This past Saturday, 8 February, marked the centenary of the birth of Francis Webb, one of Australia’s major poets. A devout Catholic, Webb’s poetry is infused with a mystical, redemptive Catholicism, whose transcendent spirit might find a precursor in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Webb struggled for much of his life with mental illness, and today is recognized as the first Australian poet to address such issues in their poetry. One of his most accomplished poems, “Ward 2”, set in Parramatta Psychiatric Hospital, opens: “Tight scrimmage of blankets in the dark; / Nerve-fluxions, flints coupling for the spark; / Today’s guilt and tomorrow’s bent; / Passion and peace trussed together, impotent”. The eight-part poem is a major achievement, I urge you to seek it out in full.
Toby Davidson, the editor of Webb’s Collected Poems (UWA Publishing, 2011), has written an illuminating essay celebrating Webb's centenary for The Australian Book Review, which offers a valuable introduction to Webb's biography and poetry (you can find it here). Davidson, who has written superbly about the tradition of Christian Mysticism in Australian poetry, argues in the essay that Webb’s asylum poems “‘On First Hearing a Cuckoo” (1952) and “A Death at Winson Green” (1955), “represent a quantum leap in how mental health was represented in Australian poetry.”
Admirers of Webb’s poetry stretch from Judith Wright to Bruce Beaver, Gwen Harwood to Robert Adamson. Les Murray, writing Webb’s obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, called him ‘the gold standard by which complex poetic language has been judged.” Adamson, in a lecture given as Chair of Australian Poetry at the University of Technology Sydney, urged his listeners "not forget how deep a grasp of poetry Webb had, his intellectual agility as a technician, his deep knowledge and experience as a poet.”
I have chosen to share Webb’s poem “Clouds” as it is, I think, as good a representation as any of the poet’s “intellectual agility as a technician.” The final two stanzas in particular display Webb’s rhetorical powers most fully—a cadence that swells with the force of his imagery, reminiscent of early—that is to say, peak—Auden.
Clouds
1. Inland
The rich surplus of consciousness rots at the wharves.
That one big bird will not preen his shallow shoulder
Nor peer at his ghost in water – there is none.
For the stooping gaffer daylight only serves
To bear in his muggy dungarees the moulder
Of mare's-tail (or teacake) and that old boiled lolly the sun.
All assignations of brooding grain with earth,
All childhood, manhood among diehard trees
As litter of string, paper, and leather are wound
In the hot palms of the wind, sent thrumming forth
To whirl above shoaling plains and memories
And drum you, tissue of waters, out of mind.
2. The Town
The entrance to the Hall
Is two splayed marble calves
Propping a lap of stone.
Plumb in the centre of all
Itinerant hatreds, loves,
Is this mentor, but all alone.
Woolworths and Lyonses lean
All askew at twelve
(Time for a beer or tea)
And watch the flittering scene
Of scamper and gabble, delve
Into known asymmetry
For their children to buy and buy
Colours and tinny stars;
They are going too fast it seems,
No one looks at the sky
With all its department stores
Auctioning thuds and gleams
And greasy meccano cloud,
Oaths rattle in heaven,
Big lists clear away:
No one has heard a word,
No signals, omens even
In the town this day,
3. Airliner
I am become a shell of delicate alleys
Stored with the bruit of the motors, resolute thunders
And unflagging dance of the nerves.
Beneath me the sad giant frescoes of the clouds:
Towerings and defiles through intense grey valleys,
Huge faces of kings, queens, castles — travelling cinders,
And monuments, and shrouds.
A fortress crammed with engines of warfare swerves
As we bank into it, and all the giant sad past
Clutches at me swimming through it: here
Is faith crumbling – here the engines of war
In sleek word and sad fresco of print,
Landscapes broken apart; and here at last
Is home all undulant, banners hanging drear
Or collapsing into chaos, burnt.
And now we are through, and now a barbarous shore
Grimaces in welcome, showing all its teeth
And now the elder sea all wrinkled with love
Sways tipsily up to us, and now the swing
Of the bridge; houses, islands, and many blue bushlands come.
Confine me in Pinchgut, bury me beneath
The bones of the old lag, analyse me above
The city lest I drunkenly sing
of wattles, wars, childhoods, being at last home.