‘Sing, Memory’

The new English edition of a selection of Harwood’s poems comes with an excellent editorial pedigree. With his co-editorship of Gwen Harwood: Collected Poems 1943–1995 (2003) and his editorship of A Steady Storm of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood 1943–1995 (2001), Gregory Kratzmann has established himself as the foremost of Harwood scholars. As a major critic of Australian poetry, Chris Wallace-Crabbe was an early champion of Harwood’s poetry, with a particular affinity, demonstrated in his own poetry, for the wit and wordplay that are distinguishing marks of Harwood’s work. Mappings of the Plane: New Selected Poems (Fyfield Books, £18.95 pb, 160 pp) is, however, unlikely to displace the Collected Poems as the essential text for Australian readers wanting to enjoy the full range of what I once called ‘the bravura diversity of personae and modes in Harwood’s poetry’. The small print runs afforded Australian poets disappear from circulation with distressing rapidity, and the final revised version of the Harwood’s Selected Poems published by Angus & Robertson dates from 1990. The Kratzmann and Alison Hoddinott Collected Poems did an invaluable service to readers and critics alike in bringing back into print in one volume not only all of Harwood’s published collections, but also the substantial number of poems previously uncollected. Not that Harwood, who received a considerable amount of critical attention in her lifetime, could be said to have dropped out of sight in the years after her death. She continued to be set for study in Year 12 literature courses and to be the subject of conference papers, critical essays and at least one full-length monograph, Cassandra L. Atherton’s Flashing Eyes and Floating Hair: A Reading of Gwen Harwood’s Pseudonymous Poetry (2007), which I reviewed for ABR (July–August 2007). Certainly, it is good to see this most luminous of Australian poets of the mid to late twentieth century made available to an international audience, although there is something disingenuous in the publisher’s claim that the volume brings her work ‘to an international readership for the first time’ – not only because the very next sentence acknowledges that she ‘has long had an audience outside Australia’ (she was, for instance, one of only two Australians included in Fleur Adcock’s Faber Book of Twentieth Century Women Poets, 1987), but also because there had in fact been an earlier UK-published volume, Night Thoughts: Selected Poems (OUP, 1992), which was based on the 1990 Selected. What is distinctive about this new collection is the opportunity it provided to utilise the work done by Kratzmann and Hoddinott in extending the range of Collected Poems by the addition not only of the poems of The Present Tense (1995), but also of previously uncollected poems that ranged across the whole period of Harwood’s publishing career, and allowed access to more of her occasional verse. And, given that one of the most exasperating things that can happen to an editor of a Collected Poems is to discover a missed item, who could wonder at the desire to include two poems from the last (presumably) unveiling of yet another Harwood ‘mask’, the pseudonymous Alan Carvosso, responsible for the last two items in this ‘New Selected’. Of these, the elegiac ‘On Wings of Song’ seems such a compendium of Harwood’s themes, motifs and formal structures, especially as these were modulated in her mature poetry, that it is surprising that it could have passed unrecognised. To start with form, if only because this was so important to Harwood, influenced as she was by her training as a musician and her interest in the art of the painter, her commitment to rhyme in an age of free verse invited classification as a traditionalist, especially when combined with a strict observation of stanzaic structure – but she was not so easily definable. Harwood did indeed have a stunning facility with rhyme, as anyone can attest who witnessed her rise to her feet at a conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and deliver in impromptu and impeccable rhyming couplets a riposte to a speaker who had recklessly declared rhyme to be the death of inspiration. Yet it is true that the perfect rhymes of some of her early poems contribute to a tightness of texture that risks rigidity, especially when she enhances that risk, as she often does, with an octo-syllabic line – something difficult to sustain, and slightly alien to ears that have grown to expect that regularity of line will mean iambic pentameter. The music of octosyllabics is older than pentameter, and flowered in early Tudor poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, of whom she spoke admiringly and to whom she renders appropriate formal tribute in ‘Meditation on Wyatt II’, included in this collection. Harwood’s more mature work often tends, as the editors observe in their introduction, to a more relaxed structure, something found in ‘On Wings of Song’. This has the five-line stanza that many contemporary poets who work in stanzaic form prefer as less confidently enclosed than the more traditional quatrain, and it rhymes only on lines three and five, forsaking even that pattern in the final stanza, where the concluding line ‘in peace, one evening closer to the end’ defies the expectations of firm rhyming closure, stimulated semantically by ‘end’, and offers only an assonantal glance to ‘overhead’ in line three. There was, however, one way in which, from her earliest to her latest work, Harwood broke the grip of line and stanza on language and ideas, creating rhythms of cadence rather than meter. Apart from artfully broken lines and inset sections (which the editors have been careful to respect), she took the device of the run-on line to extremes, extending it frequently to run-ons that went across stanza breaks, as in this example from ‘On Wings of Song’: Each sees a flawless other still, erasingyears, years, when absence simplified to anguishkept them awkward and truthful, in their own prisons of memory drinking the sublimelove-fire of this must be. At last, though late,they stroll upon green-mantled graves, abandoningas it were leaf by leaf their lofty anguish,content to pass unnoticed here, to wait and learn what time will tell. Uprooted headstones … Even as syntax here twines itself around the stanza form, so throughout the poem language entwines thematic motifs of love, time, light, the natural world and music: from her earliest poems, the key constituents for Harwood of human experience. While she is often their celebrant, they are not necessarily seen as kindly, especially if denied or resisted. Particularly in the earlier poems, time is more of an enemy, requiring in ‘Alter Ego’ the postulation of a Romantic concept of an indestructible idea of the self ‘beyond / time’s desolating drift’. Light, so significant to Harwood in all its tonal manifestations &shy;– sunshine, twilight, flickering light, blue light of summer, grey light of winter – carries inexorably its shadow self of darkness, so that it must continually bring back, out of the realms of night, ‘new healing images of day’ (‘Carapace’). Such images, however, can only heal those prepared to be wounded; for the nay-saying, intellectually controlling Professor Eisenbart, who tries to practise indifference to love and evasion of death, light as an emissary of time is necessarily inimical, so that he experiences daybreak as an assault in which ‘Light’s planet-leaping shafts go home’ (‘Early Light’). ‘Early Light’ is one of the excluded poems, and although the editors have been more generous with space for Eisenbart than for Kröte – the melancholy musician who is his counterpoint – the full imaginative force of Harwood’s professorial creation can really only be grasped by reading the whole Eisenbart sequence. In fairness, the editors have given us the star performances, with the engagingly seductive ‘Prize-Giving’, as well as ‘Panther and Peacock’ and ‘Boundary Conditions’, arguably the two most powerful and certainly the most frequently discussed of the Eisenbart poems. ‘Boundary Conditions’ allows Eisenbart’s youthful mistress to be explicit about another form of oppositional tension marking many of the earlier poems, but most dramatically realised in ‘I am the Captain of My Soul’: ‘mankind’s old dichotomy: mind and matter; flesh and spirit.’ Within this framework, Harwood’s exuberantly sensual celebrations of ‘Carnal Knowledge’ co-exist with poems such as ‘Triste, Triste’ that vividly express a yearning for transcendence, for the moment when ‘Body rolls back like a stone, and risen / spirit walks to Easter light; // away from its tomb of bone, / away from the guardian tents / of eyesight, walking alone / to unbearable light …’ Even though such poems almost invariably reel in the soaring spirit to an acceptance of ‘mortal comfort’, or an acceptance that acknowledgment of being ‘earthbound’ is a precondition of the arrival of spirit as a ‘loved guest on earth’ (‘Alla Siciliana’), there is a tension in these earlier poems that has largely departed in much of the later poetry. The change is not so much in relation to attitudes to the body, as in attitudes to the physical world. In poems such as ‘Alla Siciliana’ and ‘Ebb-Tide’, the earth, though never subjected to the pathetic fallacy, is very much a locus for the human experience at the centre of the poem. And human speech, along with awareness of human transience in contrast to the recurrent cycles of nature, often serves, as in ‘At the Water’s Edge’, to divide the suffering individual from the natural world. Yet speech retains, in the earlier poems, a privileged position that was to change. When Bone Scan was published in 1988, it offered readers two rather different poetic experiences. ‘Class of 1927’ was a set of four brilliant examples of Har-wood’s belief that one of the functions of poetry was to defy death and darkness by summoning back the lost people and places of the past into the light of memory. The opening phrase of ‘An Impromptu for Ann Jennings’ – ‘Sing, Memory, sing’ – can serve as an epigraph to much of her writing, including the evocations of Toowong schooldays that make up ‘Class of 1927’. Formally assured and richly textured in their detailing and tonality, these retained something of the unequivocal tenderness of ‘At Mornington’ or ‘The Violets’, along with the partly comical ambivalence towards the idea of childhood innocence that had marked ‘The Wasps’ (another exclusion to regret). They delighted, but they did not surprise, as did the set of Pastorals that closed the collection. The opening poem, appropriately entitled ‘Threshold’, took readers into a place very different from the dazzling landscape of ‘Mappings of the Plane’, into a ‘peaceful’ world where the balance of power between human and earth had tilted, with a crucial shift in the privileging of human language, however imperfect an instrument it might be. No longer praying to be the ‘golden child aloft on discourse’, the poet reflects in ‘Threshold’ that, while ‘Our words and thoughts are polished // like pebbles ground in the stream / of time’, the seawind breathes ‘a prayer of peace and healing / in the pure, authentic speech / that earth alone can teach’. This new sense of earth as both autonomous and generously welcoming to human beings pervades the late poems and speaks in the opening line of ‘On Wings of Song’, where ‘Earth unlocks wings, flowers, leaves, old jewels of sunlight’ in an autumnal gift to the ‘no longer young’ lovers united ‘at last, though late’. If time has lost the sharpness of its sting in a poem that is one of reconciliation rather than resignation, it is not sentimentalised: ‘Light’s clarity // can spare them nothing. Faces are more abstract, / flesh wears the gravity that pulls it down.’ If, in the memory of a high romantic passion, ‘each sees a flawless other still’, that ‘sublime love-fire’ is something to be given up in this achieved present. If they have trodden the ‘paths of love and pain’ promised to the poet of ‘Alter Ego’, they are content now to ‘stroll’ in an abandonment of ‘lofty anguish’ that brings them into harmony with nature and the music of time. Harwood is undoubtedly one of Australia’s best-loved poets, and this seems a fitting poem with which to end this collection. Even readers who prefer the lavish sensuality of ‘Carnal Knowledge’, the bitterness of ‘Ebb-Tide’ and the nervy darkness of ‘Night Thoughts: Baby and Demon’ should welcome, as part of Harwood’s virtuosity, this calm coda that plays finale to the truths of a ‘fire-talented tongue’. It should be clear that I have derived much pleasure from ‘On Wings of Song’. This modified an initial tendency to complain about the selection. Anyone with a strong attachment to a poet is almost helpless against the impulse, when faced with a new Selected Poems, to run a rapid and potentially accusing eye down the list of contents. Alerted by the introduction to the fact that ‘In the Park’, ‘that keen-edged vignette of motherhood’, had claimed its place – and indeed how could it not do so, even if Harwood had grown exasperated by its predominance in anthologies and by what she claimed were misguided readings imposing unjustified autobiographical verisimilitude or excessively feminist tenets – I looked for ‘Burning Sappho’, that scarifying poem of the conflict between creativity and domesticity (which Harwood rejected from Selected Poems because it was ‘too cruel’), and was pleased to see it restored to its place in the cohort of poems from Poems Volume Two. I then, however, demanded, and approved, the redress of balance provided by ‘An Impromptu for Ann Jennings’, surely one of the best celebrations of motherhood and female friendship ever written, ‘ Dialogue’, that heart-rending elegy for a stillborn child, and ‘Mother Who Gave Me Life’, recompense for the treatment of Harwood’s mother in the scintillating letters of Blessed City: The Letters of Gwen Harwood to Thomas Riddell, January to September 1943 (1990). I do still have some quarrel with the selection. I think Harwood was right to cast Timothy Kline into outer darkness, and would gladly sacrifice his representation for more Eisenbart and Kröte, for ‘Giorgio Morandi’, one of the first of several fine poems about the art of the painter, or ‘The Wine is Drunk’, for me a more telling representation of post-coital sadness than ‘Triste, Triste’. Others may have different lists, but the fact that mine was really quite brief obliged me to stop grumbling and acknowledge that selection from riches is a difficult task and that these editors really have given a generous sample of the themes, genres and forms of this complex, intelligent, devotee to the muse (oh, yes – and where is ‘An Address to My Muse’?).

Jennifer Strauss

From the New Issue

Climate Change and International History: Negotiating science, global change, and environmental justice by Ruth A. Morgan

The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of memory, mourning and consolation edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan

The Shortest History of Italy by Ross King

Advances - May 2024

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