Unwilling Pilgrim

This poetry is essentially honest, perhaps of all gifts the most necessary to a growing poet. There are so many pressures, internal and external, pressing equally on the girl at training-college, the boy at varsity, the housewife-poet who cares what the neighbours say and the Listener does not print, the old stager condemned to the whisky mines: pressure to choose for oneself another’s good, to accept social anaesthesia for individual pain, to fill in the well when water fails instead of digging deeper. So many succumb, and are inevitably silenced, that one looks first, in a new first book, not for the graces of poetry (wealth of imagery, stanza control, assonantal harmony) but for the grit ofpage 271 personal experience mastered and held to, the exceptional honesty which requires exceptional moral courage and which alone can sustain growth. So much for the sermon. Paul Henderson’s poems seem to me marked out by their honesty; they also possess a structural delicacy which can adequately reflect the delicate and fluctuating insights of this poet:

If there were no lack I would find
All answers in the dispassionate mind;
But this need, hunger drives, and always
I stand betrayed in my own senses.
Betrayed? Dear love, if this were illusion
Then all must fall, and the sweet tension

Of my life alter.

I must confess a bewilderment, as reader and reviewer, on first reading the love poems in this volume. The dilemma of flesh and spirit which they conceived and stated seemed curiously remote; I could not imagine it my own. Another poem, ‘The Young Legend’, presented the same difficulty. Then the scales fell from my eyes with the realisation that Paul Henderson is a woman poet writing under a pseudonym; and a world of vigorous, actual knowledge was exposed to me.

A living poem, being child of the flesh and spirit, rests on a subtle balance of intellectual and instinctual forces. The necessary identification of the reader with the poet requires him to sustain, for the moment, a parallel balance. Hence a male critic is handicapped in dealing with the work of a woman poet by his masculine pattern of instinctual response; hence, if obtuse, may regard a vigorous and well-balanced poem as a mere formal exercise. (I believe that some such confusion has often lain behind the comment of male critics on the work of Katherine Mansfield.) The resultant deprecation of the work of women writers has in the past led them to take up extreme positions – either a defensive feminism, with crude emphasis on ‘female sensitivity’, or a masking of difference, equally defensive, with the assertion that the intellectual and instinctual processes of a woman’s mind are identical with those of a man. It is very natural that a woman poet, bringing out her first volume, should choose a masculine pseudonym.

Like Ursula Bethell, Mary Stanley, and in a lesser measure, Ruth Dallas, Paul Henderson has produced durable poetry from areas of experience mainly inaccessible or unrewarding to the male poet. The symbol of the inhabited temenos in ‘The Island’, and in several poems of house and garden, is explored with unsentimental delicacy and vigour. In ‘Rock Garden she employs flower names (as Ursula Bethell did) to evoke a mystical experience:

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In time the roots spread, bring bright bloom on the rock-face,
And O what a fall of light, of locked loveliness;
Grey-leaved arctotis, fuchsia, candytuft; and here place
Arabis and alyssum, snow-drifting.

Her most characteristic poetry, however – as in ‘After Flood’, ‘New Year Bonfire’, ‘The Ghost Ships’ – has scope and energy far beyond the accustomed boundaries. The packed long line, the sharp visual imagery, even the occasional rawness, links her work with the best of Robin Hyde. In such poems, where human endeavour and habitation contrast and mingle with the terrible, regenerative wilderness, one feels that she has already travelled far, escaping the Scylla of abstract metaphysics and the Charybdis of ‘female sensitivity’. The ‘New Journey’ which she celebrates in the last poem in the book has been toward greater density of statement and a fuller awareness of the ambiguity of instinct:

Till, tamer of lion lands and siren seas
He walks towards the distant snows . . .
Let him be slow to rise. No, let him leap
Upon the world, enfold his vixen loves
With all the ancient guile they turn upon
The pulsing of his veins.

Plainly a real poet is among us. One hopes that her impulse will not be curbed or sterilised by the pressures from within and without, towards stale conformity, with which we each are obliged to contend.

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