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The Friends thank Ian McFarlane - novelist, essayist, poet, literary critic for The Canberra Times, and contributing editor to Voice - for his excellent 'Voices in the Gallery' presentation on John Shaw Neilson on November 22nd 2006. We thank Ian for providing us with the text of his address, which will be of interest to any lover of Australian Literature, and for his own poem on Shaw Neilson that completed the presentation.
The transcript
Our interest today is John Shaw Neilson, and you may be glad to know that this is definitely not an academic exercise; it’s about sharing a glimpse of the man and his poetry. But first, it might be useful to place the quicksilver notion of poetry in a contemporary context.
In a world seriously distracted by the complex threats of global terrorism and climate change, poetry might be considered an indulgence. In fact, the social relevance of poetry has been in steep decline for some time. There are many reasons for this, of course, but I don’t propose to canvas them here, other than to mention that when I grew up in England, as the dust settled on World War Two, poetry still seemed to make a difference to how people lived, and quoting a few lines aloud from Tennyson, Wordsworth or Coleridge, wasn’t considered an embarrassment, or even worse, a handicap to your prospects of making the football team. Having said that, I can’t resist adding the rider that one of the problems of poetry being written today – and there is a lot being written, the trouble is, there’s not much being read – is a lack of quotability. What ever else it does – and I’m certainly not denying the intrinsic value of contemporary poetry – quotable lines such as Wordsworth’s ‘the sounding cataract haunted me like a passion,’ which has haunted me for most of my life, don’t spring readily to mind. However, I would argue strongly that poetry has a vital relevance today, and any society daring to call itself civilized must recognise its poets. If I were asked to justify that claim, I would do so with one word … imagination. The core of our most persistent and pressing problems today – including poverty, war, and environmental damage – is a failure to think in a creative and original way capable of helping to bring down the pillars of ignorance that nourish prejudice, intolerance and fear. In other words – we are suffering from a failure of the imagination. And literature – particularly poetry - is the engine room of the imagination. A society that forgets its literature is asking for trouble. Politics has been described as the art of the possible; I’d like to suggest here today that the poetry of John Shaw Neilson embraces the art of the impossible.
John Shaw Neilson was born in Penola, South Australia, on the 22nd February 1872, and died in Melbourne on the 12th of May 1942. He received little formal education and most of his life was occupied by hard physical labour. The first of seven children, he was soon burdened by the weight of caring for his siblings and never married. Nicknamed Jock by family and friends, he called himself Shaw Neilson to avoid being confused with his father, also named John and a sometime poet. Jock was an itinerant labourer, wandering the flatlands of Western Victoria, and often distracted by having to help his family survive a dreary succession of crop failures, bad debts and tragedy, as they toiled in search of a dream of rural independence that was never fulfilled.
John Shaw Neilson’s poetry has a curiously otherworld quality that resists definition. It was shaped by the ‘thunder blue’ God of his mother’s stern Presbyterianism, his father’s tireless good grace in the face of overwhelming hardship, and a Celtic love for the sound of words, as well as their meaning. The pastoral transparency of his verse has been too easily pushed into the background by the bush-hardened masculinity of Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson. Neilson’s classroom was the natural world, and his instinct was to grasp the essential nature of poetry as a conversation with the imagination of anyone prepared to listen. When first discovering him many years ago, I couldn’t understand why he was so neglected. I still can’t. And it hurts to hear people recite Lawson, Paterson and Kendal without knowing a line of Neilson. His talent was intuitive and compassionate; untainted by formal education, and flowing from an anonymous and relentlessly impoverished life. He was always going to be hard to explain.
Some years ago, when the ABC ran an audience survey seeking a favourite love poem, I suppose it was inevitable that a few lines given celebrity status by a popular movie would come out on top. But I wonder how many people who voted for Auden’s Stop all the clocks, having heard it in Four Weddings and a Funeral, would have been aware of an Australian love poem containing these lines: Her eyes foretold of happiness / As grapes foretell of wine: /Her feet were as the lights that fall / In greeneries divine.
Neilson’s biography is unhelpful on the matter of romantic attachment, although most of his love poems, including the one just quoted, were apparently inspired by a woman whose identity has been the subject of some in-house speculation over the years.
I think most literary criticism fails in the face of Neilson’s unexpectedly profound poetic imperative. There’s a sense of shock; almost of offence, as if he had somehow been successful in a task for which he wasn’t qualified. His verses are a spider’s web of words, diligently spun in some more innocent and gleaming dawn, all fragility and light. But strong enough to do the job. A stanza from his poem, Song Be Delicate, could well be his credo: Let your song be delicate / The flowers can hear: / Too well they know the tremble, / Of the hollow year.
But the poem that catches the essence of Neilson’s unique voice, and one that is still being anthologized, I’m happy to report - having recently noticed Geoff Page’s collection of the all time top eighty poems - is The Orange Tree, written around the end of the First World War, when Neilson obtained a few days work weeding an orange grove near Mildura. Much has been read into this poem, in the mostly self-serving way that literary criticism is prone to do, but Neilson himself, in his biographical notes, remembers it merely by saying that he was “struck by the very beautiful light there is in May in Northern Victoria.’ And something else, which he puts down to ‘a kind of enchantment,’ akin to the dizzying emotion of seeing great art for the first time, such as – in his case - a book of Botticceli prints. In any event, there is a dialogue between experience and innocence taking place in the poem, with innocence having the last word.
Let’s pause for a moment as Tim Metcalf reads ‘The Orange Tree.’
The Orange Tree
The young girl stood beside me – I
Saw not what her young eyes could see.
A light, she said, not of the sky
Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.
Is it, I said, of East or West?
The heartbeat of a luminous boy
Who with his faltering flute confessed
Only the edges of his joy?
Was he, I said, borne to the blue
In a mad escapade of Spring
Ere he could make a fond adieu
To his love in the blossoming?
Listen, the young girl said. There calls
No voice, no music beats on me;
But it is almost sound – it falls
This evening on the Orange Tree.
Does he, I said, so fear the Spring,
Ere the white sap too far can climb,
See in the full gold evening
All happenings of the olden time?
Is he so goaded by the green?
Does the compulsion of the dew
Make him unknowable but keen
Asking with beauty of the blue?
Listen, the young girl said. For all
Your hapless talk you fail to see
There is a light, a step, a call,
This evening on the Orange Tree.
Is it, I said, a waste of love,
Imperishably old in pain
Moving as an affrighted dove
Under the sunlight or the rain?
Is it a fluttering heart that gave
Too willingly and was reviled?
Is it the stammering at a grave?
The last word of a little child?
Silence, the young said. Oh, why,
Why will you talk to weary me?
Plague me no longer now, for I
Am listening, like the Orange Tree.
A quintessential touch there is the way the young girl is listening ‘like’ rather than ‘to’ the orange tree.
Neilson’s poetry was championed by the legendary A.G. Stephens, who ran the Bulletin’s Red page for ten years from 1896 as a means of displaying the best literary talent of the day. Surprisingly, Nielson and Stephens corresponded for more than twenty years before meeting face to face. Their letters chronicle the growth of a friendship, and – more importantly – an intense, and often moving, creative partnership, which Neilson acknowledged to the last as being crucial to his development as a lyric poet. They quibbled over contracts and copyright; with Stephens revealing an edgy kind of paternalism and Neilson a canny sense of propriety. Not that he cared much for money, and knew his ‘rhymes’ would never make him rich. As the English poet, Robert Graves, aptly observed: ‘There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money.’
John Shaw Neilson used poetry to celebrate the senses rather than the intellect, thankfully resisting the depressingly postmodern urge to be clever about it. Vance Palmer’s memory of Neilson is apt: ‘He was a simple, rather frail man, with a quiet distinction about him, absolutely unconscious in his talk and his movements. There was nothing of what journalists called “the farmer poet” in his looks or his approach to life. He was just a poet, a man who set down subtle words to match the delicate music heard by his inner ear.’
Following the death of A. G. Stephens in 1933, Neilson’s friend and fellow-poet, James Devaney took up the cause, writing the first biography, based on faltering memories dictated from a man who was frail and isolated. Neilson’s eyesight was never good, and had worsened – at least, as far as writing and reading were concerned – by his middle years, when he increasingly relied on dictation, and others to read for him. Neilson was never a prolific poet – Stephens would often chivvy him about more ‘bulk’ – but by the time he was writing some of his best lines (in his 30s and 40s) he had somehow managed to achieve through instinct a poetic lightness of being that few critics could unravel, with contemporary reviews suggesting his poems were either willfully ‘obscure’ or – in an amazing twist – to have missed the ‘commonplace by a whisker.’
Dame Mary Gilmore, who rated Neilson alongside Blake and Keats, walked with him one day in Sydney’s Hyde Park and ‘grieved’ over his exhausted physical appearance, recalling later that when she saw ‘his work-swollen hands and the finger nails worn to the quick by the abrading stone – I felt a stone in my heart … The mind that should sing is broken in bodily fatigue.’
Neilson’s final years were eased when friends and admirers arranged a sinecure: an office messenger in Melbourne, and successfully applied for a small literary pension. Nettie Palmer, who also loved the subtle delicacy of Neilson’s talent as a ‘singer,’ wrote: ‘His poems, with their whims in the use of symbol and colour, are, in Wordsworth’s phrase, carried alive into the heart by passion.’
John Shaw Neilson’s ethereal form has been eclipsed by the more robust stance of Henry Lawson, and others, but Neilson was capable of writing lines that match – if not outrun – the best of them, resonating, both lyrically and emotionally, with the harsh and unforgiving beauty of the Australian landscape.
Let’s pause again as Karl Auer reads “Sheedy was Dying”
Sheedy was Dying
Grey as a rising ghost –
Helpless and dumb;
This he had feared the most
Now it had come!
Through the tent door –
Burning and drying
The Thirsty Land lay,
And – Sheedy was dying!
Why should he ever
And ever keep turning
All his thoughts over
To quicken their burning?
Why should the North Wind speak
Creeping and crying?
Who else could mourn for him?
Sheedy was dying!
Ay! He had travelled far –
Homeless, a rover –
Drunk his good share and more
Half the world over.
So now had ended
All toiling and trying;
Out in his tent alone
Sheedy was dying.
Never a priest to say
Where he is going –
Ah – he shall take the road
As he is knowing
That he shall rest
And the North Wind is crying
Who else should mourn for him?
Sheedy is dying.
Kind in a surly way
Somewhat rough spoken;
Straight to his fellow-men
Keeping unbroken
A fine old contempt
For the world, and its lying;
Now on his own alone,
Sheedy was dying.
Birds of the Thirsty Land
In the dull grey,
Mist of the even-time,
Floated away;
Still did the North Wind speak
Creeping and crying,
White, with his mouth agape
Sheedy was dying!
John Shaw Neilson was a complex simple man, with the subtle delicacy of his art offering a fascinating contrast between physical hardship and poetic perception. He spent the last years of his life in Melbourne with his sister, living quietly in Footscray but always in touch with the spiritual wisdom of his origins. Despite all the hardship, the years of disappointment and frustration, drought and crop failures, manuscripts lost, or eaten by plagues of mice, and a constant backdrop of pain and kinship tragedy, John Shaw Neilson never abandoned his profound devotion for the Australian bush, with its ‘holy and wise’ wildlife. The words inscribed on his headstone in the Footscray cemetery are eerily accurate:
It is calm without sorrow,
The peace without prayer:
‘Tis a fine country, surely,
That country out there.
John Shaw Neilson deserves to be quoted. He deserves to be remembered.
Remembering John Shaw Neilson
by Ian McFarlane
Your restless roving days are gone;
vanished where their music shone.
Can verses of such joyous rhyme
outstrip the wounded reach of time?
For what we say and what we do,
are often used to misconstrue,
and trim the wings of those who flew.
So let us now remember you.
Your orange tree in pristine sight;
aloft within its trembling flight.
Your song, so delicate in bloom,
was woven from a silken loom.
Your mentor was a magic king,
who conjured choirs and bade them sing.
Your homeland was a holy place,
between sky and bush and endless grace.
Where are your rhymes reflected now?
Among cyberspace and raucous row.
We need their truth and tempered light,
to beat against the rushing night.
Marion's Child: At this point Graham Farram leapt up from the stalls to deliver a marvellous reading of this Shaw Neilson classic, profoundly moving our audience... and they kept moving on to the food and drink.
References and Further Reading.
Cliff Hanna – John Shaw Neilson – Poetry, autobiography and correspondence. UQP. 1991.
Cliff Hanna – Jock – A life story of John Shaw Neilson. UQP. 1999
Margaret Roberts (editor) – John Shaw Neilson. The Collected Verse. A Variorum Edition. 2003. Available as a PDF download document from Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, UNSW at ADFA, Canberra
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