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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "When I was King and Other Verses," Henry Lawson presents a poignant collection of poems and narratives that encapsulate the spirit of Australia during the late 19th and early 20th century. Lawson's literary style is characterized by vivid imagery and colloquial language, seamlessly weaving themes of identity, social justice, and the rugged beauty of the Australian landscape. The verses reflect a keen awareness of the struggles faced by the working class, as well as the aspirations and frustrations of a nation seeking its place in the world, establishing an important context in the development of Australian literature and identity. Henry Lawson, often heralded as one of Australia's greatest writers, was deeply influenced by his experiences growing up in a rural setting and the harsh realities faced by many Australians. His commitment to portraying the everyday life and struggles of the common person informed not only his poetry but also his short stories and journalism. In a time when Australia was shaping its national identity, Lawson's works served as a powerful voice for his contemporaries and the generations that followed. Recommended for readers interested in Australian literature, social commentary, and poetic expression, "When I was King and Other Verses" invites reflection on the enduring themes of resilience and aspiration. Lawson's masterful storytelling offers a unique lens through which to appreciate both the cultural and historical landscapes of Australia, making this collection a vital addition to any literary library. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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When I was King and Other Verses
Table of Contents
Introduction
When I Was King and Other Verses gathers a broad selection of Henry Lawson’s poetry into a single, coherent volume, offering readers a panoramic view of one of Australia’s most recognizable literary voices. As a single-author collection, its purpose is to present, in one place, the range of Lawson’s concerns—rural and urban life, work and war, memory and nation—so that the poems can be read in conversation with one another. The volume shows Lawson not only as a ballad-maker of the bush but as an observer of cities and politics, inviting comparison across modes, moods, and subjects without claiming to be his complete poetic output.
The contents are poems and nothing else: narrative ballads, lyrical meditations, occasional and topical verses, elegies and tributes, satirical and political pieces, and conversational monologues. Readers will find bush ballads such as The Shearers and The Drovers, patriotic and landscape poems like Waratah and Wattle and My Land and I, historical and civic reflections including Eureka and The Men Who Made Australia, and city portraits such as The Alleys and A Voice from the City. Love lyrics and intimate addresses appear alongside public poems, while character pieces like ‘G.S.,’ or the Fourth Cook show Lawson’s ear for spoken voices.
Across this variety runs a set of unifying themes. Lawson returns to the dignity of labor, the bonds and trials of mateship, and the stark beauty and peril of the Australian landscape. He weighs the promise of national identity against hardship, displacement, and inequity, moving between bush tracks and city streets to show how both shape character and community. Poems such as The Bush Fire and The Never-Never Country reflect environmental extremes and remoteness; Eureka and The Men Who Made Australia frame civic memory and protest; while works like The Separation and Say Good-Bye When Your Chum is Married register private loss and change.
Stylistically, the collection showcases Lawson’s plainspoken clarity, steady rhythms, and preference for vivid, concrete detail. He favors ballad and songlike cadences that carry narrative drive, uses irony and understatement to sharpen social observation, and balances satire with compassion. The diction remains accessible, often incorporating colloquial turns without sacrificing formal control. Dramatic address and direct speech lend immediacy to character pieces, while the descriptive passages compress place and mood with economy. Throughout, an ethical concern for ordinary lives anchors the work, giving even the most topical poems a human focus that outlasts their immediate occasions.
The cultural context is unmistakably Australian, situated in the late colonial and Federation-era milieu that shaped Lawson’s reputation. Many pieces engage institutions and events recognizable to contemporary readers of his time, including the diggings remembered in Eureka and the lively literary-public sphere evoked by The Bulletin Hotel. Rural industries and itinerant labor—shearing, droving, prospecting—appear not as background but as subjects worthy of record. Urban poems register industrial modernity and social pressures, while works touching on soldiers and engineers situate Australia within broader imperial and technological currents. The collection thus preserves a spectrum of public moods alongside intensely local observation.
Taken together, these verses remain significant because they articulate experience from the ground up, giving durable voice to workers, wanderers, and families pitted against distance, drought, fire, and the demands of the city. Lawson’s empathy and moral directness enable the poems to speak beyond their moment, offering readers a lens on nation-making that acknowledges conflict, humor, and compromise. The formal lucidity makes the work hospitable to new readers, while the thematic depth rewards return visits. As social record and art, the collection continues to inform conversations about belonging, fairness, memory, and the relationship between land, labor, and identity.
Readers may approach the book sequentially to feel its tonal ebb and flow—from bush ballads through urban sketches to public and personal addresses—or dip in thematically, tracing poems of work, protest, landscape, love, or parting. However one proceeds, the cumulative effect is of a single, steady voice testing different angles on the same enduring questions: how to live honestly, how to stand by one’s mates, and how to name a place that is still being made. This collection offers not a complete works but a capacious survey, a trustworthy entry into the breadth of Lawson’s verse.
Historical Context
Henry Lawson was born on 17 June 1867 on the Grenfell goldfields of New South Wales to Niels Hertzberg Lawson, a Norwegian miner, and Louisa Lawson, a writer and suffragist who founded the journal The Dawn in 1888. Raised at Eurunderee near Mudgee, Lawson lost much of his hearing at age fourteen, a fact that pushed him inward toward observation and print. The homesteads, droughts, and itinerant labor of the interior informed his lifelong subjects: shearers, drovers, selectors, bush women, and the stark choices of mateship. That early rural world underlies the collection’s depictions of hardship, endurance, and the emotional economies of distance and isolation.
Lawson’s breakthrough came with A Song of the Republic in The Bulletin on 1 October 1887, placing him at the heart of the Bulletin school, the nationalist, democratic movement fostered by editor J. F. Archibald and critic A. G. Stephens. The 1890s depression, marked by the 1890 Maritime Strike and the shearers’ strikes of 1891 and 1894, shaped his sympathy for unions and the underclass. Lawson’s ballads and sketches often echo the radical memory of the 1854 Eureka Stockade at Ballarat and the figure of Peter Lalor. Across this volume, that populist current meets skepticism toward privilege, celebrating ordinary labor while questioning colonial hierarchies.
In 1892 Lawson went west to Bourke on the Darling River, where drought, river traffic, boundary riding, and the shearing sheds furnished the textures that recur throughout these poems. The long Federation Drought from the mid 1890s to the early 1900s haunts images of bush fire, dust, and empty tanks. There he encountered Afghan cameleers, Chinese storekeepers, shearers on strike pay, and drovers threading stock routes through semi arid country. Those experiences, and the backblocks townships of western New South Wales and Queensland, supplied the moral geography of mateship and mutual aid set against loneliness, itinerancy, and the precarious economics of seasonal pastoral work.
By 1901 the colonies federated as the Commonwealth of Australia, and public ritual offered new national symbols and tensions. Royal tours by the Duke and Duchess of York in 1901 and later reigns sharpened Lawson’s ambivalence toward monarchy. Native born Australians were nicknamed Cornstalks, and emblems such as the waratah and the wattle stood for local pride and unity. These poems often balance republican sentiment with the reality of empire, sketching a citizenry proud of land and labour yet wary of imported deference. The pioneering narrative is recast as collective effort and sacrifice, reaching from convict foundations to selectors, shearers, and city workers.
The same 1890s that gave Lawson the bush also thrust him into bohemian Sydney, with its pubs, boarding houses, and editorial rooms. The Bulletin’s office culture, and friendships and rivalries with A. B. Banjo Paterson, A. G. Stephens, and E. J. Brady, shaped both his craft and his subject matter. Louisa Lawson’s feminism and the suffrage victories of 1902 broadened his attention to women’s lives, from respectability’s margins to the burdens of work and marriage. Poems in this collection register the slums of Surry Hills and The Rocks, the lure and cost of drink, and the fragile economies of printers, cooks, seamen, and alley dwellers.
Between 1900 and 1902 Lawson lived in London, an imperial capital whose contrasts sharpened his realism. He wrote in the shadow of Dickens and watched labour politics in places like Battersea, where the reformist voice of John Burns had earlier stirred the docks and streets. Imperial traffic moved through ports such as Genoa and along routes to India, and the Australian diaspora haunted coffee houses and boarding rooms. This cosmopolitan interlude widened Lawson’s field beyond the Darling to the lanes, parades, and newsstands of the metropolis, enabling comparisons between Australian and British poverty, and between colonial nationalism and the wider imperium.
The collection also reflects an age of war and technology. The South African War of 1899 to 1902 saw Australian contingents fight abroad, and engineers became emblems of both military modernity and nation building at home through railways, bridges, and water schemes. Global events pressed closer: the Russo Japanese War of 1904 to 1905 and the Russian Revolution of 1905 made the figure of the Little Czar and the Russian Bear immediate. Lawson’s Norwegian heritage surfaces in Scandinavian toasts and sympathies. Across these poems he weighs duty against doubt, salutes the rank and file, and interrogates the costs of empire, frontier, and organized violence.
When I Was King and Other Verses appeared with Angus and Robertson in Sydney in 1905, gathering new and earlier work from a writer already marked by struggle. Lawson married Bertha Bredt in 1896; separation, alcoholism, and repeated imprisonments for maintenance in the years after 1905 darkened his later life. He died in Sydney on 2 September 1922 and received a state funeral before burial at Waverley Cemetery. The volume endures as a ledger of the 1890s and early Commonwealth years: labour radicalism, bush survival, urban poverty, and guarded patriotism. Its voices helped fix the language of mateship and the ethic of a fair go.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Cross-Roads
A reflective piece in which the speaker weighs divergent life paths at a symbolic junction, poised between duty and desire.
When I was King
A wry recollection of youthful swagger and imagined sovereignty, set against the humbling lessons of time.
The Author’s Farewell to the Bushmen
A valedictory address to bush mates, expressing gratitude, solidarity, and the sadness of parting from the outback life.
Early Bush and Shearing Ballads (From the Bush; Heed Not; The Bush Girl; 'G.S.,' or the Fourth Cook; Jack Cornstalk; The Shearers; 'Knocking Around'; The Shearer’s Dream; The Never-Never Country; On the Wallaby; The Drovers; Will Yer Write It Down for Me?; Andy’s Return)
Vivid portraits of itinerant workers, shearers, cooks, and swaggies—celebrating mateship, grit, and the restless push across the inland.
The Bulletin Hotel
A lively, insider sketch of the Bulletin circle, casting the bohemian press as a bustling 'hotel' of writers, rivalries, and yarns.
Sacred to the Memory of 'Unknown'
An elegy for the nameless dead—the unrecorded victims of bush hardship and city neglect—granting dignity to forgotten lives.
With Dickens
An homage to Charles Dickens, crediting his humane vision with shaping the poet’s own sympathy for the poor and outcast.
The Things We Dare Not Tell
A frank catalogue of hard truths—poverty, fear, failure—that polite society hides, urging candor over pretence.
Travel and Wanderers (Gipsy Too; The Wander-Light; Genoa; The Tracks That Lie by India; The Light on the Wreck)
Restless journeys by sea and shore—ports, sea-lanes, guiding lights, and wrecks—where wanderlust meets the wide routes of empire.
Friendship, Parting, and Domestic Strain (Say Good-Bye When Your Chum is Married; The Separation; Ruth)
Brief dramas of mateship altered by marriage, households under stress, and steadfast women navigating hardship.
Landscapes and Towns (The Cliffs; Bourke; The Stringy-Bark Tree; The Bush Fire; The Brass Well)
From sea-cliffs to Bourke’s dust, from stringy-bark forests to fierce bushfires and life-giving wells, the land’s beauty and peril frame human fates.
Empire and Protest (The Drums of Battersea; As Far as Your Rifles Cover; The Bill of the Ages; The King and Queen and I)
A critique of monarchy, militarism, and imperial justice, beating out a call for reform, fairness, and democratic accountability.
Patriotism and Nationhood (Waratah and Wattle; My Land and I; The Men Who Made Australia; Robbie’s Statue; The Heart of Australia; Eureka)
Patriotic odes that find Australia’s heart in its people, flora, rebels, and workers, weaving pioneer toil and democratic ideals into nationhood.
City Streets and Underclass (The Alleys; The Scamps; Break o’ Day; The Women of the Town; The Afterglow; A Voice from the City; The Men Who Live It Down)
Stark urban sketches of slums, larrikins, dawn labor, and marginalised women, giving voice to the shamed and the resilient poor.
Humour and Hard Times (When Your Pants Begin to Go; The Secret Whisky Cure; The Pride That Comes After; The Drunkard’s Vision)
Wry, bar-room wisdom and comic turns on empty pockets, makeshift cures, and the inevitable humbling of pride.
Love and Personal Addresses (New Life, New Love; To Hannah; The Water Lily; Barta; To Jim; Pigeon Toes)
Intimate lyrics and portraits of affection, counsel between friends, and the quiet renewal of feeling after trouble.
War and Front Lines (In the Storm That is to Come; Skaal; The Firing-Line; Riding Round the Lines; The Vanguard; The Last Review)
Anticipation and experience of conflict—comrades’ toasts, patrols, and valedictory musters—told with sober resolve.
Russia and the Czar (When the Bear Comes Back Again; The Little Czar)
Topical glimpses of Russian power and its ruler, framed as looming bear and fragile monarch, with wary irony.
Engineers and Nation-Builders (Australian Engineers; Those Foreign Engineers)
Praise for the practical makers of the young nation and a measured comparison with overseas counterparts who shape modern life.
And the Bairns Will Come
A hopeful vision of settlers or migrants building a home where future children will inherit work, land, and belonging.
Parable and Redemption (The Good Samaritan; To-Morrow; The Ballad of the Elder Son; As Good as New)
Biblical and moral recastings in Australian settings, where compassion, patience, and second chances redeem rough or wayward lives.
Written Out
A candid confession of creative exhaustion—what remains when words falter and the spark runs low.
THE END
A brief sign-off that closes the volume with a simple, final cadence.
When I was King and Other Verses
The Cross-Roads
Oncemore I write a line to you, While darker shadows fall; Dear friends of mine who have been true, And steadfast through it all. If I have written bitter rhymes, With many lines that halt, And if I have been false at times It was not all my fault.
To Heaven’s decree I would not bow, And I sank very low— The bitter things are written now, And we must let them go. But I feel softened as I write; The better spirit springs, And I am very sad to-night Because of many things.
The friendships that I have abused, The trust I did betray, The talents that I have misused, The gifts I threw away. The things that did me little good, And—well my cheeks might burn— The kindly letters that I should Have answered by return.
But you might deem them answered now, And answered from my heart; And injured friends will understand ’Tis I who feel the smart. But I have done with barren strife And dark imaginings, And in my future work and life Will seek the better things.
When I was King
The secondtime I lived on earth Was several hundred years ago; And—royal by my second birth— I know as much as most men know. I was a king who held the reins As never modern monarch can; I was a king, and I had brains[1q], And, what was more, I was a man!
Called to the throne in stormy times, When things were at their very worst, I had to fight—and not with rhymes— My own self and my kindred first; And after that my friends and foes, And great abuses born of greed; And when I’d fairly conquered those, I ruled the land a king indeed.
I found a deal of rottenness, Such as in modern towns we find; I camped my poor in palaces And tents upon the plain behind. I marked the hovels, dens and drums In that fair city by the sea. And burnt the miles of wretched slums And built the homes as they should be.
I stripped the baubles from the State, And on the land I spent the spoil; I hunted off the sullen great, And to the farmers gave the soil. My people were their own police; My courts were free to everyone. My priests were to preach love and peace; My Judges to see justice done.
I’d studied men and studied kings, No crawling cant would I allow; I hated mean and paltry things, As I can hate them even now. A land of men I meant to see, A strong and clean and noble race— No subject dared kneel down to me, But looked his king straight in the face
Had I not been a king in fact, A king in council-hall and tent, I might have let them crawl and act The courtier to their heart’s content; But when I called on other kings, And saw men kneel, I felt inclined To gently tip the abject things And kick them very hard behind.
My subjects were not slaves, I guess, But though the women in one thing— A question ’twas of healthy dress— Would dare to argue with their king (I had to give in there, I own, Though none denied that I was strong), Yet they would hear my telephone If anything went very wrong.
I also had some poets bright— Their songs were grand, I will allow— They were, if I remember right, About as bad as bards are now. I had to give them best at last, And let them booze and let them sing; As it is now, so in the past, They’d small respect for gods or king.
I loved to wander through the streets— I carried neither sword nor dirk— And watch the building of my fleets, And watch my artisans at work. At times I would take off my coat And show them how to do a thing— Till someone, clucking in his throat, Would stare and gasp, ‘It is the king!’
And I would say, ‘Shut up, you fools! Is it for this my towns I burn? You don’t know how to handle tools, And by my faith you’ll have to learn!’ I was a king, but what of that? A king may warble in the spring And carry eggs home in his hat, Provided that heisa king.
I loved to stroll about the town With chums at night, and talk of things, And, though I chanced to wear the crown, My friends, by intellect, were kings. When I was doubtful, then I might Discuss a matter quietly, But when I felt that I was right No power on earth could alter me!
