Arthur Henry Adams

Arthur Henry Adams Poems

A PAIR of lovers in the street!
I dare not mock: with reverence meet
My unforgetting heart I cheat.
...

Last night beneath the mockery of the moon
I heard the sudden startled whisperings
Of wakened birds settling their restless wings;
The North-east brought his word of gladness, "Soon!"
...

In her grey majesty of ancient stone
She queens it proudly, though the sun's caress
Her piteous cheeks, ravished of bloom, confess,
And her dark eyes his bridegroom glance have know.
...

I thought, because we had been friends so long,
That I knew all your dear lips dared intend
Before they dawned to speech. Our thoughts would blend,
I dreamed, like memories that faintly throng.
...

All things must fade. There is for cities tall
The same tomorrow as for daffodils:
Time's wind, that casts the seed, the petal spills.
Grim London's ruined arches yet shall fall
...

One moment mankind rides the crested wave,
A moment glorious, beyond recall;
And then the wave, with slow and massive fall,
Obliterates the beauty that it gave.
...

She lies, a grave disdain all her defence,
Too imperturbable for scorn. She hears
Only the murmur of the flowing years
That thunder slowly on her shores immense
...

About me leagues of houses lie,
Above me, grim and straight and high,
They climb; the terraces lean up
Like long grey reefs against the sky.
...

LAST night I saw the Pleiades again,
Faint as a drift of steam
From some tall chimney-stack;
And I remembered you as you were then:
...

The steady soaking of the rain,
The bush all sad and sombre;
The trees are weeping in their pain,
Dank leaves the ground encumber.
...

BENEATH this narrow jostling street,
Unruffled by the noise of feet,
Like a slow organ-note I hear
The pulses of the great world beat.
...

ONCE more this Autumn-earth is ripe,
Parturient of another type.

While with the Past old nations merge
...

I AM a weakling. God, who made
The still, strong man, made also me.
The God who could the tiger plan,
In his lithe splendour unafraid—
...

“AND have I changed?” she asked, and as she spoke
The old smile o'er her pale face bravely broke,
And in her eyes dead worlds of pathos woke.
Changed? When I knew again the ghost of each
...

THE WIDE sun stares without a cloud:
Whipped by his glances truculent
The earth lies quivering and cowed.
My heart is hot with discontent:
...

THEY drew him from the darkened room,
Where, swooning in a peace profound,
Beneath a heavy fragrance drowned
Her grey form glimmered in the gloom
...

HER glance is equable, serene;
She looks at life with level brow;
She strides through circumstance—a queen!
To compromise she cannot bow—
...

ALL the air was tranced and the sea was stilled,
And we stood and dreamed of a world to be.
When it seemed to me that our souls were thrilled
With a sudden sympathy.
...

THE stone that all the sullen centuries,
With sluggish hands and massive fingers rude,
Against the sepulchre of womanhood
Had sternly held, she has thrust back with ease
...

I STAND in old Earth's presence; over all
The warm, pervading sunshine seems to print
Life and the Present; and there is no glint
Of white bones from the Past's decaying pall;
...

Arthur Henry Adams Biography

Arthur Henry Adams was a journalist and author. He started his career in New Zealand, though he spent most of it in Australia, and for a short time resided in China and London. Biography Arthur Henry Adams was born in Lawrence, Otago, New Zealand, on 6 June 1872, the son of Eleanor Sarah Gillon and her husband, Charles William Adams, a surveyor and a talented astronomer. Arthur attended Otago Boys' High School in Dunedin then onto the University of Otago, where he graduated BA in 1894. Although his major study was law, he was more interested in literature, and in 1893 supplied the composer Alfred Hill with a comic opera libretto, 'The whipping boy'. (This was never performed.) Another collaboration with Hill was the cantata Time's great monotone (1894). In 1895 Adams abandoned law to become a journalist and joined the Wellington Evening Post , which was edited by his uncle E. T. Gillon. In the same year, he and Hill worked on a cantata, Hinemoa. Adams's text was an essential contribution to the work's popular success. In 1898, aged 26, he moved to Australia for the first time. For most of his life Sydney was to be his home. There he worked on the libretto of the comic opera Tapu , which - again with music by Hill - was a success on its production in Wellington in 1903 despite some inadequacies in the dialogue. His first volume of poems, Maoriland, and other verses , was published in Sydney in 1899. It was welcomed by critics and some of its verses have been frequently anthologised. Adams went to China in 1900 to cover the Boxer rebellion for the Sydney Morning Herald. He took advantage of this experience to make a lecture tour of New Zealand in 1901. Like others before and since, he travelled to England hoping to make his name. The three years he spent there seem to have been unhappy, and the poems In London streets (1906) give a negative image of the metropolis. In 1905 Adams returned to New Zealand to continue his journalistic career at the Evening Post and for a brief time, the New Zealand Times. Then in 1906 he replaced A. G. Stephens as editor of the Red Page in the Sydney Bulletin. This appointment was a sign of literary success. Stephens had long been feared and respected as the arbiter of literary taste among Australian writers. The Red Page (named for the colour of the journal's cover, on the inside of which it appeared) was four long columns of literary gossip, criticism and comment. Adams was now established as a leading figure in Sydney life. On 30 September 1908 at Neutral Bay, Sydney, he married Lilian Grace Paton. The same year the first of a series of his comedies for the theatre had been performed. The tame cat was set in London, where a New Zealander tries to persuade a friend to return to the antipodes. One critic complained of the lack of action in the play but praised its sparkling dialogue. This judgement is in keeping with later praise of Adams's skill with words rather than with larger structures. In 1909 Adams left the Bulletin to take over the editorship of the literary magazine the Lone Hand , which published many well-known Australian writers. In 1911 he became editor of the Sydney Sun and returned to the Bulletin six years later. In 1913 Adams published his Collected verses , in which he announced his abandonment of poetry. In fact he had already published his most successful novel, Tussock Land , in London in 1904. It is the story of a young man who leaves his New Zealand home to seek artistic success in Australia but is constantly tortured by memories of the country and the young Maori woman he left behind. On returning to New Zealand he and Aroha are reconciled. This novel, with its powerful word-pictures of New Zealand landscapes and Sydney streets, is an important document of a man losing and recovering his sense of belonging to New Zealand. Adams never forgot his origins and was always viewed by his Australian colleagues as a transplanted New Zealander. He continued to live in Australia, however, and published a number of other novels: Galahad Jones (1910) , A touch of fantasy (1912) , Grocer Greatheart (1915) , The Australians (1920) , and the autobiographical A man's life (1929) . These are marked by a lively sense of humour, an ironic view of the gap between sexual passion and romantic idealism, and of a similar gap between the creative urge and the banality of daily life. They are notable for their overall kind-heartedness of tone. Adams also published four novels under the pseudonym James James, light-heartedly ironic treatments of married life. Adams himself was devoted to his wife and family. He was described as 'tall and thin, good-looking in a dark, sallow way', and evidently irritated people with his vanity while charming them with his natural talents and devotion to the literary life. He was an ardent advocate of Australian drama, and for over 20 years exerted considerable influence on Australian literature as journalist and critic. As a poet, playwright and novelist, for a time he was 'a fashion and a force. Adams died in Sydney on 4 March 1936. He was survived by his wife, two daughters and a son.)

The Best Poem Of Arthur Henry Adams

A Pair Of Lovers In The Street

A PAIR of lovers in the street!
I dare not mock: with reverence meet
My unforgetting heart I cheat.

Ah, God, spare me—so soon again
At the barred door to beat in vain,
And find their dalliance such fierce pain!

I, yearning up from Hell’s abyss,
See, dreaming through their worlds of bliss,
This Dante and his Beatrice!

For these the distant goal have won
For which God made the plasm and sun;
His patient labouring is done.

For these each Spring has been a bride,
And lonely worlds were spawned and died.
Chaos for them in birth-throes cried.

Far out in seas of Space forlorn
This crescent wave was slowly born
That thunders on the beach of morn.

Ah, they, so soon to be meshed in
The web of splendour, silken-thin,
The nebulae were set to spin!

Up the long path from joy to joy
Love led the way. Can aught destroy
The task that was the stars’ employ?

Their ecstasy to God is more
Than Lucifer at Heaven’s door
Entreating pardon for his war.

These two are gods, for, by love swayed,
They have God’s special task essayed,
And new worlds for their gladness made.

This little hour so lightly given
Makes earth too mean a place to live in,
And broken toys His Hell and Heaven.

All Time, expectant of their bliss,
Hangs fearful. Space through her abyss
Shudders if they this hour should miss.

For if their kiss they went without,
The stars would be a raining rout,
And time in anguish flicker out.

About God’s room from star to sun
A stealthy slippered Thing would run,
Quenching cold tapers one by one.

But they have kissed. Eternity,
Like a great clock, beats steadily
For these mazed fools—but not for me!

Of God’s wide universe the strands
They hold within their clinging hands;
The stars march on at their commands.

So from this moment blossom free
New universes tirelessly—
Aeons of unguessed ecstasy!

But I can only bow and beat
Vain hands about God’s mercy-seat,
And, still remembering, still entreat.

Surely my penance is complete!
The rack turns grimly when I meet
A pair of lovers on the street

Arthur Henry Adams Comments

M Asim Nehal 30 March 2019

Wonderful poet, some of his poems are outstanding...

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