from dry:
'Tis hard to keep the water out, however one may try:
I'd sell myself to Satan for three fingers of a nip:
There's cramps and vile rheumatics in that drip, drip, drip.

Pat, pat, pat! how it patters on the land!
'Tis certainly consoling to be camped upon the sand:
There's naught but mud and water over yonder on the flat,
Where the spots of rain are splashing with their pat, pat, pat.

Rain, rain, rain! and the day is nearly done:
I wonder shall we see another rising of the sun?
Has the sky shut down and stifled him; or will he come again
And stop the cursed clatter of this rain, rain, rain?

Drop, drop, drop! monotonous as Life,
With now and then a western breeze that cuts one like a knife:
Sputter on the fire: is it never going to stop?
Has the weather-clerk gone crazy, with his drop, drop, drop?

Drip, drip, drip! the squatter wouldn't say
‘Thank God!' so earnestly if he were camped in it to-day.
'Tis in at last: I knew it! there's a pool about my hip:
Oh, 'tis maddening and sadd'ning, with its drip, drip, drip!

Barcroft Henry Thomas Boake Comments

Barcroft Henry Thomas Boake Popularity

Barcroft Henry Thomas Boake Popularity

Close
Error Success