an air of human music

I assert my right not to be Dora Wilcox, says Daniel Deniehy; I assert my right to write like music, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” that line they always quote from Walter Pater, an old line to you though it is not as old as me, who died in 1856, twenty-one years before it was written. I never knew it.

For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it. That the mere matter of a poem, for instance, its subject, namely, its given incidents or situation — that the mere matter of a picture, the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape — should be nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter: this is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

The “chamber music” of a fly in Proust, “evoking heat and light quite differently from an air of human music” in the Moncrieff translation, gives the fly itself the character of summer, “the flies' music is bound to the season,” and of course it is bound to the fly as well, in a chain (my imagination makes me wonder if the singing fly is accidentally telling the universe that it wants to aspire to the condition of music as well, since it is going in that direction, and one day we will all grant the wish it never asked for and it will disappear ...), see, then, I have tied myself to night, not night, your night, their night, it's my Night, and Wilcox has a bellbird and a nightingale, the bellbird bound to Australasia, the nightingale bound to England, a bondage expressed over five lines in London and again in Two Sonnets from the book Rata and Mistletoe (1911)

I. The Nightingale

Last eve I heard an English nightingale
Pouring her very soul out to the sky,
When nothing moved save Solitude and I
Pacing the fields together till the pale
Enchanted moonlight flooded all the vale.
And she sang on, and high and yet more high
Toward Heaven thrilled that rich and passionate cry,
Till at the full it seemed to flag and fail.


Thou art the embodied Spirit of the Past,
O Nightingale ! thou singest Love and Sorrow
For all that was, for all that could not last,
Being too perfect ; never shall to-morrow
Assuage thy pain, nor ever grant relief
For thy superb and all-consuming grief.


2. The Bell-Bird

Not so thou carollest at break of day,
O Bell-bird ! when the world is flushed with light
And slips triumphant from the clasp of night,
And the wind wakes and blows the clouds away,
And the hill-spirits rise and shout at play,
Rejoicing. Then thou takest sudden flight
From tree to tree, and warblest with delight.
Thou and thy comrades, jubilant and gay !


Thou singest of the Future, radiant Bird !
Surely the Gods have lent thee sacred fire
And taught thee songs forgotten or unheard
By old-world men ! thou singest of Desire,
Youth, and high Hope, and the infinity
Of all we dream the Newer Worlds may be.

the subject is simply preaching

I wasn't slack in my speeches, he says, in parliament – you were sharp, I agree, you were the opposite of yourself as a poet, relaxation, sweetness, psht, you were impatient: “Preaching on the subject is simply preaching, whether the thing be worked up in the best infernal patterns and coloured with brimstone, or full of sympathies and sentiment and graceful mournings for what is holiest and loveliest in woman,” you said when you were talking about prostitution in 1859, but poetry is like a different species to you, you let it erase so much of you – it's a place to be beautiful, he says: it's the right outlet pipe or dwelling place for beauty and peace. I'm going to find someone who disagrees with that, I say (of course there are people who disagree, he says, but they didn't write my poems).

What about Dora Wilcox (1873 - 1953), in the same anthology as you?

Why Dora Wilcox? he asks – we were talking about nostalgia and I thought of her, I say. In London (1905).

When I look out on London's teeming streets,
On grim grey houses, and on leaden skies,
My courage fails me, and my heart grows sick,
And I remember that fair heritage
Barter'd by me for what your London gives.

Then she describes the past; she recalls details --

   Nor shall I hear again
The wind that rises at the dead of night
Suddenly, and sweeps inward from the sea,
Rustling the tussock

She grieves. Then she examines her grief.

Yet let me not lament that these things are
In that lov'd country I shall see no more;
All that has been is mine inviolate,
Lock'd in the secret book of memory.

Then she decides that there is another purpose for memory, it is not only there to make her “heart feel sick,” it is a point of access; she can use it. She gets her courage back. (“My courage fails me.”) She had a little focus, one person standing or sitting still, looking at the road and thinking, but now she has a large focus, going, finding, “walking unconstrained,” accompanied by sympathetic presences, though in London she is not accompanied by anyone, “speech seems but the babble of a crowd” in London.

… walking unconstrained
By ways familiar under Southern skies;
Nor unaccompanied; the dear dumb things
I lov'd once, have their immortality.
There too is all fulfilment of desire:
In this the valley of my Paradise
I find again lost ideals, dreams too fair
For lasting; there I meet once more mine own
Whom Death has stolen, or Life estranged from me, --
And thither, with the coming of the dark,
Thou comest, and the night is full of stars.

Your point? he says -- that she is using her poetry unpeacefully to pursue, like an eagle, and you are using yours to perpetuate a stasis or present moment with music and with soft opposites that cancel one another out more or less: the lovers then the “field of slain,” these two given such similar weight that neither one exists and they fray apart under the pressure of being the same thing; in her the “teeming” crowds are less important than a convolvulus, and the nightingale is not as beautiful as the bellbird. We can't all be Dora Wilcox, he says.

baby's fading bloom

I tell him that I still don't respect Song for the Night. But you read De Quincey, he says. Yes I say, but we like different things in him; De Quincey's eccentricity (which is attention) led him to unusual convolutions or crevices (On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth) but you are the opposite, look, you write glosses, “her baby's fading bloom,” nostalgia for younger days at the nanny's knee … do you know how many poets in this anthology are suffering from nostalgia, I say: it's an epidemic – don't blame me for Bertram Stevens' taste in poems, he says, and don't tell me there's not nostalgia in the poems being published in your lifetime.

No, that's true, I say; I was reading the Island interview with Gwen Harwood earlier today and she said that she was “nostalgic even for five minutes ago.” When did she die? Nineteen ninety-five. And how many poems have I read about a living poet's dead father. But you can be suspicious of nostalgia, the way Geoffrey Hill is, or measureful, you can mediate between the past and the present (books mediate between the past of the writer's writing and the present of the reader's reading, say that writers themselves are measuring nostalgia), you can be Harwood and regard the past as if it's a courtroom where you go to be condemned in the present --

Good angel
give me that morning again
and let me share, and spare me
the shame of my parents' rebuke

she writes in Class of 1927 (I can't replicate her layout; the "good" should be over to the right) -- or

Anguish: remembered hours

when she recalls her mother in Mother Who Gave Me Life -- or you can have a more holistic grief, like the one that Cyril Connolly published in The Unquiet Grave, which is one of the books, Harwood says, that brought her towards poetry --

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself?

-- or you can say just, “Oh, nostalgia, alas,” as if it's one-dimensional and not part of you, and you were one of the ones who said, “Oh, nostalgia, alas.” You're slack.

I still have form in my poem, he says: which is a subspecies of ruthlessness, or a slaughterhouse, like memory. (Touché.) You keep ignoring that. I did mention music, I mutter; I said the whole purpose of the poem was music – then why are you criticising it for sticking to its bones? he asks, if you've already said that the bones were the point?

brought about by that power of gentleness

Reading over Daniel Deniehy again I imagine him coming back at me like this (but in his own words, not these): “That's not true. My Song for the Night doesn't exist for 'no reason.' Night is sweet and charming and I love those things, I value those things, I have dedicated myself to kindness” (tears seriously in his eyes), “kindness and fairness – no hereditary aristocrats! I argued in parliament when Wentworth wanted to create a peerage in Australia. 'It is yours to offer them a land where man is bountifully rewarded for his labour, and where a just law no more recognises the supremacy of a class than it does the predominance of a creed,' I said. Bountifully rewarded. People will be good if you're good to them; we should offer education to all adults in the Mechanics' Institutes, but you teachers, don't patronise the students.

'As if two-thirds of those who never rank themselves at all with what is specially termed “the working classes” are not as thoroughly illiterate, in every true and deep sense, as the most culture-lorn mechanic who planes cedar or hammers leather; and as if every human being is not going through a course of education from the cradle to the grave.

'I was educated in sorrow myself, as I got older: 'she whom De Quincey called ‘Our Lady of Darkness’ has laid her awful hand upon my heart,' I told my wife in a letter, and we should fight back against that 'Mater Tenebarum,' as he calls her: 'she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all;' my fight is so little – my weapon is so little – poor Night. Leigh Hunt, another weapon of mine.

'There was too much boyish goodness and sweetness in him to sympathise very heartily with the fiercer struggles of men. At his heart was for ever the whispering consciousness that things might be better brought about by that power of gentleness of which he has sung with a grace more delicate than the graces of the Sicilian muse he so loved. He was right, if men would only look upon the thing as the loving poet did. But, meanwhile, Leigh Hunt had philosophy as well as pleasure on his side. “Nothing,” says Goethe, “is an illusion that makes us happy.”

'Suggestive mysticism, that's what Night is, not time-wasting, and if Wordsworth thought it was worth it then so do I. 'One of the best things in the essay is a defence of Wordsworth's suggestive mysticism against Jeffrey's unfair demand for absolute definiteness and perspicuity in poetry,' I said in my review of Walter Bagehot's Essays. Read my poem Love in a Cottage. I respect the simple pleasures that suggest a larger principle at work: 'A cottage small be mine,' that's the crux of everything; my wife in To His Wife might be pretty or she might not but I don't talk about it because the important thing is her kindness. She is 'solace for this wrung and rifted heart' from go to whoa.

'For me, who for this thronging world’s hot strife
A prize hath brought to be
Among the known—but sweet too dearly earned;
Ah, pray for me.

'Be moved by me: I drank myself to death in Bathurst. 'Occasionally, at night, I feel more depressed and wretched than I think any human being, in Australia at all events, ever before felt. I keep at home, not going out or visiting anywhere, entering no hotels, and if from intense depression I take a little brandy, it is only in my own room at night,' is what I wrote to my wife fifteen days before I vomited blood and collapsed in the street. I was promising, I was witty, I was charismatic; they still remember me today when they use the words, 'bunyip aristocracy.' My phrase! 'Few would recognise the once gay and genial Member for Argyle in the poor, broken, prematurely aged man, tottering with feeble steps and staggering gait along the least frequented paths of the city where his bright, hopeful boyhood had been passed.' (E.L. Martin in Life and Speeches of Daniel Henry Deniehy (1884) quoting a character sketch by 'an impartial and kindly eye-witness — the Hon. Geoffrey Eagar.') De Quincey in Levana: 'Therefore it is that Levana often communes with the powers that shake a man’s heart: therefore it is that she dotes on grief.'”

choose, fair ones, to rove

Daniel Deniehy the “graceful singer” admired the work of Charles Harpur (1813 - 1868), an early Australian poet who, like Fowler, gave J. Sheridan Moore a stab in the guts. “I was further induced to take the course I have followed, in consequence of the recent reproduction, in an obscure sectional weekly newspaper, of an illiberal criticism, by Mr. CHARLES HARPUR, on one of my poems, a criticism which I hope that gentleman will yet have the honesty and manliness to modify, and which, I am sure, the public will never endorse.” So he published Spring-Life. Where's that criticism now? I can't find it anywhere but Spring-Life has been uploaded as a .pdf by the University of Sydney. Left there like a sort of dropping deposited by the criticism.

He seems to have been easy to stab, Moore, a reactive and critical person, one who wanted standards applied, and hence his involvement with the Month, a literary journal that was supposed to set a nice tone in the colony, bringing him up against the will of Charles Harpur. "Moore was esteemed by some but condemned as a charlatan by the native-born members who distrusted him and F. E. T. Fowler because of their snobbish emigré valuation of literature propounded in the Month" (from The Austraian Dictionary of Biography).

Bertram Stevens puts him in a group with Deniehy and a few other poets. “D. H. Deniehy, Henry Halloran, J. Sheridan Moore and Richard Rowe contributed fairly good verse to the newspapers.” Bad praise but he added him to the Anthology anyway.

O the Night, the Night, the solemn Night,
 When Earth is bound with her silent zone,
And the spangled sky seems a temple wide,
 Where the star-tribes kneel at the Godhead's throne;
O the Night, the Night, the wizard Night,
 When the garish reign of day is o'er,
And the myriad barques of the dream-elves come
 In a brightsome fleet from Slumber's shore!
      O the Night for me,
      When blithe and free,
Go the zephyr-hounds on their airy chase;
      When the moon is high
      In the dewy sky,
And the air is sweet as a bride's embrace!

(from A Song for the Night)

Four verses Deniehy spends messing around like that before he gets to the punchline.

      Wide is your flight,
      O spirits of Night,
By strath, and stream, and grove,
      But most in the gloom
      Of the Poet's room
Ye choose, fair ones, to rove.

In between you have a dying baby and “heaps of slain” “on the battle plain,” which, if you take the poem seriously, should be disquieting, this poet bouncing past corpses so that he can climax with imaginary spirits in his room. They “rove,” they fly, they pass, they do nothing concrete; they are flâneurs but not interesting flâneurs since they see nothing with their own eyes; they are an atmosphere and Song for the Night is a prose atmosphere. The deaths are there because he has already mentioned lovers, “Love in their eyes, | Love in their sighs,” and the key to Night is metamorphosis, “sacred Night,” “charming Night,” “wizard Night.” There is love, then there is death; it is a dramatic contrast. The purpose of this poem is to make you wait while it goes past; it is like a piece of music with “night” as a motif. There are no lovers, there are no babies, the writer and the reader have to tacitly agree that none of these things exist, they are not even honestly suggested to have existed, they are nothing but a passing impression of flavour or smell; they are a bit of coloured dye in clear water. The words are supposed to sing, not mean and the challenge for the author is a strange kind of pure aesthetic challenge: can he detain a piece of your time for virtually no reason; can he demote or muffle boredom?