Ursula Bethell

I respond to poetry, but I am not a very skilled explicator of it. In fact, if you asked me to explain what some of my favorite poems "mean," I would probably dither helplessly. I'm not against meaning; I like many poems because I sense meanings behind the attractive pattern of words, and I am grateful to those who can help me see what some of those meanings might be. I am also not great with the technical aspects of poetry such as meter.

So when I make modest notes about poetry, the encoded message is usually, "Help!"

I have been glancing through An Anthology of Twentieth-Century New Zealand Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1970), which I have out from the University of Wisconsin Green Bay library. I have been attracted to a selection of poems by Ursula Bethell (1874-1945), about whom information can be found at these websites:

http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/bethellursula.html

http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/bethell/index.asp

A number of her poems can be linked to from the second site. There is something (note how vague I am!) in Bethell's way of talking about time and botany, clearly two of her favorite subjects, that is arresting and original, at least to my ears. She was a gardener, a serious Anglican, a woman whose primary emotional attachments were with other women. Here is a representative poem published in 1939 that I like very much. I am especially taken with the way it shifts gears in the final four lines to become more abstract and "philosophical":

October Morning

‘All clear, all clear, all clear!’ after the storm in the morning.
The birds sing; all clear the rain-scoured firmament,
All clear the still blue horizontal sea;
And what, all white again? all white the long line of the mountains.
And clear on sky’s sheer blue intensity.
Gale raved night-long, but all clear, now, in the sunlight
And sharp, earth-scented air, a fair new day.
The jade and emerald squares of far-spread cultivated
All clear, and powdered foot-hills, snow-fed waterway,
And every black pattern of plantation made near;
All clear, the city set . . . but oh for taught interpreter,
To translate the quality, the excellence, for initiate seer
To tell the essence of this hallowed clarity,
Reveal the secret meaning of the symbol: ‘clear.’

I am interested to read in Vincent O'Sullivan's Introduction to the latest edition of Bethell's Collected Poems that Bethell was influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose innovative and electrifying poems had come to public attention in 1918, some thirty years after his death. This did not surprise me: I thought I had sensed the example of Hopkins in Bethell's manner (in a very positive way).

http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/bethell/osullivan.asp