FOR KENNETH SLESSOR by Douglas Stewart (1913 - 1985)

Hang it all, Slessor, as Pound once said to Browning,
Why have you sailed so untimely out on the water
To vanish up in a cloud or down by drowning
Whichever it was?  You should have died hereafter.


For though you've left your verse to make amends
And so it does, as much as verse can do,
You were a man who liked to meet his friends
And here we are but where in the world are you?


Still at the top of your stairs I see you stand
Bowing a little in your courtly manner,
Smiling and gracious, shining and pink and rotund,
Bidding us into the privilege of your dinner.


And in your dining room that you've made noble
With walls of books that climb up shelf by shelf
From floor to ceiling, there's your dark wood table
Gleaming with silver you've laid out yourself,


For men must eat their beef in decent splendour
Wherever their wives and mistresses have flown
And since those bright mad girls had all gone under
The ocean somewhere, superbly you cooked your own.


I think of how we sat there light and lucky
While the soft candlelight flowed round the room
And heard you talk of Pepys and William Hickey,
Tennyson's verse and drunken pranks of Lamb;


Or venturing forth, where oystery rocks were waiting
At Bobbin Head and you were Captain Slessor,
Staunch on your launch I see you navigating
Like Captain Dobbin, your great predecessor,


And can't believe you've sunk; yet sunk you have,
Or flown or gone, and so with due apology
I raise my voice in necessary grief
And trespass in your private field of elegy.


And yet the day you died when I went walking
- Where else to go? - restless to Circular Quay
There had come in a tide so huge and sparkling
It filled all Sydney with the open sea,


And while it flowed from Manly to Balmain
With seagulls white on it, the great blue tide,
And washed the harbour sparkling clean again
As though no man had ever drowned or died,


I thought how with your spacious hospitality
In its high tide you'd made all life a feast;
And how your verse in its rich lustrous quality
Flowed round us still though you were far and lost,


And suddenly knew it still was good that morning,
Whatever else might happen in the world,
To see that noble tide now full and turning;
And in my grief I was half reconciled.


Well, round and ripe and rich with years you went
As if you rode that great tide out to sea
And we salute you even as we lament
And drink your health wherever you may be.