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Home  »  The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse  »  56 . The Grey Company

Walter Murdoch (1874–1970). The Oxford Book of Australasian Verse. 1918.

By Jessie Mackay

56 . The Grey Company

O THE GREY, grey company

Of the pallid dawn!

O the ghostly faces

Ashen-like and drawn!

The Lord’s lone sentinels

Dotted down the years—

The little grey company

Before the pioneers!

Dreaming of Utopias

Ere the time was ripe,

They awoke to scorning,

To jeering and to strife.

Dreaming of millenniums

In a world of wars,

They awoke to shudder

At a flaming Mars.

Never was a Luther

But a Huss was first—

A fountain unregarded

In the primal thirst.

Never was a Newton

Crowned and honoured well,

But first a lone Galileo

Wasted in a cell.

In each other’s faces

Looked the pioneers;—

Drank the wine of courage

All their battle years.

For their weary sowing

Through the world wide,

Green they saw the harvest

Ere the day they died.

But the grey, grey company

Stood every man alone

In the chilly dawnlight:

Scarcely had they known

Ere the day they perished

That their beacon star

Was not glint of marshlight

In the shadows far.

The brave white witnesses

To the truth within

Took the dart of folly,

Took the jeer of sin.

Crying, ‘Follow, follow

Back to Eden-gate!’

They trod the Polar desert,—

Met the desert fate.

Be laurel to the victor,

And roses to the fair;

And asphodel Elysian

Let the hero wear:

But lay the maiden lilies

Upon their narrow biers—

The lone grey company

Before the pioneers!