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    Ursula Bethell: Collected Poems
    Ursula Bethell: Collected Poems
    Ursula Bethell: Collected Poems
    Ebook254 pages2 hours

    Ursula Bethell: Collected Poems

    By Ursula Bethell

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVictoria University Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9780864737489
    Ursula Bethell: Collected Poems

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      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

      Mail

      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

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