The Roaring Days
"The Roaring Days" is a poem by Australian poet Henry Lawson.
It was originally published in The Bulletin on 21 December 1889, and subsequently reprinted in a collection of the author's poems, other newspapers and periodicals and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.
Critical reception
When reviewing Lawson's poetry collection In the Days when the World was Wide and Other Verses, a writer in The Evening News noted: "Mr. Lawson is not, indeed, likely to be ever revealed in the character of a master singer, but so far as he goes he is really a minstrel of native fire, and not like a good many who pretend to that character, a merely ingenious imitator or adaptor of other people's ideas."
The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature states that "The Roaring Days" is "a phrase referring nostalgically to the gold rushes. Its best-known literary use is in Henry Lawson's poem, 'The Roaring Days', written from Lawson's boyhood memories of Gulgong and Pipeclay."
Publication history
After the poem's initial publication in The Bulletin it was reprinted as follows:In the Days When the World was Wide and Other Verses, 1900Selected Poems of Henry Lawson by Henry Lawson, Angus and Robertson, 1918Winnowed Verse by Henry Lawson, Angus and Robertson, 1924Selections from Australian Poets edited by Bertram Stephens and George Mackaness, Cornstalk Publishing, 1925Australian Bush Songs and Ballads edited by Will Lawson, Frank Johnson, 1944An Anthology of Australian Verse edited by George Mackaness, Angus & Robertson, 1952A Book of Australian Verse edited by Judith Wright, Oxford University Press, 1956New Land, New Language : An Anthology of Australian Verse edited by Judith Wright, Oxford University Press, 1957Favourite Australian Poems edited by Ian Mudie, Rigby, 1963Silence Into Song : An Anthology of Australian Verse edited by Clifford O'Brien, Rigby, 1968Australian Kaleidoscope edited by Barbara Ker Wilson, Collins, 1968This Land : An Anthology of Australian Poetry for Young People edited by M. M. Flynn and J. Groom, Pergamon Press, 1968Poems of Henry Lawson edited by Walter Stone, Ure Smith, 1973The World of Henry Lawson edited by Walter Stone, Hamlyn, 1974The Essential Henry Lawson : The Best Works of Australia's Greatest Writer edited Brian Kiernan, Currey O'Neil, 1982A Campfire Yarn : Henry Lawson Complete Works 1885-1900 edited by Leonard Cronin, Lansdowne, 1984Cross-Country : A Book of Australian Verse edited by John Barnes and Brian MacFarlane, Heinemann, 1984The Penguin Book of Australian Ballads edited by Elizabeth Webby and Philip Butterss, Penguin, 1993Classic Australian Verse edited by Maggie Pinkney, Five Mile Press, 2001Australian Poetry Since 1788 edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray, University of NSW Press, 2011