Richard Humphries’
p. 61 · Read in the full issue
Verses
WHEN Richard Humphries, prominent
official of the Papua-New Guinea Administration, perished in the Mount Lamington eruption on January 21, he was on the point of retirement. He had given a life-time —40 years—to New Guinea; and he loved the country, and was most unwilling to contemplate de parture.
He was a gifted writer of verse; and, at a Returned Soldiers’ function shortly before his death, he submitted a poem which he had written, in which he ex pressed his unhappiness over the cruel and far-reaching changes which the Japanese invasion and the fighting had brought about. There is a reference to the country's volcanoes (“hidden flames”); and, although the poem is intended to describe the effect of war, it could just as readily refer to the eruption's “smoke and flame and fields of agony,” in the midst of which he died.
The poem, printed hereunder, has great literary merit. Richard Humphries will be long remembered for his collected verses—he had been writing, at intervals, over many years.
New Guinea
Wild is your heart: your beauty knows no Of loveliness distilled from tender grace, But glows in savage splendour in the glare Of hidden flames that sing your name and share The darkness and the magic of your ways With wind and stars and crimson dusk of days.
But I who worshipped at a shrine now riven Shall ever see the image, whole, not part, That long ago by you to me was given When I first crossed the threshold of your heart.
No fairer image with my spirit lingers, No dream so fair will come again to me.
Enchantment fled with all her lovely 'singers Through smoke and flame and fields of agony.