Christopher Brennan

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Christopher Brennan


Born
in Sydney, Australia
November 01, 1870

Died
October 05, 1932


Christopher John Brennan was an Australian poet and scholar.

Brennan was born in Haymarket, an inner suburb of Sydney, to Christopher Brennan (d. 1919), a brewer, and his wife Mary Ann née Carroll (d. 1924), both Irish immigrants. His education took place at two schools in Sydney: he first attended St Aloysius' College, and after gaining a scholarship from Patrick Moran, he boarded at St Ignatius' College, Riverview.

Brennan entered the University of Sydney in 1888, taking up studies in the Classics, and won a travelling scholarship to Berlin. There he met his future wife, Anna Elisabeth Werth; there, also, he encountered the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. About this time, he decided to become a poet. In 1893 Brennan's article "On the Manuscrip
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Average rating: 3.84 · 55 ratings · 7 reviews · 24 distinct worksSimilar authors
Selected Poems

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4.14 avg rating — 7 ratings — published 1965 — 6 editions
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Poems 1913

4.33 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 1914 — 4 editions
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The Verse of Christopher Br...

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it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1960 — 3 editions
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XXI Poems: MDCCCXCIII–MDCCC...

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1897 — 9 editions
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Christopher Brennan (Portab...

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0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 1985 — 2 editions
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Prose-Verse-Poster-Algebrai...

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Mayan Shadows

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Hurricane's Eye

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The Chant of Doom and Other...

0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 1918 — 2 editions
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From Blake to Arnold, Selec...

0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 1900 — 19 editions
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Quotes by Christopher Brennan  (?)
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“Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?”
Christopher Brennan

Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her

If questioning would make us wise
No eyes would ever gaze in eyes;
If all our tale were told in speech
No mouths would wander each to each.

Were spirits free from mortal mesh
And love not bound in hearts of flesh
No aching breasts would yearn to meet
And find their ecstasy complete.

For who is there that lives and knows
The secret powers by which he grows?
Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?

Then seek not, sweet, the "If" and "Why"
I love you now until I die.
For I must love because I live
And life in me is what you give.”
Christopher John Brennan

“Fire
Fire In The Heavens

Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,
and fire made solid in the flinty stone,
thick-mass'd or scatter'd pebble, fire that fills
the breathless hour that lives in fire alone.

This valley, long ago the patient bed
of floods that carv'd its antient amplitude,
in stillness of the Egyptian crypt outspread,
endures to drown in noon-day's tyrant mood.

Behind the veil of burning silence bound,
vast life's innumerous busy littleness
is hush'd in vague-conjectured blur of sound
that dulls the brain with slumbrous weight, unless

some dazzling puncture let the stridence throng
in the cicada's torture-point of song.”
Christopher John Brennan, Xxi Poems, 1893, 1897: Towards The Source