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- Collection: Medievalism on the Page
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‘As it is in the Days of Now’, The Bulletin, 12 March 1908
This poem, which is best described as “an anti-nostalgic demystification of chivalric heroism” (Louise D’Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840-1910, Turnhout, Brepols, 2011, p.143), draws…
‘The Sagamen’, The Bulletin, 2 May 1907
‘Prospect Good’ was the nom de plume of the gold prospector, fossicker, and bush poet, Francis William Ophel. This poem, ‘The Sagamen,’ is filled with vivid imagery drawn in the style of Old Icelandic sagas (Louise…
‘The Old Squire’, The Bulletin, 28 May 1908
The Bulletin, which was resolutely “anti-imperialist” in its outlook, published a range of verses, ballads and other “poems in which the Middle Ages were represented as despotic and barbaric” (Louise D’Arcens, Old Songs…
‘The Ballad of Sir Anopheles’, The Bulletin, 18 June 1908
The hero of this poem, as the name Sir Anopheles hints, is a mosquito. The author here humorously stages an encounter between man and mosquito as a drawn-out battle between a recumbent Ogre and an intrepid and undaunted medieval knight. It is clear…
‘On Tapestry’, The Bulletin, 14 July 1910
This engaging “McCrae-like medieval narrative ballad” (John B. Webb, “A Critical Biography of Edwin James Brady 1869-1952” PhD Thesis, The University of Sydney, 1972, p.95) concerns the fortunes of a triad of ill-starred…
‘On Keira’, The Bulletin, 16 June 1910
This intensely nostalgic medieval poem by E. J. Brady “is most distinctive for its unapologetic insertion of the chivalric into the local”, which becomes the source of unintended humour (Louise D’Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless…
‘Viking Song’, The Bulletin, 25 August 1910
David McKee Wright draws inspiration from the journeys of the Vikings across the North Sea in this poetic martial ‘ditty’ that brims with national pride:
Australia with her bright hair glowingHas her eye on the furrows of the deep [...]…