Poet of the Women’s War

Collected Poems of Lesbia Harford
edited by Oliver Dennis
UWA Publishing, 2014, 135 pages, $29.99

If the Great War were our subject, and poetry the sole lens we employed to look at it, we might remark how, while the war’s evocation for English readers came from their male soldier-poets in the front line, for Australian readers this came from a singular woman who worked on the home front in clothing factories. And while those soldier-poets conjured images of men en masse from which an individual might catch intermittent, piteous light—in Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” for instance—by contrast, the Australian poet caught precisely the absence of men en masse, and a child surrogate to point to the vanished individual.

There’s a little boy who lives next door

With hair like you,—

Pale, pale hair and a rose-white skin

And his eyes are blue.

When I get a chance I peep at him,

Who is so like you,—

Terribly like, my dead, my fair,

For he’s dumb too.

                        (“The Silent Dead”)

Across the spectrum of war poetry, has loss ever been approached so delicately, stated with such finality? In other poems we are made conscious of the change in that en masse, the men gone, replaced by the women in their factory bays where, say, a machinist catches momentary highlight.

I sit at my machine

Hourlong beside me, Vera, aged nineteen,

Babbles her sweet and innocent tale of sex.

                        (“Machinists Talking”)

In compiling this new collection of Lesbia Harford’s poems, Oliver Dennis has done Australian poetry a service. It is thirty years since the excellent and thoroughgoing compilation The Poems of Lesbia Harford was edited by Drusilla Modjeska and Marjorie Pizer. So Dennis’s service consists in a renewal of trust that Harford is one of our poets who should be available to us perennially.

Why do I call Harford a perennial? In both her life and her work, she is remarkable to our literature. Eventually graduating in law not long before her early death, she interrupted these studies during the First World War to work among the machinists of clothing factories and as a domestic servant in well-to-do houses. This was a deliberate identification with working-class rigours and culture. She took lovers from both sexes, campaigned on behalf of the International Workers of the World and anti-conscription causes, suffered frail health, and died in 1927 aged thirty-six, leaving the 200-odd poems collected in this book, most of them unpublished.

These poems, almost all short lyrics, suggest a mind writing memos to itself. That is to say, they have a dailiness. They are interior and fluid in the manner, say, of Emily Dickinson, rather than in the tableau composition of a Judith Wright meditation such as “South Of My Days” or “Bullocky”. I intend no aspersion by this. Harford’s concise, forthright, spur-of-the-moment utterance communicates the very fabric of the living she is at pains to persuade us is most vital. Her art lies in how she communicates the spontaneity of a reaction, and how dailiness partakes of the natural essence of poetry.

Oliver Dennis mentions Harford’s ear for dialogue and her adeptness with the Sapphic “docked line”. Certainly, in her energised bisexuality, her feminism, her good nerve to be utterly direct in statement (indeed in her very Christian name), Harford’s poetry traces its lineage to the ancient poetess of Lesbos. My own ear, I confess, when reading the Sapphics in, say, Hardy, or Pound, hears more metrication than music in the trochee/dactyl grid. That said, Harford’s mostly short lines are conspicuously sinuous and restive in the metres they harness. She has a good ear and an adventurous one. At times I hear an iambic echolalia of Christina Rosetti or Emily Bronte (to whom she dedicates a poem). At times she is twisting the Sapphic trochees and dactyls to her use:

Hé looks ín my héart and the ímage thére

Ís himsélf, himsélf, than himsélf more fáir.

But countervailing these classic building blocks is the modern intelligence and candour in the watch the poet keeps on her reactions to the world. These combine being post-suffragette while reaching back to the womanly self-possession that Sappho’s poems proclaimed for womankind:

For since no male

Has ruled me or has fed,

I think my own thoughts

In my woman’s head.

So I discern a tension in Harford’s poems. A sensibility, still trailing some poeticisms from a former age—“shineth”, “shouldst”, “nay” and “thee”—is trying the more rigorous investigation of feeling that self-conscious modernism brought to the composition of poems. Be it remembered that Lesbia Harford composed her poems during precisely the period T.S. Eliot wrote his early and middle work, for all that she is isolated from the collegiality of those early moderns. In her restive experimentation with line-length and stanza she reminds me of Hardy, in the “sudden-ness” of her address she reminds me of Emily Dickinson, and in her trust to the simplest of words and statements, she resembles her Australian contemporary John Shaw Neilson. She probes her lesbianism, menstruation, class resentments, the abandonment of deity, the alcoholism of a husband. The objects that appear in her poems encompass trams, cranes, silk stockings, a clock tower, an unmade bed, these images working in tension with the lilacs, swans, meadows of an earlier poetic sensibility.

For this reason I’ll make an odd comparison; she resembles A.D. Hope. At first sight the two poets are dissimilar: Harford’s thought, vibrant with Sapphic directness, Hope’s measured in its formal prosody and rationalist values. But both poets work an identical tension, choosing to illumine the strangeness of modernity by casting it deliberately in the light of classical structure, Harford with her Sapphics and nineteenth-century lyric echolalia, Hope with his mindfulness of Dryden and the Augustans. One might look for an equivalent in the visual arts in Dali perhaps, the Spaniard’s classical draftsmanship brought to modern strangeness in theme and objects.

I have one quarrel with this collection. It claims Harford is “one of the two finest female poets so far seen in Australia”, Judith Wright being cited as the other. This is a disservice to the work of other poets, Gwen Harwood and Rosemary Dobson in particular. It is also to perpetuate a preoccupation with stature and league as opposed to the distinctive character of any given poet’s work.

In my view it is character that makes the discussion of poetry interesting. Of course some poets will be immensely more assured in craft, vision, penetration and comprehension than others. But as a literary canon unfolds and accomplishment accrues, there is a point where discriminations of stature yield to the incomparableness between one talent and another. For me, Harford, Harwood, Wright and Dobson all belong to what I call the perennials. Their credentials are distinct each from each while the credibility of their poems is on a par.

So, in Harford I see as I have described above. In Harwood I discern the compelling storyteller and remembrancer, her wit in converting canonical philosophy into poems. In Dobson I identify a quality I have called in another essay her “passionate serenity”, this together with her affectionate impishness. In Wright I find the intent vision, best stated in her own words as the process “from love to Love”, which is to say from attraction to the world to identification with it. In each of these four cases, indeed in any poet where I apply that dignity “perennial”, there are the collected poems in each case, but in addition there is the poetry that exists, as it were, between the poems, that builds the molecular bonding of a character where voice and its substance make a luminous whole.

It is this that Oliver Dennis, and before him Modjeska and Pizer, bring to us in restoring Lesbia Harford from her marginalisation. In this volume we have the evidence of a character and a craftswoman, and all the lines of intersection with which she belongs to the poetry that preceded her and which can intrigue the poetry that came after her.