A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF EDWIN JAMES BRADY - Mallacoota ...

It goes beyond the more romantic aspects to be seen in “Down in Honolulu” or
“Otahai”. The poet is the brave “knight of royal mein / With burnished glaive and
casque of gold” who searches for the Castle of Proud Dreams. 1 He is also the lover
sipping wine in an orchid-bedecked cave with his beloved while “wild rock-lilies
wanton dare / The court of roving bees” and myrtle loads the air with "virgin
fragrancies”. 2 One feels a strong identification of the poet also, with the McCrae-like
medieval narrative ballad – a poem surprisingly Chaucerian in tone. The knight hilled
in the Crusades on a “red, relentless plain, at sunset” is mourned formally by his Lady
Alice, who bows her head formally to fate’s decree and almost immediately marries a
“puissant lord”; but the humble maid who really loved him dies of a broken heart. If
the poem has, in goo medieval style, a moral, it is that we should look before our feet
for the fulfilment of our desires rather than in far-off realms. 3 Such imaginative
dreaming as is found in this poem is quite acceptable to Brady, for “Poet, Child and
Woman / Still sail the ship ‘Romance” 4
In the last assessment, however, whether the poet sings about man the worker, man
the martyr or man the dreamer, all the material structure of the earth, sea and sky, all
men and their problems pass away; only the spirit and the mind remain. It may be
true, as “Sic Itur Ad Astra” avers, that men live to die and die to live and “all the
Earth / Is bound in endless chains of Life and Death and Birth”, but the products of
man’s creativity, of his spirit, remain. “No death is here! Immortal life – the life of
Mind, / Eternal and unchanged, remains for aye behind”. 5 And at least Brady’s spirit
concerned itself throughout his life-time which much philosophising, especially in
verse; a preoccupation with the transience of human existence always evident. Yet
Time is regarded as a palliative, ridding man of accumulated sorrows and hardships
resulting from a life of care. It is not figurative old man with a scythe, but rather a
young housemaid, “clear-eyed, with cheeks abloom” who sweeps away all sorrow and
strife. 6
When examining the problem of suffering, Brady shows some ambivalence in his
attitude. While he worked, guided by his idealism, to alleviate the suffering of
mankind, yet in his theorising he reaches the conclusion that since suffering is a
cathartic, if not a therapeutic process, man should not complain about enduring it. So
when an enquiry is made in “The Lesson” about the reasons for suffering, the reply
would suggest that it can, through painting and sculpture and music, constitute a form
of worship:
And from the tall Parnassus, fell a sweet Voice
Guiding me:
‘In the Transept of my Temple.
Be pigments…
At the Pillars of my Temple,
Lie mallets …
On the Altar of my Temple,
A Lyre!
1 “Once Upon a Time”, The Earthen Floor.
2 “Wine Song”, ibid.
3 “On Tapestry”, The Bulletin, 14.7.1910. The earlier “To Chloe in Australia”, Centennial Magazine,
August, 1900, had its full share of wood-nymphs, naiads and other Arcadian inhabitants and gods.
4 “The Ship ‘Romance’”, The House of the Winds.
5 The Earthen Floor.
6 “Time”, The Earthen Floor.
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