Past and Present WorldsOn Rosemary Dobson's Untold Lives & Later Poems

Throughout a long, distinguished poetic career, Rosemary Dobson’s capacity for protective self-scrutiny has always been balanced by aspirations to self-transcendence. Anchored in a sense of the present’s dependence on the past, her best work has been characterised by exemplary clarity, restraint and tact. Predominantly elegiac in tone, mood shifts have rarely jolted her meditative, unpressured pace. Qualities I once described in a 1985 essay on her work as ‘reclusive grace’, distinctly unmodern in her considerate refusal to invade, ‘wanting the light and sorry for the dark.’

In 1984, forty years after the publication of her first book, Rosemary Dobson brought out The Three Fates which contained surprising poems intimating the play of new possibilities: a less objectified engagement with the world, movement away from formal constrictions, and a willingness, albeit hesitant, to expose the lyric ‘I’ to the absence of closure. At the time I thought she had extended her range as far as she was ever likely to. Untold Lives, emerging in this her eightieth year, proves me wrong. The grace remains unchanged but awareness of its human context has broadened and deepened.

Divided into three sections, the book opens with ‘Untold Lives’, a sequence originally published under that title in 1992 commemorating ‘unnamed people’ known to the poet; ‘untold’ in the sense of heroism unsung; ‘untold’ as in numberless, often implying regret as to what should or should not have been ‘told’ by the narrator in life as in art. Even understood as a pun on the tolling of a funeral knell, the poems’ complex potentialities are belied by their seemingly artless structural simplicity.

An undercurrent of lament acknowledging the cost of human loss and, more generally, time’s sabotage of personal and collective endeavour, breathes life into a dramatis personae drawn from the almost-vanished world of Anglo-Australia some of us remember growing up in and for which some retain residual nostalgia. The empathic affection informing these vignettes for the voiceless, the inherent indebtedness of the venture itself, reminded me of Edgar Lee Masters’ ghostly re-creation of an innocent homogenous community doomed to extinction in his 1915 Spoon River Anthology. So, too, did the telling selection and juxtaposition of detail bring Lowell’s Life Studies to mind without his chilly detachment.

The survival strengths and vulnerabilities of women, often minimised or disregarded in the past, are here allowed memory’s unironic florescence. Their destinies, often hazy and unfocused in life as wives, mothers, aunts, and sisters given to painful expiation of impulses towards self-realisation, are contrasted with those of men of the Victorian paterfamilias stamp. Such reliance on status and social importance may have bolstered clear personal definition but it has successfully and tragically impeded and crippled the growth of emotional connective tissue. The waste, pathos, and sometime brutality in relationships between the unequally-equipped emerge in ‘The Major-General’, for example, who ‘kept the stoic phase/ Ready like a revolver in his drawer’ and ‘beat the mischief from his younger son’ as his distressed wife stands speechlessly by. Surveying his ‘well-kept garden’ every morning, he lays a cut flower for her on the breakfast table ‘like a threat’, jamming another in his button-hole to meet another day.

Frail masculine vanity conjures a wry satirical response in other portraits like that of the becomingly-gowned academic whose shallow concern for students is masked by an aura of ecclesiastical piety. In similar vein, an historian’s five decorous daughters represent the arrested development consequent on parental tyranny, the dreadful shrinkage of their potential reduced to ‘sewing small objects for the church bazaar.’ In ‘Chekhov’s Sister’, Dobson speaks on behalf of ‘all those women and young girls/ Who gave or give their loyalty and love/ To men of genius’, mourning the price of female submission more directly and dynamically than her earlier reticence has prepared us to expect.

Female vanity is as sharply observed but redeemed by more forgiving overtones. As in the sketch of once-charming, theatrical Kitty whose soul, ‘like thinnest chiffon’ of the scarves with which she once hid the ‘tautened lives about her throat’, floats free along with her laughter in an image of poignant, death-defying beauty, escaping the nemesis of a sidelined daughter ominously ‘waiting in the wings.’

The true heart of the matter is revealed in poems touching on Rosemary Dobson’s own family that reach beyond categories and stereotypes of gender and class to an innocent wartime world that left her mother early widowed to rear two gifted daughters. During Word War II, her uncle (‘Too young for one war, too old for another’) dies on stretcher duty in New Guinea, leaving letters from campaigns in Egypt and Crete recounting his eager untutored exposure to relics of classical antiquity. As potent a lure as Persephone’s pomegranate seeds, the flower-seeds from Crete a young man once stuffed into his kitbag ensured, if not his return, at least his niece’s future journey and allegiance to her uncle’s enchanted underworld, to be later celebrated in many fine poems about ancient Greek civilisation.

We all carry the seeds of our parents’ hopes and unfulfilled longings but their germination takes time. The seven year-old girl reading her first obediently-rhymed poem aloud to the rhythm of her mother pegging clothes on a line grows in the strength of her mother’s encouragement and pride. ‘The rhymes went “click” as rhymes, I knew, should go’, a discipline – that ‘I knew’ is perfectly judged – eventually to yield the adult poet’s liberation to hang free like the clothes, enabling fruition in late age of that child’s vision of poetry, ‘Blowing bright coloured, all about the world.’ As fresh and immediate as the past and present worlds with which she now enriches us.

Poems in the middle section, ‘The News and Weather’, touch on present survival in an incorrigible world that ‘will not be changed’, a world where precious inner resources are modestly marshalled to meet what must be met. The consolations of art – paintings and poems that ‘ring their own radiance round the everyday’ (‘The Green Years’) – absorbed long ago by an idealistic young girl, now recur less consolingly in full knowledge of the price exacted by creation. In ‘The Artist’, the demon-haunted painter Arthur Boyd lectures, managing to speak ‘with calm and courtesy’ despite the nightmare slides propelled on the screen by his tormented imagination. Out in the street, amid the man-made horrors of a destructive metropolis, the great man is observed ‘trembling at the pavement’s edge’.

Small wonder that the poet turns for relief and nurture in two engaging acts of homage to George Herbert and his contemporary, Isaac Walton (who wrote the life of Herbert without ever meeting him), pacific filters to a transcendence that never abandons the earth and its ‘stock of natural delights.’ By example, however, they offer a comforting austerity willingly adopted in the following beautiful stanzas, humbling in their charged economy:

I move to bareness
A white-washed room

With a window telling
Of starlight, darkness
And pre-dawn pallor

And a white holland blind
To draw half down on
The full blaze of sunlight.

The book concludes with three very moving poems addressed to the poet’s recently deceased husband, Alec Bolton, Printer, with whom she shared a ‘calm content’ and from whom she received the gentle reinforcement of a stoicism already possessed: ‘Forgive, learn from the past. Press on.’ Fortunately for us, she has done just that in a collection offering breathing space amid meaningless clamour, profundity, enlightenment, and a courageous reminder of the nearly-forgotten emotional resilience, and openness to change, of older age.