Songs of the Army of the Night

by Francis Adams

AUSTRALIAN PRESS NOTICES.

“This volume holds within its slim covers more restrained power, inward, incisive vision, and passionate pity than any volume of verse that has seen the light in the Southern Hemisphere (always, of course, excepting the complete ‘Poetical Works’ of the same author). That is a bewildering book, a veritable thousand islands of passion, pathos, poetry, set in a restless, weary sea. . . The uncontrollable out-bursts of a noble, tender soul maddened by the misery and hypocrisy of our cannibal civilisation,

This putrid death,
This flesh-feast of the few,
This social structure of red mud,
This edifice of slime,
Whose bricks are bones, whose mortar blood,
Whose pinnacle is crime!

Hemorrhages from the very vitals of one tortured in Hell. Not the quaint conglomeration of bottomless brimstone and three-tined forks, but the now non-exploding self-adjusting patent Hell ‘of our own manufacture,’ whose seventh hopeless circle centres in the old village by the Thames—(trade mark, ‘Commerce and Christ.’)”—Sydney Jephcott, “Australian Standard.”

AN AUSTRALIAN POET.

“Francis Adams is about the least Australian of the Australian poets. There is in his work lack of wattle-bloom and waratah, rollicking rhyme and galloping jingle. There is much of old-world problems and old-world troubles, which are old-world simply because we here have not had time enough to breed the fever germ to a ravaging pestilence. We have, however, the fever germ, and Francis Adams does our young country yeoman service in awakening a fear for the future in his latest book of poems, ‘Songs of the Army of the Night.’ The book is not all night though. It is a cantata without music. The first part is all gloom; angry threatening clouds bar out the light

of the coming dawn; footsteps of the weary and fallen plash along in the mud and darkness; the lightning of angry steel, gleaming phosphorescent in the night; the hoarse hum of famished millions moiling along with a dim yearning for a bloody vengeance, contribute the details of a grim picture of realistic misery. The first part deserves the title given to the whole book, ‘Songs of the Army of the Night.’ The third part is perturbed and stormy, the sea heaving and surging after a tempest; but already the day is breaking, and young hope is felt in the warmth of the sun’s first rays. The third part might be justly termed ‘Songs of the Dawn.’ The second part is hot and heavy with the languorous heat of the tropics. . . . The whole book is a hymn in praise of fodder. The people march hungry, hoarse with lack of sustenance, gripping their firelocks with feverish, skeleton hands, glaring fiercely with famished eyes towards the granaries of the wealthy. . . . This is the sermon of Nature: ‘If you would be good, eat.’ It is in the first part that we hear the trumpet-blast of the social message. Here the verses throb with a realistic agony, a lyric Zolaism, that chains the eyes to the page with a virile fascination. It is so simple, too—the coarse, strong meat of the poetry of first principles. The lines are hot and fervid; the poet’s pulses keep time with the great heart of human woe. This is socialism in verse, anarchism in the guise of a Grecian statue. ‘Outside London’ breathes thick and heavy with the vapours of gutterdom. It is despair, hunger, prophecy, hate, revenge. Francis Adams, a ripe and true scholar, in this shows his devotion to truth and to art. The traditions of classicism are in this volume thrown to the winds. The poet’s muse is a glorified street trull, a Cassandra of the slums, a draggle-tailed Menad from Whitechapel, and her voice is thick and frenzied with shouting at the barricades. ‘The Evening Hymn in the Hovels,’ ‘Hagar,’ ‘To the Girls of the Unions,’ ‘In the Edgware Road,’ ‘In Trafalgar Square,’ ‘Aux Ternes,’ ‘One among so many,’ ‘The New Locksley Hall,’ ‘To the Christians,’ voice in passionate, simple people’s lyrics the socialism which is always felt in strong under-currents by a nation before it appears in literary form, but which is only on the eve of bursting forth and overwhelming everything with its fury, when it does appear in literary form. Rosseau, Voltaire, and Diderot ushered in the French Revolution; in similar fashion the English Revolution is heralded by William Morris and Francis Adams.”—F. J. Broomfield, Sydney Bulletin.

“DAWNWARDS?”

To the Author of the “Songs of the Army of the Night.”

We—who, encircled in sleepless sadness
With ears laid close to the Austral earth,
Have heard far cries of wrong-wrought madness,
Of hopeless anguish and murd’rous mirth
Beneath all noise of maudlin gladness
Awail, environ the world’s wide girth—