You wrote: "his referral to 'he' in the poem suggests to me he might be talking about himself – dreams, experiences etc"

Yes, in my opnion, that is more than likely.

I have a book of Neilson's poems somewhere, but as far as I know he didn't write much about his poems because he was an "untrained" poet. He worked on his family farm I think and wrote the poems, probably because they were an integral part of his life.

You could try Googling (Google.com) and see what you can find. I'd try the simple search first:

"John Shaw Neilson" "The Orange Tree"

(use the double quotes)


You'll probably get a lot of academic stuff but JNS appeals to the real people :-) so there'll be non-academic comments as well.

Helen
Still late for work!!