The Spike: or, Victoria University College Review, June 1923
"Rosemary, That's for Remembrance."
"Rosemary, That's for Remembrance."
Miss Marjory Nicholls, in "Gathered Leaves," gives us the fruits of experience. Her verses of a decade ago were restless, pessimistic and joyous by turns. Her new volume reveals a mind which has ranged far in the past ten years, and has brought back to our shores poetry intimate and saddened a little, but filled with resignation and quietude. The old restless days have gone for ever, the heart which held the vagrant spirit of Villon and savoured the delicacy of the Pleiades has passed with ships which trod many waters and has come home.
It cannot be said that Miss Nicholl's new volume reveals any marked increase in her technical ability, she writes as she always did, simply, directly, not seeking the ornate or resounding word, but allowing her feelings full play. For sheer simplicity one has to go to W. H. Davies or to de la Mare to find anyone to compare her with. But she is poles asunder from those poets in her view of life. Being a woman, Miss Nicholls naturally sees things in the light of her heart. It is her own personality that is reflected for her in the world's looking-glass, her own deep content that she reads into the Valley of Wainui or the thresh of rain in the roof, her own pain that she puts into a talk with a flower. Romance still hovers in the air for her as it did in the days when she wrote the most romantic of all her poems, "Red Hibiscus"; dawn and its ministering winds, rain and sun still make their magic for her. But there is turning away from her first love of nature to a pre-occupation with the things of the mind. All the world now speaks to her with the voice of her thought, and in this hook, which contains poems written as early as 1912, we can see just how far she has travelled. The old ability to give a vivid little vignette is with her still, as in the Colombo sketch:—
From my rickshaw I looked down
At a woman passing by;
With her was her baby brown.
Plump and shiny, bright of eye.
Rusty red her sari was;
He was walking naked quite;
Red hibiscus in his hand,
Vivid, impudently bright.
There is, too, the tendency to pen epigrammatic magazine trifles which marked Miss Nicholls's earlier years, and some very excellent translations from the French poets, who have always engaged her affections, and from whom she has probably learnt much in clarity of thought. But it is in the later poems that we find her at her delicate best. The mood half realised, the vision of a moment are caught in a net of words in "Silver Birches," "The Wandering Wind," and "I Scarce Believed"; while in "Two Widows" and Ms kindred poems she has attained perfection of utterance.
Why did he voice for me, speaking of another.
Thoughts I hide deep in my heart?
And I could but nod assent, and scarcely seem to heed him
Lest tears, distressing him, should start.
Tears are sister to those thoughts, and they grow together:
All the children that I have, they.
Love was father to them—Memory friend to them.
And they dwell with me alway.
Why did he say to me, speaking of another,
"Her child is life to her? . . . I am not a mother.
Miss Nicholls has not genius, but she is a poetess delicate and sensitive. Her work is now at maturity, and she has gained full control of her medium of expression. Her next book should be a real contribution to our literature.