flows the Torrens. There is a little embarrassment about showing our
river to visitors, lest they should wish to row too far west or east,
and we South Australians do not care to expose our limitations to
dwellers on Thameside. The fact is that our river has to be carefully
saved up and dammed back for the purpose, and once a year we empty
it for excavation and repairs. Some precisians call it a lake—an
artificial lake. One midwinter, when the mud-banks gleamed grey and
slimy, and only a narrow trickle forced a way along the middle of the
bed, we were subjected to civic humiliation. The Governor-General
announced a hasty and unpremeditated visit. Every effort was made to
fill the Torrens against his Excellency’s arrival, but despite all that
man could do we had to hurry the representative of majesty past a very
meagre stream.
This north end of the city is undoubtedly the loveliest. Here the
line of lower roofs is broken by towers and spires and miniature
sky-scrapers rising above the quaint architecture of a cruder time and
art. And it is over this north end of the city, with its corrugated
sky-line, its river and its lawns, that the slender Cathedral looks,
standing on a hill above churches and houses whose bases are lost in
greenery. East and south are pretty suburbs where each house stands in
its own garden, but only in North Adelaide are the homes so spacious,
so serene, so certain of their beauty and their fitness. Oddly enough,
this retreat of wealth and leisure has for western neighbour the region
where the gas and soap and bricks are made, where hides are tanned and
laundry work is done. But then North Adelaide holds up her skirts with
jewelled hands and stands clear of the squalor of Bowden and Hindmarsh
by a whole park width.
When electric cars were brought to Adelaide the Municipal Tramways
Trust had the humorous notion, or perhaps it was only the business
instinct, fortified by democratic principle, of whizzing the North
Adelaide cars down the hill and round to Bowden. And so pretty misses
with books or racquets or clubs rub shoulders with stout old parties
laden with string bags and parcels, and dingy women are bitterly
amused when their grubby offspring wipe their boots on the dresses
of remote and silken ladies. The fastidious gaze reluctantly on the
lashless, pink-lidded outdoor patients, on the monstrous and deformed.
Oh, the classes meet the masses in the Hill Street car!
A Literature in the Making
Criticism often seems presumptuous, yet until we have examined and
weighed, how can we set a price—appreciate? For us who are but
amateurs, and who have taken our growth in a province, the attempt to
fix the price (as against assessing the value for us, which is always
legitimate, for it reveals our own position rather than the subject’s)
of the great writers of the world is true presumption; our legitimate
training in criticism we get by exercising our discrimination on our
unfortunate contemporaries and compeers, the not-yet, the perhaps
not-to-be, acclaimed.
In 1916, G. Hassell & Son published a small brown pocket volume,
“Poems, Real and Imaginative,” by M. R. Walker. Like so many other
little books between 1914 and 1919, it was intended to aid the funds
of the Red Cross; unlike, on the other hand, so many of its companions,
it really deserved for its own sake the sympathetic attention of all
literary Australians. _The Bulletin_ was rather off-handed with the
little stranger, for _The Bulletin_, hardy parent that it is, often
favours the lusty, the clamorous, even the violent and rude, more than
the child with the low, sweet voice; but there must have been many who
pondered the twenty-four sets of verses in the wee book, for it ran
into a second edition.
It has been out long enough now for us to estimate it impartially.
Not a mine of pure gold, it is good enough to be mistaken for such by
the uncritical, bad enough to have its qualities entirely overlooked
by the supercilious. All is very fair verse, bits are true poetry; but
perhaps no piece, however short, is pure poetry throughout.
The topics are the simple, natural, age-old topics of the poet—the sea
and the moon and the mountains, love, friendship, and country. Of these
Miss Walker is most adequate to the first group, to “Sea Pictures,” “A
June Evening,” “To the Ouse.” Read this fragment of blank verse from
“Half-moon Bay”:—
High overhead
The forest stretching to the seven peaks
Is beautiful in slopes of wilding gum,
Wattle, and box. The sad shea-oaks,
Huddled together down a windy ridge,
Whisper their troublous sighing to the waves
A thousand feet below.
The coves and inlets of the circling bay
Are floored with giant pebbles, and the wash
Goes sweeping up the deep rock-riven cracks
To break in shallows on the level ledge,
And drop again in sparkling waterfall.
The felicities of picture and of sound in this are typical of her art,
but it misses the sunshine and open-air buoyancy of “At Maria Island.”
Oh the yellow broom is growing
On the sand-banks by the sea,
And the breezes blowing, blowing,
Mingle with the waters’ flowing
In a haunting melody.
There the gulls are rising, falling,
To the heaving of the tide,
Listen to them calling, calling,
To the fishermen a-hauling
Nets, out where the schooners ride.
Perhaps “At Maria Island” comes nearest to maintaining throughout
the same technical level, and the same trend of theme. A short
and convenient instance of the vague but disconcerting shifting
of the direction of the thought, and a certain incompleteness or
fragmentariness, that characterize most of the pieces, is “Sea
Pictures.”
Know you the swinging of wild water after storm,
The racing breeze that sings along the sand,
And rocks, deep-flung, where sea-birds love to swarm,
Wave-weary for the land?
There are fair nights in summer on the sea,
And moonlight falling gentlier on the waves
Than echo’s sighs, borne back again to me
From dim, sea-haunted caves.
Here the thought does not march from one verse to the next; rather
there is a turning away from the question that links poet and reader in
eager sympathy, to a mood of brooding, personal reminiscence. In “Blue”
the jerkiness is conscious, and is covered by a conceit impossible
to the serious poetic mood. In “There is a Land” it manifests itself
as obscurity. Poetry is in the air, but the poet cannot freely draw
breath. In the eighteen lines of this poem are examples of nearly
all Miss Walker’s qualities; there is inspiration, but inadequately
expressed, a passionate clutching at a meaning that eludes the words,
and comes out rather baldly, as in the line,
Ah Death; and some pass on, that know not and are blind.
There is technical failure—and technical felicity.
... the soul
Cries to the silence with a living cry—
A whisper that goes by upon the wind,
A breaking wave upon some lonely shore,
The list’ning hush of mountains in the dawn,
And lo! the Voice! An echo in the soul!
And then—the level stillness of the days.
The irregularity in the pulse of the thought is found also in some
constructions which, though grammatical, are unexpected and not at
first obvious, where, for instance, we were expecting one object to be
described, and find that the epithet applies to another, the thought
having moved on; it is also reflected in a technique so frequent as to
become a mannerism:—
... a Voice
Calling unto its own, that, oft, the soul ...
As sullen seas that, sweeping o’er some reef ...
Where, low, the boobyallas keep....
These halts and returns would not be noticed in longer poems, or in the
poems read separately; but the ear of the student begins to wait for
them, as it does for some inevitable voice-pauses at line-endings where
the meaning should trip on.
... tree-guarded from the light
Flinging its wide farewell across the sky.
(This also is an instance of the unexpected construction referred to
above; we are expecting a further description of “deep wells of shade,”
what we get is an adjectival clause about “light”; perhaps it is the
voice-pause that gives this feeling and sends us back again upon our
construing.)
... the fishermen a-hauling
Nets,
in the quotation above also pulls us up with a jerk.
There are other tricks of manner that grow monotonous. “O Moon,” “O Son
of Essex,” “Ah, Love,” “Ah, Death,” “Oh have you ever stood alone to
watch ...” Apostrophe and exclamation so reiterated point to poverty
of expression, to a labouring to say what cannot get itself said. And
there are commonplace lines, prose in metre—
O moon, that risest now, how beautiful thou art.
Poor little girl, you did not wish to die.
Perhaps there is bathos—
A little, wandering, broken-hearted child.
But not all this can do away with the many triumphs, the recurrent
charms for eye and ear—
Thy waters washing into shallow pools ...
... a moorèd boat
Asway upon the idle-swinging tide ...
The islands to the north were bathed in sleep,
Their cliffs stood out in sunshine to the sea,
Only the murmur, murmur, of the waves,
Broke the long silence unto you and me.
The songs and the scenes and the thought are not joyous. Beauty of
nature, and loves of friends, or man and maid, induce wistful thoughts.
The sadness may be explicit—
But in the days, ay me! the empty days,
The long, long days that lead to no fireside,
Philosophy’s a thing to call a friend,
To hold to, and to cherish, lest one fail,
Afraid before the vista of the years.
Or it may sigh itself out in falling cadence, as in the song on page
24, where what should be a sigh of ecstacy falls on the ear like a
foreboding. But the melancholy is never morbid. It may be hopeless, but
it is resigned and controlled and quietly courageous.
Australia is too young to produce great poetry, for that never blossoms
from unacclimatized minds. But the necessary conditions are gradually
emerging. Australians are increasingly in sympathy with their country
and its qualities: its sunlight, its seas and mountains and plains and
deserts, its sheep and its wheat and forests and minerals, are all
giving out their emanations into the mental medium where poetry forms;
there, too, our traditions are being made or absorbed. We have not yet
the plethora of elements from which the great poetic souls take shape,
but crystals more or less characteristic are being precipitated from
such material as there is. Those of to-day may be small and cloudy and
faultily-shapen, but they presage a beauty and a perfection in the
poetry of the future.
G. HASSELL & SON.
PRINTERS & PUBLISHERS,
CURRIE ST., ADELAIDE.