He sings a convivial song, too, but with a difference. It has none of the "clinkum -- canikin -- clink" of Shakespeare's tavern ditty, yet it has a fine extravagance of its own.
If beings of mythology
Could live at my commands,
Briareus I'd choose to be
Who had a hundred hands;
And every hand of mine
Would hold a pint of wine.
And of those beakers ninety-nine
With white wine and with red
Should brim for dear old friends of mine.
The living and the dead.
By Pluto, there would be
A noble revelry!
Then let us unto Bacchus sing
Evoe! up and down--
For Bacchus is the wisest King
Who ever wore a crown;
His vine-leaves hide from view
More wit than Plato knew.
Bacchanalian poets have written in this strain while leading abstemious lives, but Daley lived his poetry too much for that enviable achievement. Although his second book is called "Wine and Roses" Daley is rarely the poet of the pot. When he sings of wine he does it with the pathetic grace of Omar --
Very often when I'm drinking
Of the old days I am thinking,
Of the good old days when living was a joy.
When I see folks marching dreary
To the tune of Miserere --
Then I thank the Lord that still I am a boy.
The poems where we really savour the quintessential Daley, the gossamer-weaver, are such as this-- "Sunset, a fragment." Who, we ask, can sing of sunset with any freshness? Daley certainly does when he sings --
Down in the dim sad West the sun
Is dying like a dying fire.
The fiercest lances of his light
Are spent; I watch him drop and die
Like a great king who falls in fight;
None dared the duel of his eye
Living, but, now his eye is dim,
The eyes of all may stare at him.
And then we have the simple intensity of "Passion Flower" with the same thought at its root as Leigh Hunt's "Jenny Kissed Me"
Choose who will the better part,
I have held her heart to heart;
And have felt her heart-strings stirred,
And her soul's still singing heard,
For one golden haloed hour,
Of Love's life the passion-flower.
So the world may roll or rest--
I have tasted of its best,
And shall laugh while I have breath
At thy dart and thee, O Death.
Many of Daley's original metaphors have a haunting beauty. So he speaks of the insect Homer "singing his Iliad on a blade of grass." The funeral procession of a dead girl winds along "like a black serpent with a snow-white bird held in its fangs." And who can mistake the Celtic glamoury of the simile of the sun sinking "like a peony drowning in wine," which comes from an exquisite poem "A Sunset Fantasy," one of his very best, a poem which surely answers his own description --
A scented song blown oversea,
As though from bowers of bloom;
A wind harp in a lilac tree
Breathed music and perfume.
We seek in vain in Daley for profundity either of passion or of philosophy. He bears the heart of a boy, kindling to the raptures of youth echoing its sadness and revealing its undying charm. His strange poem "Ponce de Leon" expresses his longing to voyage with that conquistador of the Floridas.
"Grieved am I, senor, and sorry,"
Very courteously it said,
"But I may not take you with me --
But I only take the Dead.
These alone may dare the voyage,
These alone sail on the quest,
For the fount of Youth Eternal,
For the Islands of the Blest."
It was Daley's aspiration to write "songs and sonnets carven in fine gold." Of the eight sonnets he preserved the best is ''Anacreon," ending --
There's honey still and roses on the earth
And lips to kiss and jugs to drain with mirth,
And lovers walk in pairs, but she is gone . . .
Anacreon, Anacreon.
Daley's verse owes little to our Australian scenery beyond its golden sunshine. It seems rather to be an emanation from the Celtic wonderland, the true home of his spirit -- "His best verse," said Strong, "has peculiar grace and distinction, and sometimes achieves an almost Heinesque quality, as when he addresses his soul,"
Be still and wait, O caged immortal Bird,
Thou shalt be free;
Not all in vain hast thou the voices heard
Of lives to be.
Be still and wait! No being that draws breath
Thy bounds can set;
Though God Himself forget thee, Faithful Death
Will not forget.
Zora Cross has characterised Daley's verse with the same fine perceptiveness which marks his own laurel tribute for the brow of Kendall--
He drew the waggon of Romance this way,
And tossed her laughing spells about our day,
That we might know pure Beauty had not fled,
Old Poesy his wine and Rhyme his bread.
Much did he find to share with mates born gay
In blithe Bohemia that heard him play
Harps of the wind full-stringed by fingers dead;
A singing dreamer in a singing land,
His jesting lips gave mirth to Death -- not tears.
First published in The Courier-Mail, 18 May 1935
[Thanks to the National Library of Australia's newspaper digitisation project for this piece.]
