Kenneth Slessor Selected Poems

Introduction

In September 1944, while Kenneth Slessor was working as Australia’s Official War Correspondent, Angus and Robertson published a selection of his work under the title One Hundred Poems. In 1957 Slessor added three poems and the book was republished under the simple title Poems. Although he lived until 1971 Slessor, who was rigorously self-critical, never published another new poem. One hundred and three poems may seem a modest output on which to base an important literary reputation but Slessor’s work has been noticed by every important Australian poet since then, and Poems has never been out of print.

Slessor’s poetry is important not only for the quality of the writing, which continues to speak to readers of eternal human concerns, but also because it is pivotal in Australia’s literary history. More than any other writer, Slessor’s work turned Australian literature towards the modern. The earliest poem written here is ‘Marco Polo’, composed in October 1920, when Slessor was just nineteen years old. It derives, as the poem’s first word indicates, not from Australian life but from Slessor’s reading, and is lit by the flare of his imagination:

… past those plaster dragon-heads,

Those frescoes cut with curious flowers,

In verdigris and lilac-reds

Old tiles gleamed on the crusted towers,

While bridges cleft of serpent-stone

Bowed by their side, like branches blown

From some high granite Tree of Life

Whose roots were coiled round Kublai’s throne.

Nothing like this had been written in Australia before. The gleaming density of the stanza’s images, hard cut like the tiles and towers it presents, a syntax as intricate as Kublai’s carvings, extensive alliteration and attention to sound patterning and shifting rhythm all point to a poetry of fascination and precision, designed to evoke not just describe. It is a long way away from the brumby-dusted tracks of Lawson and Paterson, the formal, intellectual poetry of Christopher Brennan or the drifting Celtic twilight of Victor Daley which constituted the strength of Australian poetry at the time. Even this early poem points to Slessor’s lifelong concern with a ‘quality of magic’¹ in poetic language, derived from a fierce attention to detail and an aesthetic of the concrete image. Language is the most abstract medium available to all the arts, a system of shapes on the page which aims to label sense-filled experience or ideas and concepts which proceed from experience. Through images Slessor tries to evoke the sensory qualities of experience and to give concepts a flesh-and-blood, lived-with ‘feel’. How far Slessor could take this is shown in ‘Five Bells’, one of Slessor’s last poems. Unquestionably one of the greatest, and perhaps the greatest, of all Australian poems, ‘Five Bells’ is a meditation on the inner and the external experiences of time, and is simultaneously an elegy for his friend Joe Lynch, who drowned in Sydney Harbour. In going over Joe’s drowning, which had occurred eight years before Slessor began the poem, Slessor relives it, and he uses images to evoke the barely imaginable moment of death:

I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,

The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,

And the short agony, the longer dream,

The Nothing that was neither long nor short;

But I was bound, and could not go that way,

But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.

This is the most powerful evocation of death I know of in the English language, a compression and stretching of words to depict the inexplicable. The very pressure of the writing suggests the extent of Slessor’s empathy with Lynch, but enormous poignancy is generated by the simple statements that declare an inability to identify fully with his dead friend. ‘Bound’ in life, Slessor could not go with him. These few lines are sufficient to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Slessor’s poetry.

‘Marco Polo’ and ‘Five Bells’ convey intensity of different kinds, but a fuller sense of Slessor’s flexibility is revealed by considering the colloquial humour of ‘A Bushranger’, the indulgent languor of ‘Country Towns’, the melodrama of ‘Wild Grapes’, or the jokey sexuality of ‘Lesbia’s Daughter’. Slessor was also the author of some stinging satires, including section viii, of ‘The Old Play’, ‘Crustacean Rejoinder’ and ‘An Inscription for Dog River’. Most brilliant of all the satires is ‘Vesper-Song of the Reverend Samuel Marsden’, which portrays the powerful minister and political figure of the early Sydney colony as a sanctimonious sadist:

Lord, I have sung with ceaseless lips

A tinker’s litany of whips,

…

My stripes of jewelled blood repeat

A scarlet Grace for holy meat.

Given its subject the ‘Vesper-Song’ is a distinctively Australian poem, as are ‘Five Bells’ with its portrayal of Sydney Harbour, ‘William Street’, ‘A Bushranger’, ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’ and many other works by Slessor. Yet Slessor’s poetry first gained prominence through his association with Jack and Norman Lindsay, whose philosophy was against nationalism of any sort. Slessor met the famous artist, Norman, and his bohemian, literary son Jack in the early 1920s. At the time Slessor had begun an outstanding career in journalism, writing for the Sydney Sun a poetic prose that had never before been seen in Australian newspapers and has never been seen since. The Lindsays disdained Australia’s bush tradition as well as the Europe which had produced The Great War. Slessor joined with them in editing and publishing the magazine Vision, which through just four issues in 1923–24 passed judgement on many of the major figures in Western culture, consigning artists such as Dante, Raphael, Shelley, Shaw and Picasso into oblivion, while praising Rubens, Keats, Beethoven and Nietzsche. These judgements were largely the work of Jack Lindsay, and although silly they do convey one important point. Australian poetic tradition until then might be seen to have had a Colonial phase followed by a Nationalist phase. Culturally, people in a new country, as Australia was for white people from 1788 onwards, can make one of two choices: they can look back to the old country or they can look forward to the new. In Australia, they first produced a Colonial phase, in which poets saw Australia as William Charles Wentworth described it in his poem ‘Australasia’: ‘a new Britannia in another world’. Colonial poets celebrated similarities between Australia and Britain. The second choice produced a Nationalist phase, in which poets celebrated whatever was different from Britain—the animals, the bush, the man from Snowy River. Slessor’s distinctively Australian poems show his command of a sophisticated nationalism. Other poems show, as do the polemical judgements of Vision, a sense that the European heritage can belong to Australian artists without their being overawed by it; Slessor and the Lindsays did not display a cultural cringe.

The use Slessor made of that heritage introduced a new level of sophistication and modernity into Australian poetry. Slessor’s family background, especially on his father’s side, helped in this regard. Slessor’s family name was actually ‘Schloesser’, until his father changed it when World War I broke out in 1914. Kenneth was thirteen at the time, and was descended from a notable line of German musicians. His father had been born in England and had undertaken university studies in Liège, Belgium; his children had to speak French at breakfast or else they weren’t allowed to eat. Kenneth Slessor’s assimilation of Europe is apparent in his sophisticated poetic techniques and also, more obviously, in the subject matter of peoms such as ‘Nuremberg’, which deals with Albrecht Düer, ‘Heine in Paris’, which presents the last hours of the German poet Heinrich Heine, and ‘La Dame du Palais de la Reine’. European sophistication meant that Slessor in peoms like ‘Crow Country’, ‘Talbingo’ and ‘South Country’ could treat Australian landscape in ways that were unimaginable before he wrote, and paved the way for novels such as Patrick White’s Voss and Randolph Stow’s To the Islands. ‘After the whey-faced anonymity/Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush’ you reach the farms of the south country ‘As if the argument of trees were done’. This is not only brilliantly descriptive writing, it is an observation of the landscape with more thought than it had been given before. Slessor presents the landscape not as if it were simply there, but with an awareness that it is only there meaningfully in being perceived. A landscape of ‘whey-faced anonymity’ is clearly a landscape as interpreted by an individual mind. What is presented is an interaction between landscape and mind, between outer reality and inner reality, so that the poem is as much about the mind’s hesitations and fears as it is about the country south of Sydney.

‘Heine in Paris’ presents a dying Heine, and death is a strong presence in Slessor’s work. Death is there from early work to late; it hovers around the early poem ‘Mangroves’, is the allegorical subject in ‘The Night-Ride’ and ‘Next Turn’, and