[Carol Taylor]

The Legendary Ghan

It runs from Adelaide north to the Alice —
a thousand miles, as we used to say —
through desert that sears, sans mercy or malice,
fools on foot in the heat of day.
Outside is that sunbaked ochre landscape,
saltbush and spinifex dotting the sandscape;
this air-conditioned train is a palace
on rails, with bathrooms that fold away.

The Ghan that first ran in ’twenty-nine
huffed and puffed its uncertain way
two hundred miles east of this newer line,
and when you might get there, no one could say.
If ever the Ghan should happen along
on time, you’d know that your watch was wrong.
To the scheduled two days might be added nine
or (once) a full fifty-six days of delay!

Flash-floods could wrench the rails to tangled
spaghetti, stranding the train for weeks
while passengers stalked wild goats, or angled
in new-swollen torrents of streams and creeks.
Somewhere way out past Oodnadatta
essential supplies from the skies would spatter
the land with pickles and flour, as mangled
crates, dropped chuteless, sprang food-package leaks.

From Adelaide, leaving the city’s hubbub,
past vines of Riesling and Cabernet
and wheatfields we slide, and soon through scrub,
as greenness dissolves to the coaches’ soft sway.
Beyond Port Augusta the scenery changes
once more, the saltscrub sparse on the ranges
where pinpoint towns — a station, a pub —
were built on the tracker and cameltrain way.

Pimba, Tarcoola, Manguri, Finke River...
they spread in a giant finger span:
points in the blank of the Never-Never,
they marked in their turn the route of the Ghan.
Along it, too, Hawker and Edwards Creek
(“Dodge City” — they’d sooner shoot than speak),
Warrina and Copley, ... the train would deliver —
sometime — its cargo of goods and of man.

There in the “acre per bandicooot” outback,
each whistle-stop town had its tank and a dog,
and always a pub, and a man with a stout back
to handle the barrels of beer, known as grog.
There in the desert so scarce of feature,
the eye hardly ever lights on a creature.
For company, yell and an echo might shout back
from a three-billion-year-old wall of rock.

But this is the modern reincarnation
of the old, original, steam-hauled Ghan,
this legend an advertiser’s creation:
in coach class many a city man
precedes on the rails his Harley or Cruiser,
content to spend the trip as a boozer
till the legend slows at its destination
and all are offloaded according to plan.

The Alice: Alice Springs.
In the 1860s, 34 Afghan tribesmen and 120 camels were brought to South Australia to help carry supplies to remote Outback stations. The locals soon shortened "Afghans" to "Ghans". Within a few years strings of up to 70 camels were criss-crossing Central Australia, opening it up to pastoral settlement. Railways arrived in the 1920s; ironically, the train that displaced the Afghans on the main north-south route itself came to be known as "The Ghan".
Early in 2004, since this was written, the line northwards from Alice Springs to Darwin was at last completed. The modern Ghan now travels the whole 3300km (more than 2000 miles) between Adelaide and Darwin.

Henry Quince, Australia

[Richard Wilbur]

The materials here are fascinating, and the poem is full of comedy, wit and high spirits. I love “a palace on rails, with bathrooms that fold away,” and there are elegant phrases like “points in the blank of the Never-Never.” My chief criticism is that meter and rhyme ought to seem to happen accidentally as the argument flows. Here the meter is often Procrustean, as in the jammed line “crates, dropped chuteless, sprang food-package leaks,” and though it is good fun to rhyme “outback,” “stout back,” and “shout back,” one feels that it’s rhyme and not the flow of content that’s in control.

~Richard Wilbur

[Michael Cantor]

Henry -

I had a good deal of difficulty with this one because all the wonderful Kiplingesque place names and color make me want to chant it aloud - it cries for a good, thumping meter and drums and bugles to carry it along - but when I tried to read it to myself I kept getting lost. It's a train with wonderful cargo, but it needs a track.

Clumsy metaphors aside, I had a serious problem with the poem because there does not seem to be a consistent, coherent meter or sense of rhythm, and consequently no flow to the stanzas. The unusual rhyme scheme lacks support. This could work well in a shorter poem - particularly something about, for example, jamgling urban displacment, or a sense of loss or disassociation, where the wandering meter could underline the message - but here you are presenting a grand, sweeping travelogue of a poem; and I feel you need a much stronger amd more consistent sound track to carry it through. (To be honest, the meter seemed so vague that I worry that I'm missing something - looking for IP when it's not even intended to be there. However, if this is deliberately rhymed but non-metrical, I still have a problem in that, as non-met, it doesn't grab me and carry through the line breaks.)

The ababccab rhyme scheme is intriguing. Personally, I prefer the couplet providing a rim shot at the end of each stanza, but this can also work. I haven't encountered it before. Yours? Was it a deliberate intention, or - which is what happens to me - did it just push its way into the poem?

Summary - I feel this has great possibilities with the trove of rich material it contains, but I'd feel more comfortable with a stronger meter.

Michael

[Tim Murphy]

Michael, it's accentual tetrameter, and the meter about breaks my neck. I've no problem whatever being flung about by it. It's built of every foot known to man. I agree with Dick's specific criticisms however, of that one packed line and the outback rhymes. What I so love about it though, is the extraordinary and multiple senses of place in it, and its sense of history. This belongs in the canon of the nation that produced the poet. Henry is one of a very few extremely sophisticated metrists on our boards. Carol is another, witness her faux Sapphics nearby. I have never seen him commit an infelicity, no matter how complex a track he is following. Although Mike Moran had already praised this on Lariat, I wanted Dick to see what Oz is up to these days.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

I'm with Richard and Michael on the meter here. The poem is absolutely crammed with fascinating details, but the meter, as Dick said, is Procrustean--not quite fitting and sometimes painfully wrenching.

I'm thinking that a railway carriage would be better done with alternating between three dactyls and a macron and then three dactyls and a trochee, which is almost the meter which the piece starts with, but not quite. That would sound more like rattly train on unsound tracks.

Still, I really do like the details in the piece, which tells of something I'd never heard of before.

[Mark Allinson]

Henry,

as a fellow native of this country I applaud this poem. It is so true to the spirit of place. And all the touches of local colour are just right.

One of the fascinating aspects of the posts above is the wide range of reactions to the meter. On one hand we have the view that the meter is too severe on the content, wrenching it into and out of place, and on the other, that the meter is so vague as to approximate free verse. I would like to hear from anyone else on the subject of this apparent range of reactions to the meter.

I do agree that the crowded line mentioned is crowded, but I would have thought it was crowded for a purpose, since it was describing a tumble of mixed goodies. But maybe there is a more subtle way to get that effect.

I must say that none of the rhymes bothered me (maybe because of my shared Ozzieness), and I don't mind a bit of rhyme lee-way in something so lightish and jaunty as this.

In many ways I think this piece is a fair dinkum rip-snorter.

G'donyamate!




------------------
Mark Allinson

[Henry Quince]

Many thanks to Tim and Carol, and especially to Richard Wilbur. It is indeed an honour.

I consider this to be bordering on light verse, which perhaps is why I allowed myself such rhymes as outback/shout back. When it was workshopped here, somebody remarked that the 8-line stanza form and the rhythm seemed similar to Swinburne’s in Chorus in Atalanta (“Now winter’s rains and ruins are over,/And all the season of snows and sins...”). I pleaded guilty, more or less. I did borrow the tetrameter ababccab stanza pattern from Swinburne — it’s one I’ve always liked. But I think my meter is rather closer to the anapestic end of the spectrum, with modulations: an attempt to suggest the rhythm of a train — consistent but not uniform.

I know some people take to these meters more easily than others. I agree that some of the nuts and bolts are showing here, and that some lines are a stretch. There is the one Richard mentioned, which is jammed as he says, and others that may seem wrenched through uncertainty of stress. I don’t think there’s any such uncertainty in lines like “fools on foot in the heat of day” or “this air-conditioned train is a palace” but there could be in “a thousand miles, as we used to say” (if you make it MI-yuls, that might throw a disruptive stress on “we”) or “from a three-billion-year-old wall of rock” (though I hoped the heavy rather monolithic middle there might echo the sense).

This has not been offered anywhere for publication. I’m conscious it can be improved, so perhaps I will now come up with some suitable changes.

My thanks again to Richard, Tim and Carol, and to the others who have commented.

Henry




[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited March 16, 2005).]

[Janet Kenny]

Henry,
I was one of the first to wave and cheer as your poem passed by and still do so. I rather like your deliberately OTT rhymes. "He being well born came from Melbourne". Traditional
Janet