We are sated of songs that hymn the praise
Of a world beyond our ken;
We are bored by the ballads of beaten ways,
And milk and water men;
We are tired of the tales that lovers told
To the cooing, amorous dove;
We have banished the minstrelsy of old,
And the lyric of languid love,
While we stand where the ways of men have end,
And the untrod tracks commence,
We weary of songs that poets penned
In pastoral indolence.
The sleepy sonnet that lovers make
Where weeping willows arch
Cannot the passionate soul awake
Of men who outward march.
Our harps are hung in the towering
And the mulga low and gray
Our ballads are sung by every breeze
That flogs the sea to spray;
We want no lay of a moonlit strand
No idyll of daisied mead,
For the rhymes that our hearts can understand
Are the rhymes that our hearts can read.
First published in Jarrahland Jingles: A Volume of Westralian Verse 1908
