Poems by Victor James Daley

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Good fellows are laughing and drinking
Ghosts walk the Earth, that rise not from the grave.
O the Queen may keep her golden
The sun burns fiercely down the skies;
Spellbound by a sweet fantasy
A horseman on a hilltop green
Half waking and half dreaming,
When the sap runs up the tree.
Once a poet, long ago,
We bought a volume of Anacreon,
The pale discrowned stacks of maize,
On a golden dawn in the dawn sublime
The curtain rose, the play began,
I pity him who has not swung
Bouquet said: “My floral ring
When trees in Spring
Camilla calls me heartless: hence you see
Having certain cares to drown,
O day, the crown and crest of all the year!
By his side, whose days are past,
Day goeth bold in cloth of gold,
The awful seers of old, who wrote in words
Soul of the leaping flame;
For some forty years, and over,
I have been dreaming all a summer day
Stand up, my young Australian,
The days go by, the days go by,
It was a day of sombre heat:
The day and its delights are done;
Fade off the ridges, rosy light,
It may have been a fragment of that higher
Once from the world of living men
See how it flashes,
Say little: where she lies, so let her rest:
Over a slow-dying fire,
Through the noiseless doors of Death
What know we of the dead, who say these things,
Love is the sunlight of the soul,
(In Memory of Henry Kendall)
'Wanted Kind Person to take charge of baby Boy (or Girl),' etc. - Any newspaper, any day.
The Muse who comes each morning
Neæra crowns me with a purple wreath
The night is young yet; an enchanted night
With pen in hand and pipe in mouth,
What! Don't you our Mæcenas know
Very often, when I'm drinking,
Choose who will the wiser part,
And after all, and after all,
By a black wharf I stood lately,
These are the flowers of sleep
Soul, dost thou shudder at the narrow tomb?
They say that fair Romance is dead, and in her cold grave lying low,
Give thou a gift to me
If I were young as you, Sixteen,
What shall a man remember
A child came singing through the dusty town
I am the Vision and the Dream
I learnt the language of the birds,
’Tis said that the Passion Flower,
Lo, upon the carpet, where
The narrow, thorny path he trod.
There is a saying of renown,
The wan light of a stormy dawn
The days go by, the days go by,
All silent is the room,
Within his office, smiling.
It fell upon a summer night
The waters make a music low:
Methought I came unto a world-wide plain
Last night, as one who hears a tragic jest,
By the road, near her father’s dwelling,
Who are these strange small folk,
Not only on cross and gibbet,
The red sun on the lonely lands
When the moon a golden-pale
The world was in my debt,
He sat beneath the curling vines
Care is a Poet fine:
Once upon a hushed red morning
In my garden, O Beloved!
Her gown was simple woven wool,
An apple caused man’s fall, as some believe;
There is a town in Ireland,
There was a Boy, long years ago,
In Youth, when through our veins runs fast
The Woman at the Washtub,
When the tender hand of Night
They brought my fair love out upon a bier,
We said farewell, my youth and I,
There are three mighty Voices that alway
They leave us - artists, singers, all
Dedicated to Louis Becke
The old dead flowers of bygone summers,