John Shaw Neilson, a Rhymer Undefeated

There’s music in the sighing of a reed;

There’s music in the gushing of a rill;

There’s music in all things, if men had ears:

Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.

—George Gordon Bryon, Don Juan, Canto XV

 

Lord I am watching watching through the night

And listening for the heavenly harmonies

Guessing and wondering at great mysteries …

—John Shaw Neilson, aged twenty-five, “The Earth Born”

 

Good fellow of the Song

Be not too dismal—it is you and I

And a few others lift the world along.

—John Shaw Neilson, aged fifty-five, “Speech to a Rhymer”

 

… a poet in defeat, entirely undefeated.

—Geoffrey Grigson, on John Clare

February 22, 2022, marks the 150th anniversary of John Shaw Neilson’s birth, and May 12, 2022, the eightieth anniversary of his death. It is no easy thing to try to pay fitting tribute to him and his poetry. In Hugh Anderson’s essay “Green Singer” (1956) he wrote of Neilson: “the poet is able to transmit shades of attitude, perceived, and yet which defy exact description in a prose commentary. So much so that attempts to describe his poetry must fail, and fail because his form and content are inseparable.”

Much fine scholarship about the life and work of John Shaw Neilson has been written by Cliff Hanna, Helen Hewson, Margaret Roberts, John Phillips, Nancy Keesing and, from an earlier generation, by A.R. Chisholm, Jim Devaney, T. Inglis Moore, Hugh Anderson and L.J. Blake. Cliff Hanna’s The Folly of Spring: A Study of John Shaw Neilson’s Poetry (1990) contains detailed examination of many of the poems.

In “Essay on Criticism”, Alexander Pope wrote:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

’Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,

The sound must seem an echo to the sense …

A subject as rich as Neilson’s poetry cannot be condensed into an essay; I am therefore confining myself here to the acoustic element of Neilson’s poetry, the world of sound that he inhabited, the musical and poetical influences of his youth, including those of his religious upbringing. Along the way, I hope also to convey something of the subtle, terse sense of humour that emerges from the biographies and letters. In his autobiography, after a brief reference to his efforts at light verse, he makes this wry comment about public perception of his poetry: “I have got the reputation of being rather a tearful kind of fellow and perhaps it is best to stick to it.” Neilson’s verse might have the delicacy of a darting bird, or a glint of sun on water, but not to be overlooked are the fire and the dynamic, robust rhythmic sense of the Gael.

In a letter written to Neilson after his first collection of verse, Heart of Spring, was published in 1919, the poet Hubert Church wrote:

I cannot analyse my thoughts, flowing through me as I read your marvellous songs. Someway —somewhere—I am entering an unknown land to me—which no man may find who does not leave the earth. Sometimes in my moods I have seen the land, but never could break in, and now you have shown me the way.

Hubert Church calls the poems “songs”. His experience of the magic resonance in Neilson’s poetry reminds me of Keats’s exhortation to the piper on the Grecian urn—“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter … Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone”—for Church had been rendered completely deaf in a sporting accident at the age of twelve. In one of Neilson’s most famous poems, “The Orange Tree” (1919), the girl peering intently into the tree tells her inquisitor: “Listen! … There calls / No voice, no music beats on me; / But it is almost sound …” The poem was set to music by the English-born Australian composer Horace Keats in 1938, and in 1954 by Margaret Sutherland.

John Shaw Neilson loved songs; in his later years, he spoke to his friend Ted Harrington of the importance of traditional songs as an influence on his poetry, and of his fondness for the melodies of Stephen Foster. He thought “My Old Kentucky Home” one of the best folksongs in the language, and wrote a tribute piece to Foster.

Neilson and Mary Gilmore, one of his greatest supporters, conducted a charming correspondence. In a letter to her in March 1914 he wrote: “There seems indeed to be a mystery behind many things. It seems to strike me very plainly when I am listening to music. In reading verse it seldom strikes me …”

“Music means so much in verse, and many a thing beside,” he wrote “to a brother Rhymer”, Victor Kennedy, in August 1916. “Repeat your lines over and over till you get weight in the right places. If you listen to a band you will get some notion of this … Sound always means something, often an indefinite something truly.”

To his great mentor and champion A.G. Stephens, Neilson wrote in 1923:

I was reading extracts from Shelley today. To me he seems to make dreadful mistakes with his music … He often puts the weight in the wrong place … but Keats now, he’s a Wizard. He must have got music direct from Heaven—but … Heaven doesn’t exist. I’m beat again.

In 1934, he told one of his biographers, James Devaney:

When I was younger and feeling good and had the right leisure to think about verses and things, I used to feel that a tune was the thing, not the words. I’d try a tune of my own. I’d hum my tune out loud as I went along. I was usually at work out in the open at the time … I dare say it was woeful … I’d soon find out that it was no good, and then I’d start on words instead.

Neilson’s biography is a moving tale: until the age of fifty-six, his life was one of hard manual labour. His parents, both of Scottish stock, settled initially at Penola in South Australia where “Jock”, as he was known in the family, and four of his siblings were born. The family moved to Victoria, and much of his life was spent among the working poor, the Scots, Irish, German and English settlers of the Wimmera and Mallee where, with no capital, and despite his father’s never-say-die attitude, the family battled away on the land with no success. There were the premature deaths of an infant brother, his mother and two of his three sisters; there was romantic disappointment. A significant part of Neilson’s personal and poetic development was spent climbing out of the fear-bound, grim brand of Presbyterianism that had ensnared his mother.

In a life of physical toil and few pleasures, he found relief and solace in his natural surroundings, in its wildlife, and, to the extent allowed him by the family’s strict observance of the Sabbath, in the recreations of the bush labour community. Acoustic memories are conjured up in poems such as “Oh, Player of the Flute” (1912), “The Flautist” (1927) and “Julie Callaway” (the 1913 version): “The old-time singers sang of yore; / So let us all sing evermore.”

In 1934, in a letter to Mary Gilmore, written with his step-sister Lisette as amanuensis, he said of his younger brother Frank:

You asked was it I or my brother that played the fiddle. My brother is the fiddler. He has a very good ear for music. He was a fiddler not a violinist. He could play Irish Jigs and Scotch reels fairly well. He used to play a good deal for bush dances when he was young but of late years his hands have got out of shape through hard work, and it is when he is on holiday seeing us that he tackles the fiddle …

He told James Devaney that the fiddle was his favourite instrument. The fiddler in “The Unlovely Player” and “The Wedding in September” is drawn from life, inspired by the playing of a selector, Eli Billingham. After hearing of Eli’s death, Neilson wrote “Why the Little Fiddle Cried” in 1910.

I hear the blended bells and bands

The fiddlers fiddling on the green

The clapping of a thousand hands

The trembling of the tambourine …

                                (“The Dream is Deep”, 1906)

“If ever I go to Stony Town, I’ll go as to a fair, / With bells and men and a dance-girl with the heat-wave in her hair …” (“Stony Town”, 1927). Fiddles, flutes and concertinas, the robust rhythms of Scots, Irish and English country dances stamped out by hard shoes in rural halls; jigs, reels, strathspeys and hornpipes; the swirling skirts of the Irish colleens, the incantatory effect of the music, with its raw, primitive vitality: “Dancing is really a form of poetry,” he wrote to Gilmore in 1919. A short 1915 poem, “Her Foot”, evokes something of the sensory effect of these dynamic, flashing, accelerating images and the intensifying volume of sound:

What is her foot, this slyly wakeful thing?

It has the voice of Love and it can sing,

It beats, it beats, its ways are ravishing …

Music of flowing blood is in my ear.

John Shaw Neilson had a desultory schooling, which ended in 1886: about sixteen months in Penola, and less than a year in the Wimmera at Minimay, with a gap of nearly four years in between. But in the evenings at their humble bush home, his father John and mother Margaret provided an environment ingrained with the oral tradition, rich with the sound of language in song and poetry recitations. Additionally, readings from the family Bible and prayers were customary before retiring for the night.

In a letter to Gilmore in 1922, Neilson wrote:

I remember long ago Mother used to recite to me, Addison. Beautiful lines ending “The hand that made us is divine.” [Based on Psalm 19: Hymn 10 in the Presbyterian hymn-book, “The gracious firmament on high.”] She had very little education. She had to earn her living early. I think it was a Governess on a station taught her the verse she loved so much. She was a very religious woman and often seemed rather awe struck with the stars at night.

Unity of poetry and music was an integral part of his early experience. His mother sang Scottish folksongs and his father recited them. Jock listened to old Celtic tales and Scottish border ballads such as “Lamkin” and “Sir Patric Spens”. He became a keen reader: during the early 1890s, he immersed himself in George Eliot’s Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. In late 1894 or early 1895, he composed “Marian’s Child”, a ballad of pulsing rhythm and with a dark theme, that of infanticide. His brother Frank said later that the idea came from the story of Hetty Sorel in Adam Bede. In its macabre atmosphere the piece recalls “Lamkin” and the tales of another author he was reading, Edgar Allan Poe. Many years later, Gilmore recalled the impact the poem had made on her “because of its intensity of unrestrained power, its elimination of the unnecessary, and its passion of pity”. In a 1912 letter, Neilson told her that his sister Maggie must have sent the poem off to the Bulletin while he was away from home, and that he had actually named it “Emily’s Child”. Maggie, he said, “had a great belief in it but I could see its most glaring faults … I am not at all proud of it now.” “Marian’s Child” was originally published in the Bulletin in May 1895, and subsequently in the Bulletin Reciter in 1901. The poem never appeared in any of his collections.

Neilson told Devaney that his father was “a great reader, although always a hard worker with very little leisure, and he got what books he could”. Jock listened to his father’s readings of Gray, Scott, Coleridge, Hood, Burns, Keats and Shakespeare. “My father could read the Scottish in Burns, but I can’t.” Adam Lindsay Gordon was a family favourite; Neilson thought “Gone” was Gordon’s best. He later recalled that in his early efforts at poetry he tried to imitate the metre of “The Ancient Mariner”. Frank wrote that Jock thought Hood’s “Dream of Eugene Aram” the best ballad of all. Neilson was to use the metre of Hood’s “The Bridge of Sighs” in some of his mature poems: “Sheedy was Dying”, “In the Dim Counties”, “The Hen in the Bushes”. In his sixties, Neilson wrote “In Memory of Adam Lindsay Gordon”: “Lightly he rides ahead, / Soldier and mystic in his own enchantment …”

Neilson’s father was also a poet. In a letter to A.G. Stephens in 1919, Neilson thanked him for his praise of one of his father’s verses, “The Last Time”, written in the wake of Margaret’s death in 1897 at the age of forty-seven. To Devaney in 1938 he wrote that “Waiting for the Rain” was “very popular in the shearing sheds during the ‘eighties’ and ‘nineties’”. A small collection of his father’s verse was published in Melbourne that year. Its title, The Men of the Fifties, took its name from a rhyme about the Eureka Stockade. The collection consisted of thirteen pieces, including “The Almond Blossoms”, “Mother Earth” and “Song of the Shadows”. Victor Kennedy wrote a sympathetic review for which Neilson expressed his appreciation. The title of Kennedy’s review in Bohemia magazine was “A Poet Who Was Neglected”.

“The Lover Sings” (1906) is a paean to the powerful effect the sound of singing can have on the souls of those listening: “Listen, and we shall leave the earth, / Brooding no more o’er baser things”. Neilson himself was not a singer. To Gilmore in 1918 he wrote:

How hard it is to write a song; I should say a man would need to be twenty-one with all good health and fortune and a green day and just the proper sunlight, but I’m wrong altogether because great songs have been written by poor miserable wasters, homeless and penniless.

In the letter he gives favourable mention to “Douglas, Douglas Tender and True”, written by a Scottish noblewoman, “Waly, Waly” (“The Water is Wide”) and “Home Sweet Home”. In a letter to Devaney in 1934, he said that “Annie Laurie” and “Molly Asthore” (“Gramachree”) were among the love songs that touched him deeply. He told Devaney: “I like the old Irish and Scottish melodies very much, especially the Irish.” He talked of old Irish melodies, and said he thought that some clever professionals with great reputations did not play them properly at all.

In a letter to Gilmore in 1934 Neilson mentions a gramophone recording of “Believe Me”, played by the Cherniavsky Trio (violin, cello and piano): “That is a wonderful lament. It was disgraceful of Thomas Moore to put drawing room words to it.”

Neilson’s “The Stolen Lament” was composed in 1927. Years later, James Devaney asked him, “What is the stolen lament in this poem?” Neilson replied:

Well, I was thinking of the old Irish tune of “Believe me if all those endearing young charms”. I heard it played as a lament, and I’m sure that’s how it should be played. It’s a beautiful thing. I believe Thomas Moore did a lot of things like that to old Irish tunes. It makes the thing paltry. Some of those old Irish melodies were very much better as they were, without the words we have to them now.

Following Neilson’s death in June 1942, an appreciation of his poetry by the Rev. George O’Neill, SJ appeared in Studies, an Irish quarterly review: “The poet has a gradh [love] for Ireland that is unmistakable. It is softly felt in ‘The Stolen Lament’, a half-heard re-singing of an old Irish song of regrets, declared to be a sacred thing, not to be rashly assayed by the alien.” (Thomas Moore was born in Dublin, though by the age of twenty he was in London studying law.)

Of “The Woman of Ireland” (1923), Neilson said in a letter to A.G. Stephens that year: “I knew an old Irish lady a few years back. She had a beautiful voice (you know the beautiful honeyed speech some Irish women use)”. The Gaelic lilt is brought to mind in the poem’s cadences and verb constructions:

It was a woman of Ireland in old days I knew

Being far down was embittered—her little voice grew

Loaded with all the sweet honey and having love too …

She would be thinking too long of the flowers and the dew …

Of his Scottish inheritance, Neilson told Gilmore in 1926: “You speak of your son’s resemblance to me. I daresay that our ancestors were closely related to each other. They may have gone on cattle raiding expeditions together.” Three letters he sent to A.G. Stephens in 1931 while in the throes of composing “Song for a Honeymoon” (1932) reveal an atavistic impulse, a desire to capture in verse the bold, wild spirit of the ancient Scots. He writes of:

a fresh stanza for my ancestors. I understand that these old fellows prowled about in the forests a good deal and of course were very superstitious … You will notice that I have started with the man as a barbarian, then a soldier off to battle—then a corn grower. The next two verses seem to be glorifying him as a fighting man. Then in the last verse we see him again as a hunter, very primitive indeed.

Concerning revisions that Stephens had suggested, his response was:

I think “Spearmen following his tossing plumes” is not quite primitive enough … I can’t always give very good reasons for my preference but I have repeated all these lines over dozens of times. I am more likely to be right in the sound than in the sense. Of course I am handicapped in one way, that I have never read the lines myself.

Because of problems with his eyesight, his sister Annie was acting as his amanuensis.

Another remark he makes is worth noting: “The one [verse] about the savage hunter was perhaps too bloodthirsty, but the one about the soldier hurrying off to war I liked … It is perhaps a weakness in me to want to make fun of warriors.” As a rule, he rejected bellicosity and jingoism; he disliked what he called Kipling’s “noisy verse”. “The Soldier’s Lament”, written in the aftermath of the Boer War, makes his position clear: “Weary is he, and sick of the sorrow of war, / Hating the shriek of loud music, the beat of the drum …”

In his 1941 essay “Free Verse Old and New”, dictated to Victor Kennedy, which he wrote for inclusion in the 1941 Jindyworobak Symposium, he said:

I believe that our young poets are sincere. I hope that they will avoid harsh sounds, and anger at those who differ from them. (Some of the new verse I have heard is discordant.) I believe that harsh noises are bad for a nation. They lead to dullness of comprehension. And at times to a certain slave-mindedness.

“Song Be Delicate” (1913), contains an apprehension and a plea:

Let your song be delicate.

The skies declare

No war—the eyes of lovers

Wake everywhere.

In the concluding verse, entry into the abyss of war is foretold:

Let your song be delicate,

Sing no loud hymn:

Death is abroad … oh, the black season!

The deep—the dim!

The piece has been set to music by three Australian composers: Mirrie Hill, Margaret Sutherland and Alfred Hill.

“No one values good religious verse more than I do. Its [sic] so seldom anything good is written. ‘Abide with Me’ is a class of its own …” Thus he wrote in the course of advice to his brother rhymer Vic Kennedy in 1916. To Devaney he wrote in 1935:

Another thing which has always had a great hold on me is “Abide with Me”. It had the same hold before I knew it was written by a young clergyman who was dying at the time. The tune is a good one, but I don’t think it is good enough for the words.

Henry Lyte (1793–1847) wrote the words of the hymn in the year of his death with a tune to accompany it. However, “Eventide” is the tune to which the words have been sung since its composition by William Monk in 1861.

Notwithstanding the oppressive elements in his religious upbringing, the Bible readings and prayers, the psalms and hymns, had a role to play in the formation of Neilson’s poetical style. In “Free Verse Old and New” he wrote: “Since early childhood the Book of Ecclesiastes has seemed to me the greatest poetry. It gives a glow to me, and lifts me above mean things. The Book of Ecclesiastes might fairly be called free verse.”

To me, there is something of the Presbyterian hymn-book in “The Birds Go By” (1926), both in its structure and images: “After the fight and the fall, the defeat of the pilgrim / The birds go by.”

Brief as it is, the poem has a quality of the celestial, the anthemic, and its phrasing lends itself to musical arrangement. This beautiful lyric concludes:

Green earth and water have gladdening out of their cry:

Lifting the eyes of the heart to the height of the                 sky.

I dream that they bear to the dead the thoughts of the living:

The birds go by.

Another poem with a worshipful tone is “The Hen in the Bushes”, published in the Catholic Leader (Brisbane) on September 15, 1935. There are echoes in it of Christ’s words from a sermon recorded in Matthew 23:37: “how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings”. Neilson describes a mother hen’s protectiveness of her brood in the heat of red-hot February weather at Merbein, where he used to go grape-picking:

Call me the man seeing

Too much in air

Love by the little hen

Love it is there.

Birdsong is everywhere in Neilson’s poetry: birds are communicators, consolers, message-carriers, philosophers and diviners. At Minimay in “The Poor, Poor Country” (1927) of his boyhood, he hears the swans singing at night and the mountain-ducks making “many a hollow sound”. “The Blue Hen in the Hop-Bush” (1921) mocks the poet good-naturedly, as if trying to chivvy him out of his listlessness: “And he often says to my heart, ‘How thin of blood are you!’ / And he puts into the broad sunshine his melody of blue.”

In “The Gentle Water Bird” (1926), which Neilson dedicated to Mary Gilmore, the young Jock finds, in contemplation of a “courtly” crane, the revelation of a kinder divinity than that provided to him by his upbringing.

He did commune with me for many a day

Till the dark fear was lifted far away …

Nothing of hatred will about him cling:

Silent—how silent—but how his heart will sing

Always of little children and the Spring.

The same reverential spirit, a hint of the Nativity, is present in Neilson’s description of the roan foal in “Some Thievery of Old” (unfinished, 1941):

In the long grass I saw a golden mare

And by her side the tall comedian;

The foal with eyes all innocent was there …

Blue, he was blue, as well becomes a foal.

Proudly he stood with all benevolence;

Great were his eyes with cleansing of the soul.

 

Colour has a symbolic significance in Neilson’s work; blue is associated with the sky, the mystical far-off world beyond our world. The foal also features in “You and Yellow Air” (1911) from his time at Tyrrell Downs: “I was about at my top then,” he told Devaney years later; “October is a wonderful month out of doors in Australia. It seems hard to write a good lyric without bringing in the idea of God.”

The title of “The Crane Is My Neighbour” (1938) recalls further biblical associations: Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd”; the lawyer’s question to Jesus: “And who is my neighbour?” The bird at the lake is “a whimsical fellow but dim” who “bleats no instruction … / The bird is a noble, he turns to the sky for a theme, / And the ripples are thoughts coming out at the edge of a dream.” Neilson sometimes uses the word dim to signify that which is ancient and mythological. “The bird is both ancient and excellent, sober and wise.” Like the heron rising from Iona’s shores to fly home to Ireland after being cared for by St Columba, the crane calmly “puts out his wings for the blue”. The poem has been set to music for unison choir (2019) by Canadian composer Matthew Emery.

The bird in “The Song and the Bird” (1907–1916) is imbued with deep understanding; his spirit untrammelled by fear, he sings triumphantly above the fray: “Can aught of dull earth sink / Into the heart of him?” Biblical verb forms appear as with a psalm or prayer: “He hath his Heaven got … He knoweth the false and fair …” In 1923, “The Song and the Bird” was set to music by the English composer William Gillies Whittaker as a three-part song.

In 1923, A.G. Stephens prepared an article for the Melbourne Age, and sent a typescript of what he had written to Neilson. It was a characteristically full-blooded communication by “The Three Initialled Terror”:

Some people say it is a disgrace to Victoria, or to Australia, that John Shaw Neilson, the finest poet our small country has begotten—a poetical writer unsurpassed by anyone now writing in English of whom I have knowledge—author of several compositions dwelling perpetually in the loftiest airs of poetry—should be still at past fifty years of age shovelling brown coal across the Victorian landscape … when I heard of him, not so long ago, mixing concrete on a dam, night work … I rioted and blasphemed …

Neilson’s reply was also characteristic. Written from Western Camp, Yallourn, it read:

I got the books [Ballads and Lyrical Poems] … they turned out very nicely. Received also typed letter with boosting of myself … I hope that Melb. folks don’t shed too many tears about me shovelling coal. Coal shovelling here is not as bad as a rule. It is light and the footing is usually dry. I have had much worse jobs … I am in a clearing gang at present.

He thanks Stephens for his “determined effort to make people take notice of me”. He has heard about “one young Elocutionist” reciting something of his “at some Swagger turnout. This is encouraging.”

In 1928, thanks to several people active on his behalf, he was given a post as a messenger and attendant in the offices of the Country Roads Board, set up in the gardens near the Exhibition Building in Melbourne. He stayed in the job for thirteen years, and also received a small literary pension. He died in May 1942 during what was for Australia the darkest season of the Second World War. The mourners attending his funeral at Footscray heard an address from Sir John Latham, Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia from 1935 to 1952, who thought very highly of his poetry.

To conclude my tribute to John Shaw Neilson, I have chosen a poem he wrote from 1925, “For a Sweet Sound”. The birds go by, as they always will, and I dream that they bear to John Shaw Neilson the appreciation and admiration of living Australians.

Pence for his petulant eyelids, and make him his mound;

But he will tremble out over the skyline

For a sweet sound.

 

Peace be upon him, make the good prayer;

But he walks over white wishes

To the blue air.

 

He will go lightly, out into strawberry ground;

Haply he may with red kisses

Hear the sweet sound.

 

He will keep all the sweet colours, lavender, blue;

But he goes seeking the colour

Eyes never knew.

 

Call him not fool—he is feeling for the profound;

He beats with his foot on the skyline

For a sweet sound.

Diana Figgis lives in Sydney. She wrote on the correspondence between John Shaw Neilson and Mary Gilmore in the September 2018 issue.