Ursula Bethell

Collected Poems

Ursula Bethell, Vincent O'Sullivan

• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780864737489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Poesie

Bethell stands with RAK Mason at the beginnings of modern poetry in New Zealand. Born in England, she grew up in New Zealand but did not live there until the 1920's when at the age of fifty she began to write poetry. Her first collection of poems, 'From a Garden in the Antipodes', was published in 1929. Vincent O'Sullivan's introduction takes account of discoveries and insights from the last decade.

Day and Night, poems 1924–1934 (1939)

To-day

Plenipotentiary Dawn, unwrapping royal gift,

Black-overcloaked, red-robed, stern, transitory,

A day confers. Death-dusty, knees I bend, hands lift

The awful dowry to accept: arbitrament, doom, glory.

Rainy Morning

Early in the morning I stood pondering

Intricate interchange of shadow on the dreaming hills.

Soluble colour, moss-green by purple-grey penetrated,

Brown into blue turning, brief gleam of gorse gilding

Softened solidity of sheep-sustaining access,

Of water-fashioned gully soft decline.

Eonial form. Ephemeral coloration.

Ascribable to slow, hesitant, soft clouds hanging

Low overhead, brooding, meditating rain, rain.

At footside, spherical soft clover-head,

Whitish and murry-shaded, spicy ….

Into the dream there crept a little bird-voice,

Again, again, again insinuating his small essential song.

Soliloquy’s no song, once spake a pundit. But not guilty, Sir!

Not self-sufficient, soul, nor little hidden bird.

Spirit of Beauty, here, hovering, informing, prevalent,

To thee, to thee, to thee, we sing reconnaissant!

Here, where still solitude unseals thy casket

Of sovran wealth, we secretly salute thee!

Again, again, again, the invisible rain-bird,

Never, never seen, but ever heard,

Repeats, assured, his sweet eight-noted lay;

To thee, to thee, to thee making

Plain, plain, his quiet statement

Of pure, serene, unquestioned pain,

Unquestionable joy.

Morning Walk

On a bright morning of winter I walked up the bitumined highway

to forget the fret of the fetters of down-tending detail,

of diurnal subsistence escape delight-dimming screen.

The morning air was full of the cries of humanity active,

red sparks rising up to the whiter light of silence;

the eternal mountains, aloof, maintained their endless procession;

like tender bloom on curve of immature peach-skin

clung fugitive frost to the foot of winter-green gullies;

shone, sun-glossed gold and silver, the satiny tussock …

I kissed the chains that bind the body to bounty of earthly scene.

Spring Snow and Tui

We said: there will surely be hawthorn out

down in the sun-holding folds of the hills by the sea;

but suddenly snow had forestalled the thorns there,

death-white and cold on their boughs hung

the festival wreaths.

It is all one. The same hand scatters the blossoms

of winter and spring-time. The black-robed psalmodist,

traversing swiftly the silent landscape like Azrael,

echoed in clear repetition his well-tuned antiphon;

a waking bugle it might be, a passing bell,

of life, death, life, life tellin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• From a Garden in the Antipodes
• Time and Place (1936)
• Day and Night, poems 1924–1934 (1939)
• From Collected Poems (1950)
• Six Memorials
• By the River Ashley
• Note on the Text
• Notes to the Poems
• Acknowledgement
• Index of Titles and First Lines
• Copyright