Collected Poems: Lesbia Harford
Edited and introduced by Oliver Dennis. University of Western Australia Press. $29.99.
Lesbia Harford (1891-1927) is an intriguing figure in Australian poetry and one who has been much resurrected of late, having been substantially forgotten since Nettie Palmer's small collection of her work, The Poems of Lesbia Harford, in 1941. Her novel, The Invaluable Mystery, was published in 1987 to considerable (and deserved) acclaim. As a poet, Harford's work has been championed by, among others, Les Murray - who has written a short Foreword to his new collection edited by Oliver Dennis.
The real problem with Harford is not her interesting life (the bisexuality, the Melbourne University law degree in the same class as Robert Menzies, her membership of the "Wobblies" during World War I, her affair with Marxist Guido Barrachi and so on) but the gap between her best and worst poetry.
Partly due to its sexual unorthodoxy, not much of Harford's work was published in her lifetime. Her poems were confided, like diary entries, to a number of notebooks, now in the Mitchell Library. It is these, as well Harford's previously published poems, that Oliver Dennis has for his "Collected" - which, as he admits, contains "just over half" of the nearly "four hundred poems in manuscript".
While Dennis has plainly "rescued" several successful poems previously unknown to most readers, he has also given us quite a few that would have been better left in the library, as the poet herself would probably have preferred. As Harford once told the anthologist, Percy Searle: " ... I am in no hurry to be read".
Oliver Dennis, who has written a thorough and persuasive "Introduction", identifies the problem at once - without, perhaps, paying it sufficient attention. Harford's work, he says, "looks both forwards and backwards, blending pre-Raphaelite influences and plain speaking with unusual subtlety". Her early work (not really intended for publication) has a school-girlish atmosphere with influences going all the way back through the 19th century to Keats. There is a "poetasting" quality here which recurs every now and then until quite late in her career.
It's not hard to find examples. Take, for instance, the opening stanza of "Oh hall of music, promise fair": "Oh hall of music, promise fair, / No memories yet to thee belong. / No ghostlings hover in thine air / Of nights made sweet with song." Unfortunately, Dennis has given us too much of this kind of thing - and done the object of his enthusiasm no favours in the processes.
On the other hand, there are also quite a few satisfactions to be had here. Since Dennis has arranged Harford's poems chronologically it's more than interesting to see how they reflect her situation in life at various points.For example, when she opts to work in a clothing factory rather than the lawyer's office her degree would (more or less) have entitled her to.
Part of this decision was revolutionary solidarity; part of it sexual attraction to her workmates. Some of it could also have been due to a distaste for the law (where she eventually worked during her last year or two). A sense of Harford's "no-nonsense" later style can be seen in the closing stanzas of her very late poem, "When I am articled": "I must not tell the chap / For whom I work. / He pays the penalty / If I should shirk // And take to writing books / And verse instead / of 'hereinafter,' 'duly,' /'Viz,' 'the said."
Harford is often at her most memorable when her poems have a political edge and move away from the "unrequited love" of her girlhood. She is, however - partly through her affair with Guido Barrachi and her relatively brief marriage to the (sometimes violent) war veteran, Pat Harford - something of an expert on the complexities of love and its failure to live up to youthful expectations. Her late poem, "Pat wasn't Pat last night at all" is short enough to quote in full - and very positive: "Pat wasn't Pat last night at all / He was the rain, - / The Spring, - / Young Dionysus, white and warm, - / Lilac and everything."
More typical, however, is "I'm like all lovers, wanting love to be". The poem has an argument worthy of John Donne and is a strongly felt plea for realism in the husband/wife relationship rather the mere fulfilment of societal stereotypes. Its last six lines are Lesbia Harford at her best - and how she deserves to be remembered: "And you loved me for loving much beside / But now you want a woman for your bride. // Oh, make no woman of me, you who can, / Or I will make a husband of a man. //
By my unwomanly love that sets you free / Love all myself, but least the woman in me."
