"At Mornington" by Gwen Harwood

Text of poem here.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The universecraft 

-Shout out to the Aussies!

-Tim Tams SLAM, y'all

-Alice Allan, Poetry Says, and our episode on Gwen Harwood

-The Australian Augustans: Hope, McAuley, Stewart

-Paul Valery's "Le Cimitiere Marin"

-Tertius paeon reviewed

-The ocean motif, and my episodes on JMW's Through the Water and Yezzi's Mother Carey's Hen

-Quickness, Fastness

-Why graveyards are killer 

-In Soviet Russia, bones wear YOU.

-The jack-o-lanterns of our labor

-Love as the light upon the waters of death

Transcript

Versecraft 5-6: “At Mornington” by Gwen Harwood

            One of the small delights of making this show is checking in every now and then to see where in the world people have been listening to Versecraft. Some of the results are predictable—Ohio, Texas, New York, and other places where I have friends and connections. There are always cool surprises however: in recent weeks, I have had listeners tuning in from Ukraine, Bulgaria, India, Ireland, Singapore, Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Philippines among others. It truly is heartwarming and remarkable to know that people across the globe whom I would probably never get the chance to meet in real life are able to discover my show and listen to me yammer on about poetry. What a time to be alive, as they say. If you’re listening to Versecraft in a land far beyond the humble shores of Cleveland, Ohio, I’d like to offer you my gratitude and a special thanks for tuning in and helping me put verse in the universe. 

            Out of all the surprises of this sort however, none have been more surprising and moving than the following fact: out of the top five cities where this podcast is streamed, two are in Australia— Melbourne and Sydney. Pretty much since I started this show, a healthy and slowly growing contingent of Australian listeners has been loyally following my work, and I think it’s only right that I acknowledge you and thank you so much for your enduring support. I’m sure some of you were turned on to Versecraft by Alice Allan, the host of Poetry Says, a dear friend of mine, and one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met in my life, and so to Alice I say: thank you so much darling. As she’s remarked to me though, she can’t take all the credit for this phenomenon: I think we both agree that the fact of the matter is that Australians just happen to be very enthusiastic about poetry and want to know more about it, and I think that’s such a wonderful thing. Good on ya, dear Aussies! Also, Alice was kind enough to send me some sleeves of Tim Tams recently, and I have to say: those things are a triumph of civilization. 

            I mention all this of course because Gwen Harwood, our poet for today, is an Australian poet, and very famous and damned good one at that. I fear however that as soon as my Australian listeners saw the title of this week’s episode, they sighed and rolled their eyes, because the poem I’ve chosen, “At Mornington,” has a similar place in the Australian educational system as a poem like Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” has in the American educational system. It has been read, analyzed, and tested on to death by Australian high school and college students, and the antipodean citizenry are probably sick of hearing about it by now. Indeed, if you google “At Mornington Gwen Harwood” you will actually find it difficult to find a decent copy of the poem. Instead, you will simply find page after page of students, bloggers, and tutors offering their own uneven takes on it. I have chosen it, however, for three reasons: firstly, it is simply a very good poem worth knowing and analyzing; secondly, because this poem is so heavily tested on, I hope that this episode can serve as a better aid to any Aussie students in need of it than the mostly spotty material they are likely to find online; and thirdly, I guarantee that, unfortunate as the fact may be, ninety-nine percent of my non-Aussie listeners have never encountered this poem in their life. 

I would of course recommend to all my listeners that if they would like to know more about the incredibly rich world of Australian poetry, they should listen to Alice’s show, Poetry Says. I will also say that Alice is a wonderful person to talk to if you would like to know more about Gwen Harwood specifically, as she’s just recently finished reading her biography. One of my unstated rules on this show is that I don’t feature a poet more than once— that doesn’t bar me from repeating topics on other people’s shows though. If you would like to hear the Poetry Says episode where Alice and I talk about another excellent Gwen Harwood poem, “Prize-Giving,” please see my link in the show notes. 

Before going any further, I implore you that if you enjoy this episode, please consider leaving a donation at the link in the show notes, or advertising your enthusiasm by purchasing a Versecraft shirt from the merch store. If those options are out of the question, please at least consider taking a moment to tell your friends and their mamas about the show, and leaving a rating on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much! 

Gwen Harwood, who lived from 1920 to 1995, was born and raised in the suburbs of Brisbane, a warm and sunny city that Harwood, in subsequent years living in gloomy, gothic Tasmania, would look back upon as the blessed environ of a halcyon childhood. Her early artistic efforts were directed toward music, and as a youth she became an accomplished pianist and church organist. At the age of 21, she briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a nun, but ultimately decided better of it. During most of World War II she worked as a clerk at the War Damage Commission, and shortly afterward married Bill Harwood, a naval officer and scholar of linguistics who introduced her to the work of her lifetime philosophical muse, Wittgenstein.

 When Bill acquired a professorship at the University of Tasmania, the couple moved to Hobart, and Gwen spent most of the next two decades playing the domestic, birthing and raising children. Though she felt isolated in Tasmania, overwhelmed by motherhood, trapped in her husband’s shadow, and intellectually underestimated as a housewife, she also spent these years quietly honing her poetic talent and ambitions. She published modestly here and there, but it was not until she reached her forties that Harwood finally had the time to pursue poetry seriously and began to submit poems to major magazines under male pseudonyms. This was partly a tactic to get published, but it also accorded with a playful desire in Harwood for acting and subterfuge. Even after she became noteworthy enough to begin publishing under her own name, she still sometimes submitted poems under alter-egos, or else in the voice of fictional characters she had created. 

Throughout the 60’s, Harwood rapidly ensconced herself in the literary scene and formed lasting relationships with many of the notable Australian poets of her day, including A.D. Hope, whom I have featured in a previous episode, Vincent Buckley, James McAuley, and many others. If you get a chance to peruse a selection of her poems, you will quickly notice how many of them are dedicated to or addressed to these friends of hers. For Harwood as for Horace, poetry was not a hermetic art, but a form of communication. During this time she also returned to her musical roots, writing the libretti for many operas by Australian composers. 

In the next decades, Harwood’s star only continued to rise, and she won all manner of awards, from the Grace Levin prize, the Robert Frost medallion, and the Patrick White literary award to being inducted into the Order of Australia. A living icon of Australian poetry, she died from breast cancer at the age of 75. The following year, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize was created in her honor, which has come to be seen as one of the most coveted awards in all of Australian letters. 

Just as mid-century American poetry was a fascinating battleground between avant-garde modernism and neo-traditional formalism, so too was Australian poetry of the same period. Poets like Hope, McAuley, and Harold Stewart, the latter two of whom perpetuated the devastating Ern Malley hoax, formed a kind of conservative front against the experimental radicalism of modernist poetics, and succeeded for a time in creating a space for modern formalism in Australia to thrive. Harwood herself was a neo-romantic poet who wrote largely in meter and rhyme, was friends with Hope and McAuley, and probably owed much of her success to the form-friendly environment that these figures helped to create. At the same time, she was very much her own woman, and her poetry not only upheld traditional virtues of craftsmanship, clarity, and intellectualism, but also explored progressive topics such as feminism and indigenous rights. She bridged and encompassed both the aesthetic strengths and disciplined rigor of conservative poetics and the political consciousness of liberal poetics, and in doing so, and in keeping society with poets on both sides, became a marvelous and singular example of the universally beloved poet. 

Our poem for today, “At Mornington,” combines two of my favorite poetic topics: the ocean as allegory, and the spiritual invigoration of visiting graveyards. Insert Le Cimitiere Marin reference here. The poem goes like this:

At Mornington

They told me that when I was taken
 To the sea’s edge, for the first time,
 I leapt from my father’s arms
 And was caught by a wave and rolled
 Like a doll among rattling shells;
 And I seem to remember my father
 Fully clothed, still streaming with water
 Half comforting, half angry.
 And indeed I remember believing
 As a child, I could walk on water –
 The next wave, the next wave –
 It was only a matter of balance.

 On what flood are they borne,
 These memories of early childhood
 Iridescent, fugitive
 As light in a sea-wet shell,
 While we stand, two friends of middle age,
 By your parents’ grave in silence
 Among avenues of the dead
 With their cadences of trees,
 Marble and granite parting
 The quick of autumn grasses.
 We have the wholeness of this day
 To share as we will between us.

 This morning I saw in your garden
 Fine pumpkins grown on a trellis
 So it seemed that the vines were rising
 To flourish the fruits of earth
 Above their humble station
 In airy defiance of nature
 - a parable of myself,
 a skinful of elements climbing
 from earth to the fastness of light;
 now come to that time of life
 when our bones begin to wear us,
 to settle our flesh in final shape
 as the drying face of land
 rose out of earth’s seamless waters.
             I dreamed once, long ago,
             That we walked among day-bright flowers
             To a bench in the Brisbane gardens
             With a pitcher of water between us,
             And stayed for a whole day
             Talking, and drinking the water.
             Then, as night fell, you said
             “There is still some water left over.”
 We have one day, only one,
 But more than enough to refresh us.

 At your side among the graves
 I think of death no more
 Than when, secure in my father’s arms,
 I laughed at a hollowed pumpkin
 With candle flame for eyesight,
 And when I am seized at last
 And rolled in one grinding race
 Of dreams, pain and memories, love and grief,
 From which no hand will save me,
 The peace of this day will shine
 Like light on the face of the waters
 That bear me away for ever.

This poem is actually among the formally loosest in Harwood’s oeuvre— it is not quite prose lyric, but it gets close. It is unrhymed, and the main rhythmic organizing principle we have here is an accentual norm which oscillates from 3 to 4 beats per line. We might therefore say that the poem is written in a loose accentual meter. As always though, it is a good idea to scan the poem as if it were in traditional accentual-syllabic feet to see if any interesting patterns emerge. Lo and behold, some do: We discover that anapestic motions dominate, and indeed the vast majority of the poem consists of upward rhythms, i.e. iambs and anapests. We also notice that Harwood has a noticeable taste for feminine endings, and beyond this, ends an extraordinary number of her lines with a tertius paeon cadence. As a refresher, a tertius paeon is a unit of four beats in which the third beat receives the accent. It sounds like: buh-buh-BUM-bum. Another way to think about it is as a feminine anapest. We hear it in lines like: 

“The told me that when I was taken”

“And I seem to remember my father”

“fully clothed, still streaming with water”

“and indeed I remember believing”

“it was only a matter of balance”

All of these examples are from the first stanza alone. The cadence occurs nine more times throughout the poem. Rhythmic tics like these do not create a regular pattern, but they do establish a noticeable music in the poem which lends it additional aural interest. 

It is clear however that Harwood is still very formally minded in this poem: it is consciously organized into stanzas of 12, 12, 24, and 12, and the 3 to 4 beat norm is adhered to throughout, save for the eighth line of the last stanza, “of dreams, pain and memories, love and grief,” which is specifically extended to five beats to produce the effect of a vast, rolling wave. Even at her loosest, Harwood gives signs of her formal awareness and control. 

Let’s now go back and read the first two stanzas again. As you may have noticed, at sixty lines in length, this is quite a long poem for the format of this show, so I will not be analyzing in as much line-by-line detail as usual. Nevertheless, I still hope to do as much justice to the poem as possible. The poem begins: 

They told me that when I was taken
 To the sea’s edge, for the first time,
 I leapt from my father’s arms
 And was caught by a wave and rolled
 Like a doll among rattling shells;
 And I seem to remember my father
 Fully clothed, still streaming with water
 Half comforting, half angry.
 And indeed I remember believing
 As a child, I could walk on water –
 The next wave, the next wave –
 It was only a matter of balance.

 On what flood are they borne,
 These memories of early childhood
 Iridescent, fugitive
 As light in a sea-wet shell,
 While we stand, two friends of middle age,
 By your parents’ grave in silence
 Among avenues of the dead
 With their cadences of trees,
 Marble and granite parting
 The quick of autumn grasses.
 We have the wholeness of this day
 To share as we will between us.

Harwood begins in the first stanza by exploring various types of childhood memories: memories of events imaginatively reconstructed based on stories told by one’s parents, memories of events recalled only as flashes of images or sensations, and memories of prior states of personality recalled with confidence. This focus on interiority and concrete personal experience already and immediately places this poem in the Romantic tradition. She describes being told that, as a child, she once leapt from her father’s arms into the ocean, “and was caught by a wave and rolled like a doll among rattling shells.” The young girl, who feels invincible, safe, and at home in the world, is given her first taste of nature’s overwhelming power and hostile indifference to human life. Like a doll, she becomes a mere object in the wave, bereft of volition. The “rattling shells” she is accompanied by are also bleak revelations of the human condition: we identify ourselves with our souls, but our bodies are mere shells at the mercy of nature, which will one day rattle into death. 

When the speaker goes on to describe her stern but loving father saving her from the sea, where she thought she could walk on water, we are immediately reminded of Matthew 14, where Jesus saves Peter when he attempts the same thing. This is, incidentally, the same biblical episode that we discussed in relation to James Matthew Wilson’s poem, “Through the Water,” and, here as there, the water in question represents the Big Other, the mystical, turbulent chaos of nature in which the human being can become easily lost and destroyed. In her youthful naivete, the child Harwood believed that walking on water was merely “a matter of balance.” Here you might recall the episode on David Yezzi’s poem, “Mother Carey’s Hen,” in which the speaker wishes to ride the waves of life with as much equanimity and ease as the petrel glides above the ocean. In this childish cockiness however is a kernel of wisdom: while it is not true that any mortal can ever become a master of the cosmic ocean, cannot, like God, walk on water, it is certainly true that to the extent that we can negotiate our metaphorical, metaphysical ocean, balance in all things are key. Along with knowing thyself, this is the essential imperative of classical wisdom. 

In the second stanza, the literal water which was already implicitly allegorical is made figurative, as Harwood shifts to speaking of the flood of memories which are borne on her stream of consciousness like the glimmering shells she rolled with as a child. It is implied that, like her childhood self in the ocean, the now middle-aged Harwood feels unmoored in the tumultuous tides of time. She stands with her friend, whom we know from outside evidence to be her longtime companion and the secret, unrequited love of her life, Thomas Riddell, and no, I’m not talking about Lord Voldemort. They are at Mornington cemetery, among the avenues of the dead, visiting Riddell’s parents. We may note that Harwood may be making a pun here: “Mornington” sounds like “mourning town,” and in this town of mourning are “avenues of the dead.” As we will have reason to believe later, the “morning” in Mornington may also hint at a sense of hope and renewal. 

            Ever the musician, Harwood speaks of “cadences of trees,” suggesting that the world’s appearances are like chords in a melody that is fundamentally temporal and changing, a pattern of desire building and resolving, dying and renewing, as in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, or the motion of ocean waves. She then compares the marble and granite of tombstones against the “quick” of autumn grasses. The word “quick” here performs triple duty: it contrasts the deadness of stone against the “quickness,” the aliveness, of grass, it contrasts the endurance of stone against the “quickness,” the fleetingness, of grass, and it is also a comparison of blades of grass to nails or claws, which can be cut “to the quick,” cut at the vital, sensitive base. We are also reminded of the haunting pronouncement of Isaiah 40:6: “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flowers of the field.” What is enduring and certain, death, represented by the tombstones, parts lives, represented by grass, from their fellows. All of these juxtapositions are reconciled in the final two lines of the stanza: “we have the wholeness of this day to share as we will between us.”

            The couple have the whole day together, but they also have the “wholeness” of the day, the recognition that life and death, beauty and grief, friendship and loss can coexist in one fluid, musical whole that reinforces all of its parts. The awareness of death allows the couple to appreciate all the more the short time they have together, and prompts Gwen to try to fit all the pieces of her fleeting life into one whole to understand it as a unified phenomenon. 

This sense of wholeness is one of the main reasons why I love cemeteries, especially those of the Victorian, garden-style variety which have lush arboreal landscaping, lavish tombs, and exuberant funerary sculpture. Being in such a place, you’re surrounded by so much beauty, so much reverence and love for the memories of others, and in addition, the constant reminder of terrifying mortality makes you all the more appreciative of the exquisite sensoria around you and the tremendous dignity of human beings who face up to and beautify the process and fact of death. One is left with the sense of a profound reconciliation. Bonus points of course if there’s a famous writer or artist in the vicinity. 

Let’s now go back and read through the entire poem again:

They told me that when I was taken
 To the sea’s edge, for the first time,
 I leapt from my father’s arms
 And was caught by a wave and rolled
 Like a doll among rattling shells;
 And I seem to remember my father
 Fully clothed, still streaming with water
 Half comforting, half angry.
 And indeed I remember believing
 As a child, I could walk on water –
 The next wave, the next wave –
 It was only a matter of balance.

 On what flood are they borne,
 These memories of early childhood
 Iridescent, fugitive
 As light in a sea-wet shell,
 While we stand, two friends of middle age,
 By your parents’ grave in silence
 Among avenues of the dead
 With their cadences of trees,
 Marble and granite parting
 The quick of autumn grasses.
 We have the wholeness of this day
 To share as we will between us.

 This morning I saw in your garden
 Fine pumpkins grown on a trellis
 So it seemed that the vines were rising
 To flourish the fruits of earth
 Above their humble station
 In airy defiance of nature
 - a parable of myself,
 a skinful of elements climbing
 from earth to the fastness of light;
 now come to that time of life
 when our bones begin to wear us,
 to settle our flesh in final shape
 as the drying face of land
 rose out of earth’s seamless waters.
             I dreamed once, long ago,
             That we walked among day-bright flowers
             To a bench in the Brisbane gardens
             With a pitcher of water between us,
             And stayed for a whole day
             Talking, and drinking the water.
             Then, as night fell, you said
             “There is still some water left over.”
 We have one day, only one,
 But more than enough to refresh us.

 At your side among the graves
 I think of death no more
 Than when, secure in my father’s arms,
 I laughed at a hollowed pumpkin
 With candle flame for eyesight,
 And when I am seized at last
 And rolled in one grinding race
 Of dreams, pain and memories, love and grief,
 From which no hand will save me,
 The peace of this day will shine
 Like light on the face of the waters
 That bear me away for ever.

In the third stanza, Harwood shifts gears once again, flashing back from the graveyard scene to several hours earlier in the morning, when she was visiting her friend’s house. She speaks of the pumpkin vines she saw there in Thomas’s garden, which appeared to her to be in “defiance of nature” by how high up they supported their huge, weighty crop of pumpkins. We note that she refers to these pumpkins as “fruits of the earth,” an allusion to Deuteronomy 26:2 wherein the fruits refer to an offering made to God. When she then compares herself to the vine, which climbs “from earth to the fastness of light,” we understand what she means—not only is she speaking of the desire for transcendence, the desire to ascend from earthly origins to the divine light of the spirit, but she also seeks to “rise above her humble station” – the status of a housewife— to offer her fruits, her poems, to God. That is her method of ascent. This would be a standard devotional conceit, but her remark that she is working in “airy defiance of nature” adds a Promethean, Romantic element—she does not merely aspire to touch God’s light, she wishes to acquire it in spite of natural limitations, to grasp the infinite as a finite creature. Her impossible desire to walk on water remains, it has merely taken a more sophisticated form. 

Before moving on, we should also take a moment to appreciate the phrase “fastness of light.” As with the word, “quickness,” “fastness” can mean a number of things. A fastness is a haven or a shelter; it is also the ability for a material to retain its color; and of course, we can use it rather informally to mean speed. Harwood wishes to transcend earthly limitations and reach the speed of light, to dwell in the secure bosom of God, and to endure there eternally. 

We are then immediately hit with another absolute killer of a pun: “now come to that time of life when our bones begin to wear us.” She is saying that she and her companion have come to that time of life, mid-life, when their bones begin to creak and wear them down. Way more metal than that though, she is also saying that they have come to the time of life where, rather than wearing their skeletons as frames for their vigorous bodies, their skeletons now begin to wear them as drooping clothes. A Copernican shift is occurring whereby the skeleton is acquiring more emphasis than the person. Mortality is creeping in, and corporeality becomes more and more a part of one’s identity as one weakens and ages, moving toward the “final shape.” 

Interestingly, she then compares the desiccation of the flesh to the receding of the sea away from dry land. Here, water is not merely the great, tumultuous unknown, not merely the flow of unstoppable time, it is also the vivifying force of life. When we recall that plants require not only light but water to grow, this transition seems all the more fitting. With water we are dynamic—without it, we are merely the dry earth of the grave. A certain amount of drinking in the mystery is necessary not only to our growth, but to combating the inevitable desertification which is the austerity of death. 

This connection of water and life force becomes almost explicit in the next section, where Harwood describes a dream of herself and her companion talking the day away over a pitcher of water: “Then, as night fell, you said, ‘there is still some water left over.’ We have one day, only one, but more than enough to refresh us.” This excerpt functions almost like a small poem in itself. In the anticipation of mortality, each remaining day becomes precious, and sufficient. 

In the final section, Harwood finally addresses the subject of mortality head-on. What greater expression of love could there be than to confess that in someone’s presence, death seems like nothing scarier than a jack-o-lantern? Because of the previous passage on pumpkins, this image of the jack-o-lantern takes on a deeper resonance: the hollowed-out pumpkin is the death of aspiration. When alive, it was illuminated by the sun, which caused it to grow—now it is illumined by nothing more than a candle. When dreams become impossible, and darkness descends, we must do with our fruits what we can, and provide our own light.

Nevertheless, love redeems, and allows us to laugh in the face of our jack-o-lanterns, our existential ghouls. Harwood admits that one day she will be “seized at last, rolled in one grinding race of dreams, pain and memories, love and grief, from which no hand will save me.” Nevertheless, “the peace of this day will shine like light on the face of the waters that bear me away for ever.” The biblical imagery here suggests the authority of prophecy: “When I am dying” she seems to say, “the memory of you will be like the light of genesis, a new birth, and will suffuse with radiance the mysterious cosmic necessity which dictates that I must die.” Her gratitude for the time she spent with this loved one will redeem the loss and horror of ceasing to be. The poem then ends ambiguously, with a space between “for” and “ever.” Do the waters bear her away forever, never to return? Or do they bear her away for ever, her soul always migrating into the next phase of existence? Though night falls, and death comes, the memory of love suggests the dawning of a new morning. There may still be some water left over. 

            With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through the poem one last time, as an old friend:

At Mornington

They told me that when I was taken
 To the sea’s edge, for the first time,
 I leapt from my father’s arms
 And was caught by a wave and rolled
 Like a doll among rattling shells;
 And I seem to remember my father
 Fully clothed, still streaming with water
 Half comforting, half angry.
 And indeed I remember believing
 As a child, I could walk on water –
 The next wave, the next wave –
 It was only a matter of balance.

 On what flood are they borne,
 These memories of early childhood
 Iridescent, fugitive
 As light in a sea-wet shell,
 While we stand, two friends of middle age,
 By your parents’ grave in silence
 Among avenues of the dead
 With their cadences of trees,
 Marble and granite parting
 The quick of autumn grasses.
 We have the wholeness of this day
 To share as we will between us.

 This morning I saw in your garden
 Fine pumpkins grown on a trellis
 So it seemed that the vines were rising
 To flourish the fruits of earth
 Above their humble station
 In airy defiance of nature
 - a parable of myself,
 a skinful of elements climbing
 from earth to the fastness of light;
 now come to that time of life
 when our bones begin to wear us,
 to settle our flesh in final shape
 as the drying face of land
 rose out of earth’s seamless waters.
             I dreamed once, long ago,
             That we walked among day-bright flowers
             To a bench in the Brisbane gardens
             With a pitcher of water between us,
             And stayed for a whole day
             Talking, and drinking the water.
             Then, as night fell, you said
             “There is still some water left over.”
 We have one day, only one,
 But more than enough to refresh us.

 At your side among the graves
 I think of death no more
 Than when, secure in my father’s arms,
 I laughed at a hollowed pumpkin
 With candle flame for eyesight,
 And when I am seized at last
 And rolled in one grinding race
 Of dreams, pain and memories, love and grief,
 From which no hand will save me,
 The peace of this day will shine
 Like light on the face of the waters
 That bear me away for ever.