October Morning

‘All clear, all clear, all clear!’ after the storm in the morning.
The birds sing; all clear after 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’.

Ursula Bethell

from Day and Night, Poems 1924 – 1935 (Caxton Press, 1939).
However, this version appears in Vincent O’Sullivan’s Ursula Bethell: Collected Poems (Victoria University Press, 1997, reissued 2011, 2021). Vincent explains in his endnote why the 1997 anthology includes corrections. The poem also appeared in Ursula’s Collected Poems (The Caxton Press, 1950).

Someone recently told me a garden poem might be just the medicine I need for the day, especially when steamrollered. So I picked up my Ursula Bethell books and fell into the delight of her poetry. She writes of seasons, weather, mountain ranges, the sky. She writes of gardening, and she writes of love, and then in the last years, after losing her beloved partner, Effie Pollen, writes of death. She also writes of the darker depths of humanity.

Like so many other people, the weight of the world rests upon my shoulders, the hunger, the poverty, the violence, the racism, the gender phobia, the injustice, the foolish decisions our Government and other world leaders are making, the utter inhumanity. It is unbearable. Yet it is a time, as it has been at other crucial moments in the past, when we need to voice our concerns, to register our protest, to speak together.

How does poetry fit with global and local catastrophe? What good is a poem? It can be a form of protest and it can be balm, and everything in between for both reader and writer.

And so I turn to Ursula Bethell, a poet who listened. She listened to the world and transcribed it into the word on the line, to a rendition of place, beauty scenes that were dear to her, from the distant horizon line to the garden she lovingly tended. I wrote about her aural attentiveness in Wild Honey, her ability to transport us through the arrival of both the musical and the physical.

In ‘October Morning’, I am reminded how I become embedded in her scenes, whether garden or wider view from a backdoor step. How I can smell, hear and feel place to the point reading the poem is a form of meditation, stillness, awe. And yes, this happens as I read ‘October Morning’, the words connecting musical notes and traces of intense beauty. Yet the poem also, fittingly, moves into the unease I feel as I write. How we move between storm and calm. How we translate versions of the world, whether it’s the ‘sky’s sheer blue intensity’ or the ‘powdered foot-hills’ or the resonant and slippery notion ‘clear’?

Ursula offers poetry, rich and resonant, for us to find our own routes through, our own clearings to linger within and beyond, our own ways of holding a poem as talisman, as poetry of darkness and poetry of light.

Paula Green

Ursula (Mary) Bethell (1874-1945) was born in England, raised in New Zealand, educated in England and moved back to Christchurch in the 1920s. Bethell published three poetry collections in her lifetime (From a Garden in the Antipodes, 1929; Time and Place, 1936; Day and Night, 1939). A Collected Poems appeared posthumously (Caxton Press, 1950). She did not begin writing until she was fifty, and was part of Christchurch’s active art and literary scene in the 1930s. Her productive decade of writing was at Rise Cottage in the Cashmere Hills, but after the death of her companion, Effie Pollen, she wrote very little. Vincent O’Sullivan edited a collection of her poetry in 1977 (Collected Poems, Oxford University Press,1985).