[Editor: This article about John Shaw Neilson was published in The Age (Melbourne, Vic.), 20 February 1937.]
John Shaw Neilson
By E.T.
On Monday next (22nd Feb.) John Shaw Neilson will be sixty-five, an attainment of years commonly acknowledged to be within the portals of what is called old age. True poet that he is, years cannot touch the spirit of this man. Only a sorrow that the frailties of the flesh encroach even upon the most dear, gives the fact of his age any importance. John Shaw Neilson’s sight is failing. The words of that sentence in juxtaposition to his name have a certain sadness, when it is considered how utterly unfailing is his inward vision.
This thought for his birthday does not arise from a wish to make a biographical study of a great Australian. That has already been done from hearts loving and deeply appreciative; by those who have actually known and spoken with him. This springs from love and loyalty as deep, from coming close to him throughh his poetry — from searching his pictured face. It is a face to which rare words could apply and do; but above all, it is a face of purity.
Purity is the essence of his poetry. It is a word worth pondering, so significant and all-embracing is it. He, the bush-worker, accustomed from boyhood to heavy boots, accustomed to toil apparently far removed from beauty, yet found beauty, made it and sang it. Without restraint or shackles of any kind, it is poetry so chaste that it could only have been conceived in spheres of the loftiest detachment. For A Little Girl’s Birthday begins:—
Is there a beauty over pain,
Is there of music for a song,
Gentle as sunlight on the rain,
Gentle with crying all day long?
There is no doubt that this had its being in utmost tenderness. It is unearthly, to be felt and cherished — not discussed.
Shades of subtlety pervade his collected poems, but never is the subtlety calculated. It comes from a natural flowing out of the spirit and is sincere in form to the feeling from which it sprang. In The Child Being There, are these words:—
And she will say at the midnight — her heart lying bare —
Surely I have part of heaven? — my child being there.
The poem is one of his loveliest, revealing a perception and divine pity, which proves over again the truth that in understanding and translating into language a great emotion, the poet mind knows no sex.
The men and women among whom he spent many years of his life, have their memorial in some of his finest work. In living the same outward life as they, he did not need to strive to comprehend their ways. Just as the sun shone and the seasons over and over made their cycle, these people were of his own and helped him to shape his poetry.
He speaks of his riches in The Poor, Poor Country:—
My wealth it was the glow that lives for ever in the young,
’Twas on the brown water, in the green leaves it hung,* * * * * * * * * *
Down in that poor country, no pauper was I.
No mystery is there. The sun shines on it with no cloud in sight; and of a glad heart came To a Blue Flower. But how different his mood in Julie Callaway:—
I sometimes fancy Julie hears
The mid-day murmuring of the bees,
And knows our footsteps every way,
And this sweet world to her denied.
Is there here the mystic touch? The poem tells a simple story, but like much else, in its simplicity it struck from the heart of Neilson something immortal.
His compassion is boundless. Who, but a poet inspired of gentlest compassion, could have given us Maggie Tulliver?
Though the miracle of life as it affected men and women drew so much beauty from him, some of his most beautiful poetry is called forth by creatures not human. There is in At a Lowan’s Nest a dignity and loveliness that is not excelled in anything he had written. In it he has uttered his recognition of a force unexplainable.
It is well that in the gathering of his poems into one volume, all the rest lie between Heart of Spring and The Gentle Water Bird, which was written for Mary Gilmore. Each, though so different, has that quality which in a varying degree lives in all his poetry, and which wakes in the one who reads such humility.
Source:
The Age (Melbourne, Vic.), 20 February 1937, page 6
[Editor: Added a full stop after “inward vision”. Added a comma after “one of his loveliest”. Changed “Is there beauty over pain” to “Is there a beauty over pain”, as per the original text of “For a Little Girl’s Birthday” in Ballad and Lyrical Poems (1932) and Collected Poems of John Shaw Neilson (1934).]
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