Today’s Artifact: After All (by Henry Lawson)
I’ve copied the text of Lawson’s poem below. It’s not subject to copyright, so instead of sending you to a far-flung corner of the internet I thought I’d put it here to save you trouble. A friend (the inimitable, and appropriately Australian
) has also volunteered a voiceover of the poem, which you can play here.A Good World, After All
The brooding ghosts of Australian night have gone from the bush and town;
My spirit revives in the morning breeze, though it died when the sun went down;
The river is high and the stream is strong, and the grass is green and tall,
And I fain would think that this world of ours is a good world after all.
The light of passion in dreamy eyes, and a page of truth well read,
The glorious thrill in a heart grown cold of the spirit I thought was dead,
A song that goes to a comrade's heart, and a tear of pride let fall —
And my soul is strong! and the world to me is a grand world after all!
Let our enemies go by their old dull tracks, and theirs be the fault or shame
(The man is bitter against the world who has only himself to blame);
Let the darkest side of the past be dark, and only the good recall;
For I must believe that the world, my dear, is a kind world after all.
It well may be that I saw too plain, and it may be I was blind;
But I'll keep my face to the dawning light, though the devil may stand behind!
Though the devil may stand behind my back, I'll not see his shadow fall,
But read the signs in the morning stars of a good world after all.
Rest, for your eyes are weary, girl — you have driven the worst away —
The ghost of the man that I might have been is gone from my heart to-day;
We'll live for life and the best it brings till our twilight shadows fall;
My heart grows brave, and the world, my girl, is a good world after all.Henry Lawson, 1896
My first encounter with this poem was via the songs of Garnet Rogers, who set the poem to music for his album Speaking Softly in the Dark in 1988.
To this day I greatly prefer Rogers’ version; he makes subtle changes to the lyrics and meter that bring out a hidden beauty in the poem—altering the cadence and simplifying the meaning in ways that should be impossible given his minimalist touch. But Rogers’ has a gentle genius and a simplicity of soul that complements and harmonizes with Lawson’s work. I’m convinced if Lawson could read Rogers’ changes and hear him sing, he would cry and thank Rogers for understanding him and saying what he was trying to say, only better.
But that’s just an affectation I’m projecting from my safe, snug place 130 years in the future. Still, if you want to hear Garnet Rogers’ version, I recommend it highly. You can hear it at the link below, and if you want, you can read his lyrics in the first comment below the video.
After All was written in 1896, the year that Henry Lawson was married to Bertha Bredt Jr. It reads like a love poem, and to listen to it is to fall in a love a bit, yourself. It strikes me also as a poem of rebirth; in his opening lines Lawson speaks of brooding ghosts that vanish with dawn. He speaks of standing with his face to the light while the devil lurks behind his back. He speaks of simple beauties—a lover, a song of courage, a tear of pride, the page of truth. He talks about letting the darkness go.
And for much of my life that is how I took his song. It was, for me, a beautiful meditation on darkness and light and what it means to step from one into the other. And then, of course, I decided to write about it today, so I tried to understand it.
And the first thought I had upon my review of it was that something felt… wrong.
It’s a bit hard to explain the sensation; as I tried to process the gestalt of the poem I asked myself how it fit into the life of the man who wrote it. The first thought my brain offered in response was “This was not written by a man who won.”
That felt true. The second thought was “This was written by a man who dreamed of winning. This is a dreamer’s poem.” Now, a good hour later, I’m looking over the notes I have gathered on Henry Lawson’s life—a collection of Wikipedia pages and other internet apocrypha, some scrawled words in a note document—and it all seems horribly tragic to me.
A few thoughts come to mind so I’m just going to write what I’m feeling, no particular connection or order. Some days, the orderly essays elude me. But here goes:
Lawson the Man
My feelings about Lawson are mixed because I recognize inside of him the dark soul of the depressive—poignantly aware of injustice and yet doomed to perpetuate it because of the compulsive lizard-brain like regression that accompanies the worst sorrows. I’m going to gloss over his youth; the sweep of his history is that he lost his hearing at a young age, but was talented and connected to the world of publishing through his mother. If he had been wiser with his money or his choices he might have had a better life. But he turned alcoholic early in life, and that tells you what you need to know about how the latter half went.
His wife, Bertha Bredt Jr., was cautioned against marrying him because he was clearly heading down the path of severe alcoholism, but she ignored the warnings. There’s some evidence that the two were aware of his problem and were actively working towards solutions. Shortly after marrying the two of them moved to Western Australia and then to New Zealand, trying to escape the hedonistic circles that Lawson had run with in Sydney.
I think that’s all you need to know in order to understand After All. Published in 1896 it seems to me (again, from my safe distance here in the future) that it was a love letter to his wife, that he was describing his depression and his relationship to alcohol, at a moment when it seemed that he might truly be free from both of them.
In fact the poem is much more intelligible viewed through the lens of new sobriety. So many of the evocative passages in his writing make sense in light of his alcoholism; the brooding ghosts, the devil behind his back, his determination to stand with his face to the dawn, and his admonition to “let the darkest part of the past stay dark” — these are the words of a man swearing that he’ll outpace his demons. It’s an admirable sentiment, if nothing else—some men even succeed.
Interpreted through alcoholism, the entirety of the second verse takes on a new shade of meaning. In it, Lawson praises the minutiae of life; a look of passion, a moment of truth, a fluttering heart, a song, a tear. When I initially heard these things the only thing I experienced was their most obvious meaning—the deep appreciation for the minutiae that make life worth living. But in light of Lawson’s alcoholism I also think, now, of a speech I once heard at a church twenty three years ago from a fellow teen who had detoxed from heroin.
He was trying to explain what it was like, and told us of a moment, after a few months of sobriety, where he was suddenly able to experience the world as it was again, rather than mediated through his need for the next fix. His family found him on his knees in the front lawn with dirt in his hands, crying at how green the grass was. They thought for a moment he had gone insane because he was carrying around a chunk of turf like it was a miracle.
I think of that moment in his life and even though I will never be able to prove it I am utterly convinced that Lawson had that exact moment, himself, in 1896, and that After All was written that night. The line for his wife, Bertha; “Rest, for your eyes are weary, girl — you have driven the worst away — the ghost of the man I might have been is gone from my heart today” is the deep, soft, heartfelt whisper of a man who felt the demon leave him and was resting in the sunlight after the dark.
I suppose that’s what tipped me off that this whole thing was a dream. Reading it today I thought “That’s not how it really works.” There is a poetic sense, of course, in which love and partnership really do chase away “the man I might have been.” I suspect that men who have found a strong and happy marriage would readily agree that living life in reaction to a good woman—her needs, her aesthetics, her understanding, her faith and love—has made them immeasurably better.1
But ghosts don’t leave. They haunt. And a sensitive poet like Lawson would only be able to maintain his ebullience about their vanishings for a while before he started to hear their footsteps in the hallway at night again. In other words there is only a narrow window in which a poem like After All could have been written—within a scant few days of that first moment of freedom, when the alcohol-induced depression lifted, when the world was shining as if new, when there was nothing but gratitude and a sense of peace.
But those moments are not actually an unshackling. They just feel that way. As it turns out we know how Lawson’s experience ended. In less than ten years his wife Bertha had to file for divorce. In her affidavit submitted to the court she described Henry:
My husband has during three years and upwards been a habitual drunkard and habitually been guilty of cruelty towards me. My affidavit consists of the acts and matters following. That my husband during the last three years struck me in the face and about the body and blacked my eye and hit me with a bottle and attempted to stab me and pulled me out of bed when I was ill and purposely made a noise in my room when I was ill and pulled my hair and repeatedly used abusive and insulting language to me and was guilty of divers other acts of cruelty to me whereby my health and safety are endangered.
The divorce was granted in 1903. If we follow the timeline, it suggests a rapid deterioration of their marriage. They were back in Sidney again by 1900; it seems that Lawson had started drinking by then, again, and had also started abusing her at around that time, if the timeline in her affidavit (“during three years and upwards”) captures the general time frame.
Lawson’s poetry never brought in much money; he negotiated his royalties poorly. He struggled to provide for his family, and instead of keeping the course he retreated back to alcoholism. The circumstances don’t exonerate him; life got difficult and the man who had written such nakedly brave words just a few years prior reneged on them and assaulted his wife regularly in a drunken rage. There’s not much more to say. I don’t think my commentary can add to Lawson’s repulsiveness, so I would rather just let it stand here as an unadorned fact.
Not every man who holds beauty in his eyes is worthy of it.
A Good World After All
I’ve been thinking, in light of all of this, how to feel about the poem. Is the original message diluted? Should I think of it as naive?
I keep going back to a single moment that has nothing to do with Lawson at all. It’s that kid from the Catholic church (I have to keep reminding myself that this was 23 years ago, this kid was my age, but he looks so small and frail in my mind) and he’s talking candidly about how a patch of green grass reduced him to tears.
I have a similar experience in my history. About eight years ago I was coming out of a major depression; in my second year of graduate school it had consumed me entirely and I needed medication in order to extract myself. I was lucky; a normal dose of Wellbutrin was all it took.
There was this moment about five weeks into the Wellbutrin when my emotions came back online. I remember it well; I was at a friend’s house, playing frisbee with his dog—Kogi, a Golden Retriever named after a Korean BBQ food truck—and suddenly I could feel happy again. The game of frisbee almost reduced me to joyful tears; I was excited enough to get into the frisbee game instead of standing inert at the edge of the parking lot. Kogi’s joy was contagious. My heart thrilled and hurt at the same time. I was crying for hours afterwards—my eyes were leaking tears.
I find myself wondering if there’s a parallel here. Alcohol and heroin are chemical depressants, but they are… depressants! And I think they are similar enough to a psychologically induced depressive episode that the “emotions coming online” may be a common occurrence to all of them when they lift.
Is it possible that once the weight of depression is taken off of your nervous system properly there’s this moment where your heart thrills and you can feel again? Is that Lawson’s poem? That single moment, caught in time, a testament to a biochemical quirk that manifests as a profound spiritual awakening—That moment my soul came back to me?
But Lawson’s work has changed in my eyes, permanently, as a result of understanding its context. It’s not a story about a man redeemed—or, if it is, it’s a reminder that redemption is a fragile thing. Perhaps that’s what I see in it now; a fragility and an impermanence that weren’t there in it yesterday. But in its own way that is also appropriate, because it changes the nature of the joy in the poem to something sharper and more powerful.
What I see in Lawson’s poem now is defiance. Rather than a successful transition from shadow to light I see the furious fight to live and love against an all-consuming dark. I see Dylan Thomas’s fury; ”Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” I see Darwin’s caged birds—the old scientist once made a haunting observation that if you take a free bird and cage it, when migratory season comes around the bird will be seized by an instinct so old and powerful that it will throw its wings wide and beat its breast furiously against the bars of its own cage until its feathers are torn out of its chest, its heart shrieking for the southern sky.
I know that thrill. I remember that thrill. I remember playing a game of frisbee with a golden retriever and suddenly I was living Lawson’s second stanza—a glorious thrill in a heart grown cold, of a spirit once thought dead. I was throwing a frisbee. A young dog was stupidly happy chasing it down the green. I was stupidly happy with her. We were stupidly happy together; two idiots on a lawn hucking a plastic disc and catching it with our teeth.
It was something like insanity. I was just one clod of dirt removed from burying my head in the grass and crying at how green it was. But for a moment it was mine and I recognize that it was once the provenance of Henry Lawson, too, before he drank himself into the grave. He had that thrill and he put it to paper for all of us.
Not everyone who has that feeling gets to ascend to the sky that comes afterwards. Lawson didn’t; he was consumed by his alcohol and his rage. But I read the poem now and I see his wings, spread wide for a brief moment, and it makes mine flutter too.
One day, a great dark will consume me as well. A different dark, to be sure: I am not a drunk and I don’t smack around the people who love and depend on me. My undoing will probably be diabetes, and depression, and ennui. We all descend, each by our own path.
But until then, it is a good world, after all.
Garnet Rogers’ Edits
There are a few notable edits that Rogers made to the text of the poem. Rogers drops a lot of the use of and by Lawson, replacing it with a more powerful silence, letting each clause stand on its own, separate from the others:
Lawson: A song that goes to a comrade's heart, and a tear of pride let fall —
Rogers: The song that goes to a comrade’s heart. The tear of pride, let fall.
Rogers also removes some of the variation in Lawson’s language. Lawson, for example, varies the ending of his first three verses: A good world, after all; A grand world, after all; A kind world, after all. Rogers omits this variation and ends every verse on A good world, after all, turning it into a repetitive mantra and an anchor for the mind to hold fast to as he moves from one verse to the next. Regardless of where Rogers goes, you know he will come back to his refrain; a good world, after all.
Lawson: And my soul is strong! and the world to me is a grand world after all!
Rogers: My heart grows brave, and the world to me, is a good world after all.
Another note on the example above—where Lawson uses ‘And my soul is strong’ in verse two, and ‘My heart grows brave’ in verse five, Rogers uses the much more powerful ‘My heart grows brave’ in both verses, linking the two. Rogers’ choice is more meditative and less manic than my soul is strong. It is more archaic, too, adding a raw, primitive honesty to the verse that is lacking from Lawson’s. And it tells a different story—a man who has found a reason to overcome his cowardice, rather than one proclaiming his strength. Lawson almost certainly wished for the former interpretation, but Rogers, willing to repeat himself, captures that intent better for both of them.
These are interesting but trivial stylistic points. There’s one change, however, that alters the meaning of the song drastically, which merited making this last section:
Lawson: The man is bitter against the world who has only himself to blame
Rogers: The man who is bitter against the world has only himself to blame
It is a subtle difference—all that Rogers did is move the word “who” back five words or so. But it changes the meaning of the line profoundly and, I think, illustrates a difference between the two men. Lawson seems to be externalizing; his phrasing suggests that a man who takes the whole world on his shoulders, who doesn’t reserve some blame for forces beyond his control, will grow bitter.
Rogers, through the change of a single word, inverts the meaning of the line, suggesting that a man who has grown bitter is completely responsible for his the state of his heart. He advocates for the posture of Atlas—let a man carry the world, or at least his own world, on his shoulders. And let him be stronger for it.
Because again—it’s a good world, after all.
It’s a subtle difference but I feel that somewhere in that distinction lies the demise of Henry Lawson. He spent the rest of his life in the grips of his demon—what success he had was due to finding people who cared for him deeply, who were willing to lend their shoulders to a drunken wretch because they saw in him the brighter wings that couldn’t be consumed entirely by the shadows.
His ending was bittersweet—He died of cerebral hemorrhage in the care of Ms. Isabela Byers, his landlady, at the age of 55. Ms. Byers had been a close friend and supporter of his for close to twenty years, because she had faith in his greatness as a poet, if not a man.
Her faith was rewarded. Lawson was given a New South Wales state funeral. It was an honor reserved exclusively for government figures: Lawson was the first man to receive it on the basis of being a distinguished citizen. He is remembered today for his genius and his frailty. Ms. Byers, whose faith in him never wavered, is similarly remembered for her kindness; without her it is entirely likely that Henry Lawson would been consumed, vanishing into his demon, leaving no legacy at all to mark the latter half of his life.
Footnotes
I suspect that some women feel that way, too, though scholarship from the past fifty years suggests that it is rarer.
"That single moment, caught in time, a testament to a biochemical quirk that manifests as a profound spiritual moment—That moment my soul came back to me"
Brilliant, James! 👏 I think you have found your flow/zone in the writing you're doing now on Moonshots.