in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance

Enough about Stevens' anthology, says Daniel Deniehy, yawning: wrap up with something, tie off with some remark about his selection, my god, I say looking startled, this is not a review -- what is it then? -- a unloved violation of clarity, I said: I think, well, bush ballads almost absent, and the 1800s section of Les Murray's New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986) is vastly different, convict ballads, bushranger epics (“Jack Gilbert was a bushranger of terrible renown | For sticking lots of people up and shooting others down”), translations of Aboriginal oral poetry, which of course Stevens didn't; but what if he had, and why should I expect him not to?

(Noticeable, when I read books of verse by the New Zealanders Bathgate and Wilcox, the melancholy and guilty poems about the romance of a defeated Maori, “Here once the mighty Atua had his dwelling | In mystery,” from Wilcox's Onawe in Verses from Maoriland, and no counterpart in any of the Australian books so far. Not so in Australian prose, where it appears quite early. Leakey in The Broad Arrow had a character make a speech about it. Ditto Louisa Atkinson in Gertrude the Emigrant.)

Murray will take poems from Anonymous (or: the Collective Mind) and Stevens will not, no, more of a poet-canon-builder, Stevens, asking who is there, who can I acknowledge, even when they are only “fairly good”?

No doubt sociological reasons for that, Deniehy says sagaciously, if you wanted to look for them.

Murray's choice from Mary Gilmore is a piece about a small dead girl, and so is Stevens', but Murray's is a less whimsical poem, though you can't blame Stevens for choosing his Little Ghost over Murray's The Little Shoes That Died, when you look it up and discover that the first publication of Little Shoes occurred in the Sydney Morning Herald on the 5th of November, 1938, and Stevens' book came out more than two decades before.

Banjo Paterson is in Stevens' Anthology because how could he not be; and yet as I write those words, I remember that Yeats left Wilfred Owen out of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, saying that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry” after Matthew Arnold's preface to his Poems in 1853.

For the Muses, as Hesiod says, were born that they might be ‘a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce from cares’: and it is not enough that the Poet should add to the knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to their happiness. ‘All Art,’ says Schiller, ‘is dedicated to Joy, and there is no higher and no more serious problem, than how to make men happy.' [So spake Leigh Hunt, says Daniel Deniehy] The right Art is that alone, which creates the highest enjoyment.

...

What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also.

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.