Swimming, Bondi Beach, "Oh! brave white horses!" Elgar and Adam Lindsay Gordon

I woke up dreaming of an early morning swim at Bondi Beach, listening to Elgar's (Sea Pictures) evocative setting of "The Swimmer", the poem by Adam Lindsay Gordon (sung here by Janet Baker).

With short, sharp, violent lights made vivid, 
   To southward far as the sight can roam, 
Only the swirl of the surges livid, 
   The seas that climb and the surfs that comb. 
Only the crag and the cliff to nor'ward, 
And the rocks receding, and reefs flung forward, 
And waifs wreck'd seaward and wasted shoreward 
   On shallows sheeted with flaming foam...


Oh! brave white horses! you gather and gallop, 
   The storm sprite loosens the gusty reins; 
Now the stoutest ship were the frailest shallop 
   In your hollow backs, or your high arch'd manes. 
I would ride as never a man has ridden 
In your sleepy, swirling surges hidden, 
To gulfs foreshadow'd through straits forbidden, 
   Where no light wearies and no love wanes. 

***

Full text of poem here

Adam Lindsay Gordon, brief biography

Henry Kendall on Adam Lindsay Gordon

"They did not know,
The hundreds who had read his sturdy verse

And revelled over ringing major notes,

The mournful meaning of the undersong

Which runs through all he wrote, and often takes
The deep autumnal, half-prophetic tone
Of forest winds in March"

Marcus Clarke (1880) on Adam Lindsay Gordon:

"Unhappily, the melancholy which Gordon's friends had with pain observed increased daily, and in the full flood of his success, with congratulations pouring upon him from every side, he was found dead in the heather near his home with a bullet from his own rifle in his brain" .

***

BondiBeach (YouTube video)

Some general views

So here I am, dreaming that I'm plunging into the

rolling surf back in Bondi, with leg no longer

in its cast (less than three weeks to go)-

O, brave white horses!


Monday morning

Got a message -

"Gone to Bondi,

Back on Sunday.

If you see me

From the beach,

Be on my surf-board,

Out of reach.

Gone to Bondi,

Out of reach."

Bondi, Bondi,

Bondi beach.

O, fierce white horses,

Bondi Beach.

Charles Meere, Australian Beach Pattern, 1940

Don't miss the Australia Exhibition at the Royal College of Art
September-December, 2013