Doreen

“I wish’t yeh meant it, Bill.” Oh, ’ow me ’eart
Went out to ’er that ev’nin’ on the beach.
I knoo she weren’t no ordinary tart,
My little peach!
I tell yeh, square an’ all, me ’eart stood still
To ’ear ’er say, “I wish’t yeh meant it, Bill.”

To ’ear ’er voice! Its gentle sorter tone,
Like soft dream-music of some Dago band.
An’ me all out; an’ ’oldin’ in me own
’Er little ’and.
An’ ’ow she blushed! O, strike! it was divine
The way she raised ’er shinin’ eyes to mine.

’Er eyes! Soft in the moon; such boshter eyes!
An’ when they sight a bloke . . . O, spare me days!
’E goes all loose inside; such glamour lies
In ’er sweet gaze.
It makes ’im all ashamed uv wot ’e’s been
To look into the eyes of my Doreen.

The wet sands glistened, an’ the gleamin’ moon
Shone yeller on the sea, all streakin’ down.
A band was playin’ some soft, dreamy toon;
An’ up the town
We ’eard the distant tram-cars whir an’ clash.
An’ there I told ’er ’ow I’d done me dash.

“I wish’t yeh meant it.” ‘Struth! And did I, fair?
A bloke ’ud be a dawg to kid a skirt
Like ’er. An’ me well knowin’ she was square.
It ’ud be dirt!
’E’d be no man to point wiv ’er, an’ kid.
I meant it honest; an’ she knoo I did.

She knoo. I’ve done me block in on ’er, straight.
A cove ’as got to think some time in life
An’ get some decent tart, ere it’s too late,
To be ’is wife.
But, Gawd! ’Oo would ’a’ thort it could ’a’ been
My luck to strike the likes of ’er? . . . Doreen!

Aw, I can stand their chuckin’ off, I can.
It’s ’ard; an’ I’d delight to take ’em on.
The dawgs! But it gets that way wiv a man
When ’e’s fair gone.
She’ll sight no stoush; an’ so I ’ave to take
Their mag, an’ do a duck fer ’er sweet sake.

Fer ’er sweet sake I’ve gone and chucked it clean:
The pubs an’ schools an’ all that leery game.
Fer when a bloke ’as come to know Doreen,
It ain’t the same.
There’s ’igher things, she sez, for blokes to do.
An’ I am ’arf believin’ that it’s true.

Yes, ’igher things — that wus the way she spoke;
An’ when she looked at me I sorter felt
That bosker feelin’ that comes o’er a bloke,
An’ makes ’im melt;
Makes ’im all ’ot to maul ’er, an’ to shove
’Is arms about ’er . . . Bli’me? but it’s love!

That’s wot it is. An’ when a man ’as grown
Like that ’e gets a sort o’ yearn inside
To be a little ’ero on ’is own;
An’ see the pride
Glow in the eyes of ’er ’e calls ’is queen;
An’ ’ear ’er say ’e is a shine champeen.

“I wish’t yeh meant it,” I can ’ear ’er yet,
My bit o’ fluff! The moon was shinin’ bright,
Turnin’ the waves all yeller where it set —
A bonzer night!
The sparklin’ sea all sorter gold an’ green;
An’ on the pier the band — O, ’Ell! . . . Doreen!

Background and Analysis of This Poem

C. J. Dennis's Doreen belongs to The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, the 1915 verse novel that became one of the great popular successes of Australian poetry. Dennis, born Clarence Michael James Dennis in South Australia in 1876, built his reputation on humorous and affectionate uses of Australian vernacular, and the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes his gift for turning slang speech into lively, memorable verse Australian Dictionary of Biography. In The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, Dennis gives voice to Bill, a rough Melbourne larrikin whose love for Doreen slowly reshapes him. The poem Doreen captures one of the key stages in that transformation: the moment when affection starts tugging Bill away from his old habits.

The pleasure of the poem begins with its voice. Bill does not speak in polished literary English, and Dennis does not ask him to. Instead, his slang, dropped consonants and comic exaggerations become the very instruments of sincerity. The result is not a poet looking down on working-class speech, but a poet finding music inside it. Bill's language is funny, but it is not empty clowning. His roughness allows tenderness to arrive unexpectedly, and that surprise is central to the poem's charm. When he speaks of Doreen, the swagger softens.

Doreen herself is important not because Dennis gives her long speeches, but because of the change she produces in Bill's imagination. Her name becomes almost a spell to him, a word he lingers over as if its sound has remade the air. The poem's romance is simple on the surface: a bloke is smitten, promises reform and tries to become worthy of the woman he loves. Beneath that, however, is a larger social and emotional drama. Bill is discovering that love is not merely appetite or flirtation. It asks something of him. It presses him towards self-control, domestic aspiration and a future that reaches beyond the old push and the pub.

The poem also reflects Dennis's skill in balancing comedy with genuine feeling. Bill's earnestness is often amusing because he is so unpractised at it. He can sound melodramatic, defensive, wounded or grand in the space of a few lines. Yet Dennis never lets the reader forget that the emotion is real. That is why The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke struck such a strong chord with Australian readers. As the Australian Literature Electronic Gateway text of the work shows, the larger sequence follows Bill and Doreen through courtship, conflict, marriage and family life, turning a larrikin romance into a broader story of emotional education University of Sydney Library.

There is also a distinctly Australian cultural energy in the poem. Dennis writes within the world of early twentieth-century urban Australia, not the bush landscape more commonly associated with earlier nationalist verse. Bill is not a drover, digger or pastoral hero. He belongs to the streets, the markets, the push and the ordinary language of working people. That matters because Doreen helps widen the poetic map of Australia. It suggests that romance, humour and moral growth can be found not only in grand landscapes, but in the speech and feelings of a bloke who might otherwise be dismissed as merely rough.

For modern readers, Doreen remains engaging because it is both culturally specific and emotionally familiar. Some of the dialect may now feel dated, and some of the gender assumptions belong plainly to Dennis's time, but the central movement is still recognisable: love makes a person see themselves from the outside and wonder whether they might become better. Bill's devotion is comic because he is awkward in it, but it is moving because he means it. Dennis gives us a romance in which the sentimental is not the enemy of the rough. It is the hidden softness that was there all along, waiting for Doreen to call it out.