Poetry Revisited: An Australian Rose by Harriet Anne Martin

An Australian Rose

(from Lala Fisher [ed.], By Creek and Gully. Stories and Sketches Mostly of Bush Life:
Told in Prose and Rhyme by Australian Writers in England: 1899)

Patchett Martin

To R. M. P.

To her of gracious gifts, whose graceful pen
Becomes a fairy wand in her frail hand
Flashing the sunlight of her Austral land
   On the slim maidens and brown-bearded men
   Who live their lives for us at her command
   I said — “I always think of you as when,
   Like one entranced in an enchanted glen,
You stood one night amidst a madcap band.

With red lips parted, and a roseleaf flush
   Painting the pearly pallor of your face,
   Mute, motionless, in an expectant hush,
   Your dreamy eyes like stars shone into space.”
   Softly she answer’d with a shadowy blush—
“My soul first stirred to life in that fair place.”

Harriet Anne Martin (c. 1837-1908)
Australian poet and writer