Ursula Bethell: Collected Poems
()
About this ebook
Related to Ursula Bethell
Related ebooks
Somewhere in England Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Homecomings Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Footnotes: A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gluck: Her Biography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nella Last in the 1950s: Further diaries of Housewife, 49 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe School by the Sea - A School Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTime Of Hope Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5More Welsh Lives Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRecollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLegends & Lyrics: First Series: 'Joy is like restless day; but peace divine like quiet night'' Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStories, Dreams and Allegories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhen Rupert Murdoch Came to Tea: A Memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Tongue is My Own: A Life of Gwen Harwood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Essential Anne Wilkinson Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLegends and Lyrics Part 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTina Grenville: A Life in Three Acts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Old Maids' Club: With a Chapter From English Humorists of To-day by J. A. Hammerton Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTales of Horror and the Supernatural Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Legends & Lyrics: "No star is ever lost we once have seen, we always may be what we might have been." Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFar Off Things: “There are strange things lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the newspaper.” Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Judge's Cat Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLeaves from the Diary of an Impressionist; Early Writings by Lafcadio Hearn Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Lovels of Arden Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSolly's Girl: a memoir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHoard Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Clip of Steel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Story of the Treasure Seekers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Practical Mystic: Evelyn Underhill and her Writings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCarmilla Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Poetry of Adelaide Anne Procter - Volume I: "We always may be what we might have been" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Poetry For You
The Things We Don't Talk About Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dream Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You Better Be Lightning Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Road Not Taken and other Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enough Rope: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Ursula Bethell
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Ursula Bethell - Ursula Bethell
Collected Poems
Ursula Bethell
Collected Poems
Ursula Bethell
Edited by
Vincent O’Sullivan
Victoria University Press
Contents
Title Page
Introduction
From a Garden in the Antipodes (1929)
Foreword
Response
Pause
Gale SSW
Ruth H. T.
Catalogue
Grace
Bulbs
Detail
Soothsayer
Prepare
Weather
Primavera
Sinensis
Time
Water Colour
Discipline
Name
Alpines
Nomenclature
Fraicheur
Ado
Compensation
Controversy
Kakemono
Citrus
Incident
Primitive
Warfare
Erica
Meridian
Surprise
Ficus
Homage
Gradient
Garden Lion
Fuchsias
Elect
Aesthetic
Glory
Perspective
Yule
Admonition
Verdure
Fortune
Fancy
Old Master
Appel
Sabbath
Crisis
Fall
Trance
Dirge
Time and Place (1936)
Spring
Willows in the Valley
Spring Storm
Anniversary
The Long Harbour
Summer
November
Drive to North Canterbury
Forest Sleep
Levavi Oculos
Autumn
Autumn Roses
Showers of Leaves
By Burke’s Pass
Autumn Afternoon
Winter
Warning of Winter
Weathered Rocks
May Night
Envoy
Day and Night: poems 1924–1935 (1939)
To-day
Rainy Morning
Morning Walk
Spring Snow and Tui
Candour
Out on a Spring Morning
Spring on the Plain
Southerly Sunday
Summer Afternoon
Picnic
Grey Day
Rock-Crystal
Rose-Wreath
Decoration
Autumn on the Plain
Nor’-West Evening, Winter
After Dark
At the Lighting of the Lamps
Cloudy Night
Twinkled to Sleep
Night Rain
The Crucifix
Waves
Midnight
The Small Hours
Waiting for Dawn
Winter Night
6th July, 1930
Night of July
Midwinter Dawn
July 23. 1930. 6 a.m.
July 9. 1932. 7 a.m.
Dark Morning
Lever de Rideau
October Morning
Spring South-Wester
Summer Daybreak
Nor’-West Night
Autumn Dawn
Limitation
From Collected Poems (1950)
14th August, 1930
In a Hospital
Evening Walk in Winter
Looking Down on Mesopotamia. 1937
Winter 1941. Kaikoura
Six Memorials
October 1935
November 1936
November 1937
For November 1938
November 1939
Spring 1940
By the River Ashley
1 ‘It was the river’
2 ‘Under the schoolroom window’
3 ‘THE RANGIORA SHOW
’
4 ‘Willows in the autumn’
5 ‘Voices at the back door’
6 ‘Poor Mr so-and-so
’
7 ‘Sauntering home from church’
8 ‘Of late when I saw’
9 ‘The cliffs and bays’
10 ‘Our neat back-yard’
11 ‘A vignette’
12 ‘The smell of matipo’
13 ‘Lament for those who never’
14 ‘The new inhabitants’
15 Parakeets (Rangiora, 1883). July 1933
16 ‘A day in town’
17 ‘Back from the seaside’
18 ‘That bridge from the city’
19 ‘Alternate with the schoolroom plan’
20 ‘Grey thousands’
21 ‘The hour is dark’
Note on the Text
Notes to the Poems
Acknowledgements
Index of Titles and First Lines
Copyright
Introduction
I
An advertisement for Ursula Bethell’s first book of poems in 1929 asked the prospective buyer, with words taken from Kipling, ‘Won’t you greet a friend from home, /Half the world away?’ The sentiment was accurate. As she had informed her publisher, ‘I am by birth and choice English, but I have lived in New Zealand a good deal and shouldn’t like to be impolite to it.’¹ Although she spent two thirds of her life in New Zealand, England was always ‘home’ to Ursula Bethell, Canterbury where she happened to live.
Her father Richard, son of a Bursar at Eton and brother of the owner of Watton Abbey and Rise Park in Yorkshire, had come to the colony in 1860. Both Anglican and from a landed background, his intention was to see his sense of social order firmly reproduced in the antipodes. Some years later he married Isabel Lillie, daughter of a former Presbyterian minister at Papanui. Their first child Ursula was born in Horsell, Surrey, on St Faith’s day, 6 October 1874. The young family soon returned to New Zealand, eventually taking up a property at Rangiora, a small settlement close to the River Ashley. It was there Ursula spent her childhood, in the comfort of considerable wealth, surrounded by an impressive landscape, and with England always in the background as cultural and moral touchstone. Her parents sent her to good schools in Canterbury, then better schools in Oxford and Switzerland. By the time she was eighteen she was travelled, at ease in French and German, and very aware that Christchurch was both remote and small when she was obliged to sail back. A true daughter to social responsibility, she then worked among the poor and the underprivileged young until she went for two years to study painting in Geneva, and music in Dresden. Back in London in the 1890s, she again took up social work, and at the end of the century joined the Women Workers for God, known as the ‘Grey Ladies’, an Anglican community engaged in parish service to the sick and disadvantaged. M. H. Holcroft’s monograph on Bethell suggests ‘This was probably a crucial point in her life, a moment when she decided that her vocation must be religious and social rather than with the arts.’²
Gifted with natural rapport in working with young boys, she taught and advised until ill-health took her back to New Zealand for a year. She was then in Europe again until 1908. She kept house for her mother in Hampstead, she travelled widely on the Continent, and first met Effie Pollen, a young New Zealand woman who became the centre of her affections for the rest of her life. There were further years of social work in Christchurch, and England once more before the First World War broke out. ‘During the war she stayed in London, worked as a night waitress at the New Zealand Soldiers’ Club, and helped also at an information office near Westminster Abbey.’³ After the Armistice a sense of duty brought her back to Christchurch, and within a few years she had built a home in Westenra Terrace on the Cashmere Hills. Remembering her connections with the gentry in Yorkshire, and perhaps with a touch of irony at the disparity in scale, she called her new home ‘Rise Cottage’. For the next ten years she lived there with Effie Pollen. On the slopes of the hills, with a fine view of the plains levelling out to the foothills of the Alps, she established a garden, and at about the age of fifty began writing poems.
After the death of her close friend and companion, Bethell moved down from the hills into the city, and from then on wrote little poetry. Almost all of the poems in this collection are from the decade 1924–1934. She was surprised that people admired her ‘garden’ poems, often written as casual messages to friends, or as modest celebrations of what occurred beneath her hands and in front of her eyes. By the late 1920s, she was also writing the more deliberate and intellectually adventurous poems which took their place in her later two books.
Those who knew Ursula Bethell were struck by the breadth of her reading, her courtesy, her strong interest in social issues, the friendships in which she revealed ‘a nice sense of the degree of intimacy proper to each relationship’.⁴ When Charles Brasch met her in ‘The barren complacencies of suburban Christchurch’, he found her ‘the centre of an astonishingly diverse circle of interesting people, many of the younger of whom were so close to her that she almost directed their lives—with them I believe she saw herself as a spiritual director of a traditional kind. I could imagine her hearing confessions, a tall gaunt severe woman a little bent as if with listening, with a fine aquiline nose for direction, a penetrating gaze when she turned it on you and a rare warming smile.’⁵ Certainly she was neither prudish nor remote. Although ‘Being a Victorian,’ as she said, ‘I can never understand how people part with their privacy so readily,’⁶ and enjoying Trollope’s fiction because ‘I recall the remnants of that society’,⁷ she could speak frankly enough to those who sought her advice. ‘I don’t know how much of that sur-realist stunt you will have to scrap,’ she wrote to a young friend. ‘What do we do with all that surging unconscious but consecrate it? If persons don’t notice the surge they are either underdeveloped or advanced saints I think. The thing is not to be afraid of bogies and suggestions.’⁸ Her religious certainty did not prevent her taking others on their own terms. She found the young philosopher Arthur Prior, once he declared himself a professing atheist, ‘much more honest in his thinking than when he was a professing presbyterian.’⁹ And she made no bones about the New Zealand she lived in. After visiting an exhibition of Chinese ceramics, she found that on ‘Emerging into Chch streets the barbarity struck me more acutely than ever.’¹⁰ In the same vein, she remarked ‘Doesn’t one learn to select in N.Z! To leave out the houses. I seldom saw those on either side of Rise C. but in photographs they cannot not be seen.’¹¹ On seeing the behaviour of young people at Mt Harper for the winter skating, she decided ‘We are rearing a race of barbarians.’¹² Although her painter’s eye took in a different perspective—‘I have thought at times how paintable some of these scarlet lipped skating girls would be in their various get ups.’¹³
When E. H. McCormick once taxed her with too insistent a loyalty to English things, she answered him ‘No, I don’t look back to England thru’ rose-coloured haze
—I look at it through tears, that’s all.’ She also warned him ‘You mustn’t take me as a sample of a Country (England) or a Class! I wouldn’t be a good specimen—I am too variegated … That’s one of the sad things about me!—I don’t belong anywhere in particular—I’ve dodged to and fro—my friends are of all sorts of classes and countries—I’m not a fair sample—I have not been able to settle, always there was some event, some frustration.’¹⁴
Perhaps there was a trace of uncertainty, then, as well as a natural reluctance for any kind of self-promotion, in her refusing ever to publish under her own name. She told her London publisher in 1929 ‘I clearly see that I must agree to anything that will from [the] publisher’s point of view help the book on but I confess