SOURCE: Mitchell, Adrian. “Writing up a Storm: Natural Strife and Charles Harpur.” Southerly 53, no. 2 (1993): 90-113.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1992, Mitchell considers the reasons and methods for reading Australian colonial poetry and focuses on Harpur's efforts to combine new experiences and expressions of thought with a sense of the familiar.]

Australian colonial poetry is considered, if it is considered at all, more with sorrow than delight. The colonial writer lived with the inevitability of failure, one recent commentator tells us, leaning over the counter of the post-colonial theory store.¹ Others concede that the poetry is not all that great, though acknowledging obliquely that some of the poets, and Charles Harpur not least, did have a hankering after greatness. Somewhere behind that is a principle of diminishing returns: the more the hankering, the more unlikely the greatness. For one reason or another, the Colonial poets no longer have the power to capture the imagination; perhaps, it is admitted, they never did, or rarely.

Yet they do have something to offer, as we occasionally find. Here and there a remarkable image, a set of wonderful lines, even whole poems that lift themselves above the disappointing mire. Those lines get read attentively, and inspected carefully by at least a few of the literary historians, and suggestions are made about why those bits and pieces are impressive. But there is less and less of this as the years and anthologies wheel by; the colonial poets receive less and less space in the total representation of Australian writing. Perhaps that is inevitable: if the anthologies aren't going to get any bigger then necessarily the apportionment of early material will shrink.

It occurs to me that something less mechanical is at work, however: that the colonial poets are disappearing not because we have forgotten about them, but because we have forgotten how to read them. This is not just a matter of taste and judgement, of objections that the poetry is too prone to eighteenth-century English poetic diction for example, and therefore has nothing to contribute to a post-Romantic and insistently, exclusively Australian literary tradition. Yes, it is true that much of the verse is lame, or ingenuous, or bathetic, or “artificial”. But that is largely beside the point, for I have no doubt that it would be possible to demonstrate the same sort of objections in modern Australian poetry. The question of distinctive Australianness is likewise unreasonably distorted in discussions about our literary origins and literary connections. Indeed, although it is often enough proposed that there is a rather interesting correspondence between development in Australian poetry and in Australian painting, I find an extraordinary disagreement in just this particular—that whereas art historians can quite comfortably indicate the obligations that experimental young avant-garde painters of the modernist movement—Nolan, Tucker, Boyd, Drysdale—had to Europe, to suggest that Australian poets actually imitated anything European is enough to turn the nationalist literary historian apoplectic. No one suggests that Nolan and Boyd and co. are less than Australian, and we have all delighted in their success in directing world attention to Australian painting. But for poets to learn anything from anywhere else is a cultural scandal, it seems. The extraordinary thing is that this objection in relation to literature is no new thing. It was at large in the middle of the colonial era, in the nationalist nineties, and in various manifestoes through the first part of this century; it was very much an issue in the sixties, and it is back again, if it ever went away, in the current passion for critical theorising, with its ideological inner-spring mattress.

The question that needs to be put is not, I suggest, why read colonial poetry, but how do we read colonial poetry? The “why” really presumes the other, and notions of taste and judgement have to be held in abeyance until we can recognize what it is that we are reading. To read colonial poetry we need to retrieve a forgotten language; and we need to retrieve a context, a context of ideas, as well as a literary context. And when that is learned, we are in a position to understand something else about colonial poetry, that it isn't absolutely independent, and has no aspiration to be absolutely original, just as contemporary writing also benefits from imitating developments and experiments from elsewhere. It is the process of adaptation that is interesting and results in a distinctive Australian statement. This question of originality and imitation was addressed by Professor Kramer in an article that I have been keeping my eye on, “Imitation and Originality in Australian Colonial Poetry: The Case of Charles Harpur”; and in these remarks this evening I am attempting no more than a footnote to her exemplary discussion; taking up a case from her case, like a matching set of travelware perhaps.

The general problems I am raising here, about the inability to read, about a forgotten language and a forgotten context, are not confined to Australian circumstances. Much as we know we are meant to admire Shelley, for example, we find it difficult to focus on concepts like ideality—however important that may have been for him, however much a key to his poetic thought, we are impatient with it. The word is a furry soapbubble at best; it doesn't know whether it is froth or bubble, whether to rise or fall, and its function is just to blow away. Similarly we make no attempt to see what is intended by the language of eighteenth-century poetry:

O vale of bliss! O softly-swelling hills!
On which the Power of Cultivation lies,
And joys to see the wonders of his toil.

wrote James Thomson in Summer (ll. 1435-7). O for goodness' sake, modern readers think, if we get that far. It means nothing to us, it is too vague and generalized. It comes as something of a surprise then, to read (probably) Oliver Goldsmith in The British Magazine:

We cannot conceive a more beautiful image than that of the Genius of Agriculture, distinguished by the implements of his art, imbrowned with labour, glowing with health, crowned with a garland of foliage, flowers, and fruit, lying stretched at his ease on the brow of a gently swelling hill, and contemplating with pleasure the happy effects of his own industry.

On this comment Donald Davie has rightly remarked that the writer “probably contributes nothing that was not in Thomson's intention. For Thomson could count on finding in his readers a ready allegorical imagination, such as seems lost to us today. The loss is certainly ours”.² And it is true—we don't read with Goldsmith's appreciation. Yet it ought not to be quite foreign to us.

Something of that allegorical imagination is required for Keats' “Ode to Autumn”, for example, likewise for Charles Harpur's “A Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest”: “Over hills and over plains / Quiet, vast and slumbrous, reigns,” he writes; or

Tired Summer, in her forest bower,
Turning with the noontide hour,
Heaves a slumbrous breath, ere she
Once more slumbers peacefully.

Language, idiom, habits of mind, these are just a little of what we need to retrieve if we are to revive interest in and acquaintance with colonial poetry; just as we need to identify other signals, such as reference and allusions, a much more vexed question. Henry Kendall felt the need to address this particular issue in his “Prefatory Sonnets” to Leaves from Australian Forests (1869); it was clearly something that needed to be said in advance of his own poetic practice, that on the one hand his ambition was to write directly to, and from, the experience itself of Australian forests; and on the other that what he wrote was inevitably coloured by his reading of other poetry.

I

I purposed once to take my pen and write
          Not songs like some tormented and awry
          With Passion, but a cunning harmony
Of words and music caught from glen and height,
          And lucid colours born of woodland light,
And shining places where the sea-streams lie;
But this was when the heat of youth glowed white,
          And since I've put the faded purpose by.
I have no faultless fruits to offer you
          Who read this book; but certain syllables
          Herein are borrowed from unfooted dells,
And secret hollows dear to noontide dew;
And these at least, though far between and few,
          May catch the sense like subtle forest spells.

II

So take these kindly, even though there be
          Some notes that unto other lyres belong:
          Stray echoes from the elder sons of Song;
And think how from its neighbouring, native sea
The pensive shell doth borrow melody.
          I would not do the lordly masters wrong,
          By filching fair words from the shining throng
Whose music haunts me, as the wind a tree!
          Lo, when a stranger, in soft glooms
Shot through with sunset, treads the cedar dells,
And hears the breezy ring of elfin bells
          Far down by where the white-haired cataract booms,
He, faint with sweetness caught from forest smells,
          Bears thence, unwitting, plunder of perfumes.

In that heady, swirling mix, one of the tinkling notes is surely Keatsian; but who can be sure? The point is not so much where it comes from as what Kendall makes of it, and from it. Something has come from somewhere: the poetry is a combination of imitation and originality, and imitation does not imply imaginative inadequacy, and colonial dependence. Rather it indicates how art always is. You could argue that were any poem, any painting absolutely original, we possibly could not understand it.

While Kendall is the occasion of the Herbert Blaiklock lecture series, he is not the subject of this particular lecture. It is Charles Harpur we attend to this evening; Harpur, Kendall's elected mentor and esteemed correspondent. And when Harpur died, it was Kendall who defended his literary reputation. Here is a passage from Kendall that not only argues for Harpur as a poet, but also presents Kendall's credentials as a perceptive and responsive critic. It comes from an article Kendall published in the Freeman's Journal, 9 December 1871, the second in a series of “Notes Upon Men and Books”; and in it we see again Kendall asserting on the one hand local responsiveness, and on the other negotiating a complaint about imitativeness, in the sense of derivativeness:

Charles Harpur was a son of the forests—a man of the backwoods—a dweller in wild and uncouth country; and his songs are accordingly saturated with the strange fitful music of waste and broken-up places. This was a singer whose genius was ripened, so to speak, by the sun and winds of outside wildernesses; mountains were his sponsors; and from them he received his lyrical education. As Tennyson's elder songs are filled with the mournful, monotonous melody of the North-easter sweeping over there across the Lincolnshire fens, so Harpur's most characteristic and most maligned lyrics have, incorporated with them, the full, strong, lawless music of the Australian hills. And this music, native to rugged places where cliff, and gorge, and tree conspire to break it into fragments, has a rhythm of its own altogether unlike that which pulsates through the sustained winds of the open lowlands—a rhythm restless and broken, but, for all that, melodious. That the Australian poet was influenced to a considerable degree by the healthy, masculine genius of the great Lake Bard is a fact beyond all question; still, it is equally clear to us that Harpur stands as much apart from Wordsworth as the latter does from the author of the Seasons. The grand, austere toiler who thought out that marvellous poem The Excursion, and who left behind him the most remarkable ode in the English language, was—like the two other singers we have named—on his strongest ground when set face to face with external Nature; but, then, there is a broad subjective element in the verse he has left us, that is nowhere to be met with in the writings of Thomson and Harpur. The most characteristic poems of Harpur and the author of the Seasons are purely descriptive—being that and nothing more; and it is from this point of view that the critic must judge, in order to be fair to the Australian poet without underrating his indebtedness to Wordsworth.

The two propositions are quite clear. Harpur's poetry expresses in its cadences and rhythms, its music, the strange fitfulness of waste and broken-up places; and his Wordsworthianism is Wordsworth with a difference, in which the subjective self is, as with Thomson, separate from the nature description.

But closer reading suggest this is a most peculiar defence. First, Kendall has not so much characterized Harpur, or his poetry, as matched him to a particular context. It hardly seems worth elaboration, so Kendall has presumed, that the place Harpur comes from, the natural landscape he expresses, is a waste and broken-up place. This is not the same order of nature as Wordsworth's Cumberland hills; this is the wilderness.

Second, the determination to represent Harpur as a lyric poet, a musical poet, a singer, is a projection of Kendall's own image of the poet, and more particularly of himself as poet. You might have noticed his reference to Tennyson's “elder songs”, and remembered the phrase about “echoes from the elder sons of Song”—this passage relates closely to his own situation. For Kendall, the poet is almost automatically a “singer”. For Adam Lindsay Gordon, the poet constructs a necklace of rhyme; for Harpur, however, the poet is more like a prophet—especially, he almost seems bitterly to remember, in being without honour in his own land. These are different orientations in one of the on-going debates in the nineteenth century about the poet's relation to society. The poet might be a man speaking to men, or the unacknowledged legislator of mankind; or he might be nearly anonymous. It is a strange argument, to defend Harpur against his obligations to Wordsworth by asserting that he is actually closer to Thomson. Especially it is strange when Harpur himself had written to Kendall, urging him to abandon his decadent Tennysonian tendencies and to concentrate on Wordsworth and Milton:

Study Milton and Wordsworth for a blank verse style, and combine the master-movements of the two. Wordsworth will teach you how to loosen and modernise Milton's, so as to make it eloquent; and Milton will show you how to put thunder into Wordsworth's.

(letter to Kendall, 7 July 1866)

Harpur knew what he wanted from other poets and he knew what he wanted and wouldn't get. It would seem then a much more vigorous defence to notice his desire for thunder in the poetic line, and his blunt assertion that Wordsworth doesn't have it. Whatever Harpur's indebtedness to Wordsworth, he was not merely imitative, he was not merely Wordsworth and water—not even Wordsworth and stormwater. The originality of Harpur is in that he knew his own mind, exercized his own judgement, and learned what he needed from whichever poet—Wordsworth or Milton, or Homer or Shakespeare. Of course, Wordsworth was in fact most often the model for him.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with the poem “A Storm in the Mountains”, the poem about a boyhood experience which established for him that he would be a poet. Professor Kramer has summarized the case:

A link between “A Storm in the Mountains” and Wordsworth's The Prelude seems more than probable. Into the mind of Wordsworth's Winander boy, who died at the age of eleven, [i.e. the same age as the youthful Harpur], the “visible scene” with “all its solemn imagery” enters “unawares”. Harpur's boyhood self wanders among the crags and comes upon a pool scooped out, like the “rocky basin” in Wordsworth's “An Evening Walk”, “by the shocks of rain-floods plunging from the upper rocks”, and here he drinks and muses. He is sufficiently observant to detect a change in the scene transmitted by the instinctive reactions of living things. He notices, for example, that the “locusts” cease flying and climb to the top of the tallest grasses, as they in fact do, he explains in a footnote, to escape sudden floods. Harpur's boy is just as finely attuned to his natural world as is the Winander boy, or the young Wordsworth of The Prelude, but he is not in communion with it. The storm is merely a part of nature; it does not speak directly to him nor he to it. The perceptions are those of a solitary observer, not unlike the young Wordsworth, with “a listless, yet enquiring eye”; but the sentiments have more in common with those of Thomson's The Seasons or Cowper's “A Thunder Storm” than with the intensity of Wordsworth's passionate hauntings.³

The influence of Wordsworth, she notes, is strongest in the earliest part of the poem, which concentrates on the inwardness of the experience. As the storm rumbles off, so does the poem into a kind of artificial coda, a bland statement about the purging of pestilence and the return of peace.

The Wordsworthian markings here are prominent; Professor Kramer's point is well-taken. But notice that like Henry Kendall she has inserted another name into the discussion, not Cowper for his “Thunder Storm”, but James Thomson of The Seasons. That is a hint that I shall follow up later. For in Kendall's double argument there is that other proposition, about the nature of Nature in Australia; a point raised incidentally by Professor Wilkes in the introduction to his anthology The Colonial Poets. The bush as Harpur described it has for the most part vanished, he remarks;

it no longer seems to us quite so vast, so unknown, so overwhelming. Harpur also saw it in a particular way. The bush in his poetry is not simply a huge presence dwarfing man; it is also a source of elemental violence, as savage as it is unaccountable.⁴

And Vivian Smith, in The Oxford History of Australian Literature, extends the perception in an interesting direction:

If later writers have concentrated on the arid monotonies of the Australian landscape, merging their sense of its social and cultural limitations with the sense of the repetitive sameness of the land, Harpur emphasised its picturesque, dramatic and more violent qualities, again rather in the manner of the early colonial landscape painters. Harpur had behind him the late eighteenth century and early Romantic tradition of descriptive and landscape poems, but it is worth noting how frequently his titles and subjects, “The Bush Fire”, “The Creek of the Four Graves”, “Dawn and Sunrise in the Snowy Mountains”, “A Coast View”, “A Storm in the Mountains”, “The Kangaroo Hunt”, are also found as the titles and subjects of some of the most important colonial paintings—from Glover, Roper, Martens and Buvelot, to von Guérard and Chevalier. There is in the poetry, as in the painting, the same sense of vastness, with the emphasis on vision and views, a sense of the sublime. A detailed study of landscape in Australian poetry would, I believe, show a gradual development away from the dramatic panoramas and the large view of the first colonial artists to a microscopic focus on things in the landscape, to the tiniest insects, plants and animal life—so that now a mere boulder or pebble or a bird can be invested with the sense of the sublime and mysterious once found only in an enormous coastal view or mountain sweep.⁵

And he is right about that, of course; there is just such a pattern. But notice something further. The titles of early colonial poetry, and painting, tend to form into another pattern too, not only from vastness to minuteness, but from general to particular. The titles of Harpur's poems are often of a general or representative kind: “A Coastal View”, “A Midsummer Noon in the Australian Forest”, “A Storm in the Mountains”; though yes, we also find “The Creek of the Four Graves”, “The Bush Fire”, which is on the way to specifying particularity, as Kendall does with his proper titles and exact place names, or Adam Lindsay Gordon with his predication of the individual, the singular, the discrete. Harpur, that is, represents the point of transfer between an initial affirmation of the general, to the recognition of the particular; and in this he also imitates the process of rational or scientific enquiry which had become prominent in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and which reinforced the practice of periphrasis in poetry, replicating as that does the system of botanical or zoological classification—the singular identified as an example of a class or species. In perception and discrimination Harpur's poetic eye works in a recognizable manner. But it is not exclusively that of the lingering eighteenth century, for he also makes the bridge to the colonial Romantic determination to see exactly and closely—he establishes at least a colonial beach-head, if that bridging is not a sufficiently autonomous and dramatic moment for Phillip Mead, amongst others.

Harpur does in fact represent an important cultural moment. Though there are, as we learned from C. P. Snow and others who shall not be mentioned here, two cultures. In that other culture, Harpur again has a point. He was writing towards a perception of what is normative here in Australia, which is not, it seems, normative over there: the normative is relativized. By which I mean that the world to which the Europeans came, kept on being different, kept on resisting expectations from the very beginning. The case for this can be traced out in terms of myth, by showing how Australia as both place and experience kept on actualizing, if in subtly transformed ways, the legendary Antipodes. Everything turned out to be a cunning reversal, an inversion, an anomaly.

.....

Or one can turn to the phenomenal events which met European arrival, and observe what kind of conceptual determination emerges from that.

For example, I understand that when Ken Stewart gave the Blaiklock Lecture several years ago, he began by referring to Captain Cook's journal. “Winds southerly, a hard gale with heavy squalls attended with showers of rain and a great sea”, Cook wrote of 18 April 1770: typically, as we have come to learn from our familiarity with this part of the world, the weather cleared and then worsened again, to “a large hollow sea … rowling in upon the land”. Cook was not much impressed by rough seas—Joseph Banks, with a livelier imagination and a livelier vocabulary, expressed anxiety to a much greater degree. The simple point is that Cook's journal is almost necessarily a discontinuous narrative. Every detail is a discrete fact; there is no pattern of experience to inform the writing other than retrospectively, and whether storms were frequent or not in this part of the world could not be guessed at.

When the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay, with Cook's journal as a kind of carefully read instruction manual, Phillip and his officers found that, with all due respect to the Great Navigator, it was an eminently unsuitable place for settlement; and not just because Cook's fine meadows turned out to be a “rotten spongy bog”, in Major Ross's irritated phrase, but because the Bay was, and is, exposed to storms, open to the heavy seas which (by the time of his published report) Phillip had learned to expect would roll in from the East. As a naval man he evidently had his weather eye out.

With the relocation of the fleet to Port Jackson, almost the first thing that happened was, you may remember, a violent storm, a Hawthornian or Melvillean thunderstorm. Ships dragged at their anchor, endangering life and limb; a bolt of lightning smashed a large gumtree under which the officers had penned their personal livestock—and both tree and livestock were destroyed. The early journals describe all this, but none as far as I know interprets these events in any symbolic or intentional way, none relates it to any of the anarchy attendant on the unloading of the convicts, or to the perverse civilization now being established at the end of the world. That kind of commentary is left for the gothic imagination of novelists like Hal Porter and Thomas Keneally.

What did happen was that Captain Hunter was very soon observing that these coastal storms were frequent, that it was a characteristic of this part of the world, and that those sailing to Sydney should be careful to avoid getting caught on a lee shore.

Our passage, since we came round Van Diemen's Land, had been attended with much bad weather, very violent squalls, and a thick haze; particularly with the wind from the eastward: I had before observed, that in the winter-time, upon this coast, we were subject to much bad weather … During the Summer months we were sometimes subject to thunder, lightning, and strong squalls; but in general the weather is fine. If in the fairest weather you observe it to lighten in the lee part of the horizon, you should prepare for a squall from that quarter, which is in general pretty severe.⁶

And second, since lightning had struck that gumtree, and all around Sydney there were burnt gumtrees, maybe gumtrees attracted lightning. Slowly this hypothesis was revised, as the colonizers observed how Aborigines hunted for possums, or set fire to large tracts of bush; and the storm theory at least in that particular, quietly lapsed.

Hunter knew what he was talking about when he warned of the dangers of being driven into shore with no leeway to tack out to sea again. He had had the narrowest of escapes in Storm Bay, Tasmania, an escape he acknowledged as providential. At the very last minute the wind had shifted the merest two points of the compass, and with the Sirius heeled right over he had just managed to escape being wrecked on a group of rocks. In low visibility, with prodigious seas breaking, “the gale not in the least likely to abate and the sea running mountain high, with very thick weather, a long dark night just coming on, and an unknown coast”, the Sirius was in more than just a spot of bother. With the narrowest shift in the wind, they managed to clear the danger:

… I do not recollect to have heard of a more wonderful escape. Every thing which depended upon us, I believe, was done; but it would be the highest presumption and ingratitude to Divine Providence, were we to attribute our preservation wholly to our best endeavours: his interference in our favour was so very conspicuously manifested in various instances, in the course of that night, as I believe not to leave a shadow of doubt, even in the minds of the most profligate on board, of his immediate assistance!⁷

And he gives that one of his rare exclamation marks.

Providence does not often rate a mention in early Australian encounters, of either a testing or a priorising kind. Luck or irony is more the measure of experience; there is an appreciation that events do have a discernible pattern, and that they bear upon an individual outcome. But gratitude of Hunter's kind is noticeable for its rarity; more frequent is a celebration of amazement, possibly on occasion the sort of astonishment that Burke proposed as supporting the sublime.

Here for example is an account by Mary Ann Parker, wife of the captain of the Gorgon, bringing Lt. Governor Philip Gidley King and his wife out to Sydney. In fact Mrs Parker appears to be relying on her husband's log, for it is a more objective passage of writing than is normal with her. The purpose of her book was to present an interesting narrative, to be amusing in the period sense of that word, rather than to impose her own perceptions and reflections:

The ensuing day, being Sunday, was pleasant and serene, as if to afford us an opportunity of imploring a continuance of the Divine Protection, which we had hitherto experienced in a singular degree.

On Monday the 19th [September], at noon, … a point of land appeared in sight, called by Captain Cook Long Nose, on account of its pointed shape. At sun-set the hovering clouds seemed to forebode the event of the evening; at eight came on a tremendous thunder-squall, attended with most dreadful lightning and constant heavy rains, which continued upwards of an hour and a half. About half past eight the lightning struck the pole of the main-top-gallant-mast, shivered it and the head of the mast entirely to pieces; thence it communicated to the main-top-mast, under the hounds, and split it exactly in the middle, above one third down the mast; it next took the main-mast by the main-yard, on the larboard side, and in a spherical direction struck it in six different places; the shock electrified every person on the quarter-deck; those who were unfortunately near the main-mast were knocked down, but recovered in a few minutes: this continued until about half past ten, when a most awful spectacle presented itself to the view of those on deck; whilst we who were below felt a sudden shock, which gave us every reason to fear that the ship had struck against a rock; from which dreadful apprehension we were however relieved upon being informed that it was occasioned by a ball of fire which fell at that moment. The lightning also broke over the ship in every direction: it was allowed to be a dismal resemblance of a besieged garrison; and, if I might hazard an opinion, I should think it was the effect of an earthquake. The sea ran high, and seemed to foam with anger at the feeble resistance which our lone bark occasioned. At midnight the wind shifted to the westward, which brought on fine clear weather, and I found myself at leisure to anticipate the satisfaction which our arrival would diffuse throughout the colony …⁸

The long sentence full of connecting, disconnective semi-colons, and the curiously flat trajectory of this as recreated experience, are to my mind reminiscent of Defoe. It presents itself as authentic in just his way; and it does not reflect on itself as extraordinary. It is an episode that invites a Melville. But that, of course, is not what we get. Rather, the episode is inserted between the rather cosy remembrance of Sunday (the point being that in the stormy passage from Cape Town there had not been too many sunny Sundays) and their imminent arrival in Sydney Harbour, and the relief they will bring to the anxious settlement. Which is to say that the passage, like the experience it recreates, is an extraordinary irruption of the disorderly into an otherwise fairly serene, sufficiently amusing voyage; and it occurs along the NSW coast. Mrs Parker evidently did not feel as strongly as Dr Johnson: “I would not for my amusement wish for a storm” he wrote early in his journey into Scotland.⁹

As a pattern in her writing, Mrs Parker clearly fancied this procedure of occasional interruption, for it is repeated on the way home, when the ship is caught amongst icebergs and the combination of beauty and terror are consciously identified and acknowledged. The icebergs are obviously dangerous; they are very big, very numerous, and much too close. Spray from the waves freezing on to them, makes the most fantastic forms: the combination is here exactly that exquisite mixture of pleasure and apprehension Edmund Burke had identified as underlying the sublime. In other words, Mrs Parker had a way of recognizing and articulating this experience, and indeed of contextualizing it, as evidenced by her references to the common distress felt at the death of Sir Hugh Willoughby and his crew, frozen to death in Elizabethan times in quest of the north-east passage, and remembered much as Sir John Franklin was to be in the mid-nineteenth century. The tragedy of Sir Hugh was part of the common culture; it is also, one notes in passing, identified in Thomson's own note to Winter, his first poem. Violent storms off the NSW coast did not, however, have an available context at this early moment in colonial history (1795).

By the time Charles Sturt was presenting his account of Australia in 1833, it was already well established—at least to his satisfaction—that unruliness in climatic behaviour was only to be expected:

In the course of the day we crossed the line of a hurricane that had just swept with resistless force over the country, preserving a due north course, and which we had heard from a distance, fortunately too great to admit of its injuring us. It had opened a fearful gap in the forest through which it had passed, of about a quarter of a mile in breadth. Within that space, no tree had been able to withstand its fury, for it had wrenched every bough from such as it had failed to prostrate, and they stood naked in the midst of the surrounding wreck. I am inclined to think that the rudeness of nature itself in these wild and uninhabited regions gives birth to these terrific phenomena. They have never occurred, so far as I know, in the located districts.¹⁰

“The rudeness of nature in these wild and uninhabited regions”: that is what sponsors such terrific phenomena. That is what is consequent upon “waste and broken-up places”. Sturt is not a slovenly writer; on the contrary, he is very careful and thoughtful. So his evidence of the nature of Nature in Australia, its comparative disorderliness, is intriguing. Elsewhere he draws attention to a kind of moral ennervation, a feebleness in the unconvincing rivers, which have not enough flow to wash their sandbars out to sea. Nature in Australia is not as it is in Europe—and that is a scientific observation as well as something like a poetic fact. Furthermore, this barbaric, unreformed Nature is in the wilderness, not in the located, that is, civilized districts. For Sturt, the poetic proposition about Art improving Nature is inseparable from observable fact, evidence from what is these days called the real world.

The poets had of course been alert to Sturt's perception all along. I give as just one brief example Michael Massey Robinson, who in his “Ode for the King's Birth Day 1811” (Sydney Gazette, 8 June 1811) resumes for us some of the themes I have been identifying:

                    Time was, when o'er THIS dread expanse of land
                    No TRAIT appear'd of Culture's fost'ring hand:
                    And, as the wild Woods yielded to the Blast,
                    Nature scarce own'd the unproductive Waste.
                    O'er rugged Cliffs fantastic Branches hung,
                    Round whose hoar Trunks the slender Scions clung,
                    Impervious Mountains met the ling'ring Eye,
                    Whose cloud-cap't Summits brav'd the Sky.
                    Rocks, whose repulsive Frown access defied,
                    And Bays, where idly ebb'd the slumb'ring Tide—
                    Unless some Straggler of the NATIVE RACE,
                    In crude Canoe expos'd his sooty Face;
                    With lazy Motion paddled o'er the Flood,
Snatch'd at the spear-struck Fish—and hugged his Food.
But when BRITANNIA'S Sons came forth, to brave
The dreary Perils of the length'ning Wave;
When her bold Barks, with swelling Sails unfurled,
Trac'd these rude Coasts, and hail'd a new-found World.
Soon as their Footsteps press'd the yielding sand,
A sun more genial brighten'd on the Land:
Commerce and Arts enrich'd the social Soil,
Burst through the gloom and bade all Nature smile.

You see by that Robinson is no great threat as an original poet. But notice the trope and the terms that are caught up in it. Robinson didn't work all this out for himself. He was a derivative poet, about as derivative and imitative as you can get. What he demonstrates is the intersection of a literary, a poetic convention (and conventionality) and empirical (well, maybe empirical) actuality. There are storms in poetry and storms in local fact, and for once lack of invention is protected by circumstantial reality. The terms and the experience are both to hand. This is not a big storm, it is a brief storm, with the sun coming out one might think too suddenly, too sudden for good form—but that, by experience, is what actually happens here. These are coastal storms, expressing instability rather than say profound Wagnerian themes. Or to analyse more closely, here is initially a wilderness, a wasteland that Nature would scarce own; this is how it is before cultural contact, before Civilization comes, Nature unimproved by Art. And when Britannia's sons arrive from over the sea, the sun bursts through the gloomy clouds. Creation, in a sense, recurs; smiling Nature is a Providential Nature, the sun figures that God who is also light, genial in the sense of generating, creating, engendering. It is a standard topos. One further detail though, a line that will come in useful later—“Impervious Mountains met the ling'ring Eye”. This sense of the listless undirected look, this passive regard, in relation to storms, mountains and waste and broken places, will be discovered again. But chiefly remember Sturt's premise of a rude nature, a condition wherein things are “wilder than 'twas elsewhere wont” as Harpur proposes in “The Creek of the Four Graves”. That and not just sheer distaste informs say Barron Field's complaint that this is a place where

                                                                                Nature is prosaic,
Unpicturesque, unmusical, and where
Nature reflecting Art is not yet born.

When Sturt first entered Sydney Harbour he “speculated on the probable character of the landscape”: the hills, which must have been covered with the same undifferentiated “dense and gloomy wood which abounded everywhere else” had in fact been over-run by skill and industry, and “a flourishing town stands on the ruins of the forest”. This is the eighteenth-century triumph of Art over Nature. A fundamental proposition about the nature of Nature is encoded in all these descriptions, and the storms that occur in the early writing, whether imaginative or factual, all confirm that particular concept.

These storms are in the early literature. In this country we haven't had many really big storms, that is, storms in our writing. We have mainly floods and droughts and bushfires: occasionally in the north-west we have cockeyed bobs. Once we had our national act together and entered the halcyon days of pastoral dreaming, all our worries were occasional plagues of rabbits and locusts, said Hanrahan. There is, I suggest, a patterning of dominant tropes in our literature, and the early writing is much taken up with storms. A simple, extra-literary explanation is that people coming to this country came by sea, and the storms were encountered at sea, or along the coast.¹¹ Once settlement pushed into the interior, you got beyond the storm zone; and the context of experience, especially hazardous experience, changed. It's obvious enough, no doubt.

But there are some prominent instances in our colonial writing. The storm at the end of Marcus Clarke's His Natural Life is a case in point—a storm that performs the same restorative cleansing function that we have begun to discern, but which also completes the waste and destruction of life, almost in revulsion against the very anarchy and violence which it in itself represents—a storm of moral disaffection. That kind of image in turn is replaced or displaced by a different kind of trope, the relentless abrading wind at the end of Henry Handel Richardson's Fortunes of Richard Mahony for example. Increasingly that becomes the dominant version of Australia—the eroding forces, not the confrontational ones; and stoicism replaces fatalism, the wilderness surrenders to the desert. We have no Lear-like storms. Patrick White's Eye of The Storm doesn't make that translation adequately.

Charles Harpur's “A Storm in the Mountains” partakes of the early configuration of course. His is a vivid response to a direct experience:

the author, young as he was, and from the very coming on of the storm, became possessed with the feeling that it was for him eventually to make a poem of it, and was thereby led to observe its startling and dangerous manifestations throughout, with a singularly daring attention. And in this way, the conception, which is here elaborated, was crudely stirring within him, I say, even then.

(Mitchell Library MS A93)

There is a difference immediately. This storm is seen as a process, a movement, a dramatic narrative; not as a “site”, nor as artificial contrivance, nor as symbolic. It is an event, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Yet it is to be made into a poem; more than that, the experience confirms not what the experience is to become, but what the boy is to become; so that in another sense it is after all symbolic.

But one thing more, for my guess is that Harpur not only recognized the innate poem, or the nascent poetic impulse there, but recognized also that here was a direct, or direct enough, correlation between the world of real experience and the world of poetry: he saw, and saw vividly, how poetry was about reality. For there is a poetic model for what he saw, and what he writes.

And what is that? From Kendall to Kramer the answer has already been given, and my modest addition is to ascertain in just what way Harpur is obliged to James Thomson's The Seasons—and specifically (just to contain the discussion to a manageable limit), to the poem “Summer”.

Thomson was an enormously popular poet. The Appendix to Ralph Cohen's The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's The Seasons and the Language of Criticism (1964) lists the hundreds of editions of The Seasons following its publication in 1730. It supplied the occasion for numerous illustrations, it prompted musical compositions (e.g. by Haydn); and it was frequently and variously imitated. It was a major cultural force, for it not only influenced how people thought about poetry, but also how they thought about nature. Harpur may not have been much impressed by Dr Johnson's estimation of Thomson's mind as one that “at once comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute” (Life of Thomson), but Wordsworth had esteemed Thomson as the next poet to Milton (thereby discounting Marvell, Dryden, Pope). There is not between the two of them, he claimed, “a single new image of external nature; and scarcely … a familiar one from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object” (Essay Supplementary to the Preface, 1815). That proposition of the “strikingly external” sits right at the centre of the most important, most conceptually ambitious stanza of Harpur's “Storm”, held there in direct relation to the working out of another perception of immanent force.

Thomson's poem is organized around the sequence of events of an ideal day. Harpur's poem, which recounts the events of the storm—its onset, the storm itself, its aftermath—is likewise set against the course of a day. To some extent Harpur takes up the model that Thomson much more clearly adapts, the georgic—not in any exact imitation of Virgil but in the general generic sense of a poem dealing with “matters of fact, descriptions of material objects and accounts of physical processes (with or without their supernatural causes), dressed out with a stylistic artifice which emphasized their dignity and importance.”¹² Harpur was never much impressed by stylistic artifice, though he has his momentary lapses; and he structured his poems more tightly than the georgic required. But certainly he was intent on representing matters of fact—and, given some of his notes to his poems, vain about the accuracy of his descriptions of material objects, physical processes. And like Thomson—speculatively, in imitation of Thomson—he modified the georgic in the direction of what has become identified as the “excursion” poem, with its emphasis on meditation as well as precise description, and its persistent attraction to images of vastness and ruin. “Magnificence, vastness, ruin—no three words could better sum up the effects for which the ‘excursion’ poets were striving. In most of them a theory of the ‘natural Sublime’ was implied.”¹³

One important difference between Harpur and Thomson however is in Harpur's determination to wrestle with intimations of the ineffable, with the something far more deeply interfused. Thomson does not enquire so energetically into the mysteries. Yet it would be a misrepresentation to suggest he was content with some bland sense of Providence; for the one particular passage which most demands our attention, Thomson's account of a summer storm, arrives just as Harpur's does, at a reflection of

That sense of powers exceeding far his own,
Ere yet his feeble heart has lost its fears …

(ll. 1242-3)

while the poem “Summer” as a whole ends with a meditation on the workings of reason and imagination.

In other words, Thomson's poem provides Harpur with both a specific model, and with a general conceptual model: and one might also add in passing, Harpur adopted Thomson's practice of revising and amending and enlarging his poems. Let me give some examples of specific correlation.

First, as to material. One of the most sensational episodes in “Summer” is the destruction, by a bolt of lightning, of the young maiden Amelia while she is being embraced by her lover Celadon. This is, I hasten to add, an entirely innocent and virtuous love:

                                                                                                    From his void embrace,
Mysterious Heaven! that moment to the ground,
A blackened corse, was struck the beauteous maid.
But who can paint the lover, as he stood
Pierced by severe amazement, hating life,
Speechless, and fixed in all the death of woe?

(ll. 1214-1219)

It is difficult to take this seriously, just as difficult as taking seriously the desperate attempts of illustrators to capture Celadon's astonishment (not to mention Amelia's …); and just as difficult, in Harpur's case, to read with suitable concern and distress of the eagle zapped by the lightning:

                                                                      Short stops his flight!
His dark form shrivels in the blasting light!
And then as follows a sharp thunderous sound,
Falls whizzing, stone-like, lifeless to the ground!

(ll. 98-101)

Yet readers were much affected by Thomson's story. It was based on a real event, and Pope wrote an epitaph upon the lovers. In Harpur's case, there is genuine awe created in the lines just preceding, as the storm-front bulges over the eagle, bloats, grows frightfully luminous.¹⁴ That is, Harpur is more successful at expressing the immediacy of the storm; he is bathetic in narrating the bare facts of what happened, and to some extent that can be true of Thomson too.

Thomson's summer storm begins

                                                                      A boding silence reigns
Dread though the dun expanse—save the dull sound
That from the mountain, previous to the storm,
Rolls o'er the muttering earth …

(ll. 1116-1119)

Harpur has, though a little later in his poem,

Portentous silence! Time keeps breathing past—
Yet it continues! May this marvel last?
This wild weird silence in the midst of gloom
So manifestly big with latent doom?
Tingles the boding ear …

(ll. 110-114)

and he had used “dun” just previously in reference to the legions of the storm. Thomson turns to the reaction of animals to the coming storm—birds flying low, the tempest-loving raven intimidated, the cattle all listening in “fear and dumb amazement”. Harpur likewise begins by observing that the creatures and insects of the bush give the first intimations of the approaching storm. With the sudden crashing explosion of thunder comes wind, comes lightning, come sheets of rain. Storms will be storms, no doubt, and that is likely enough what happens; what interests me is the poetic vocabulary which Harpur has taken over. Thus Thomson:

                                                                                overhead a sheet
Of livid flame discloses wide, then shuts
And opens wider, shuts and opens still
Expansive, wrapping ether in a blaze.
Follows the loosened aggravated roar,
Enlarging, deepening, mingling, peal on peal
Crushed horrible, convulsing heaven and earth

(ll. 1137-1143)

and so on. That “discloses” is Harpur too, and so is “convulsing”. And the sheets of lightning opening and shutting are, I think, where Harpur gets his restless heat flares, “like the dazzling hem / Of some else viewless veil held trembling …” (ll. 21-22). Thomson has a smouldering pine shattered and blackened; Harpur blasts an ancient gumtree.

Harpur emphasises, by underlining, the red hills; and that directs us to the lines in Thomson

various-tinctured trains of latent flame,
Pollute the sky, and in yon baleful cloud,
A reddening gloom …

(ll. 1110-1112)

Harpur uses the adjective “latent” several times: it appeals to him. The Thomson passage also suggests where the otherwise rather surprising adjective “polluted” comes from in Harpur—surprising that it should be there at all, but he does not take up Thomson's image, which is of explosive natural gases.

These and other verbal correlations suggest very strongly the presence of Thomson somewhere in the organizing of Harpur's recollections; that is, his storm is both a real storm and a poetical storm.

There is more; there is always more. The lonely Boy, the perhaps Wordsworthian boy, roams “out on the half-wild herd's dim tracks”. The point has been made that if this is the wilderness, the waste and broken place (“vast-backed ridges … all rent in jags”), so too, in Thomson's tropic vision, under the “bright effulgent Sun” (and isn't that exactly Harpur!), on the vast savannas where great Nature dwells, “naught is seen / But the wild herds …” (ll. 703/4); though these are not quite the herds Harpur has in mind.

Harpur's storm occurs in “A rude peculiar world”—that is, the kind of rudeness and peculiarity that Charles Sturt had registered. It is sui generis—“the productions of this singular region seem peculiar to it, and unlike those of any other part of the world”¹⁵, which corresponds to the kind of extreme nature that Thomson identified in the Welsh mountains, with their loud “repercussive roar”, their heaped rude rocks, and smitten cliffs. This is an unruly nature; this is where the thunder gets to in Thomson, the climax just before the episode of Celadon and Amelia. The point is not just the poetic echoing, or verbal reverberation (what other kind could there be?). It is more importantly what Harpur discovers through his resumption of Thomson—not just the unruliness of the heavens in the unruly mountains, but the spill-over of that into the realm of human affairs. The potential for disaster that Harpur explores is requisite as a donnée against which his conviction of being unharmed in the midst of all this elemental strife is asserted.

One last example: the young boy looking about him on the mountainside turns “a listless, yet enquiring eye”. That is not too distant from Thomson's “unfixed, wandering eye” (l.692); nor from Michael Massey Robinson's “lingering eye”. For the philosophical question is what can be seen in the undifferentiated wilderness? How, in an as yet uninformed realm of Nature, can the eye see, how can the mind determine what the eye is to see? This is the question which comes back at the high point of Harpur's poem—how, he asks (and it seems it is a question asked well after the event), how may he find

How through all being works the light of Mind?
Yea, through the strikingly external see
My novel Soul's divulging energy!
Spirit transmuting into forms of thought
What but for its cognition were as nought!

(ll. 166-170)

This is ambitious verse. Harpur has moved well past what he could learn from Thomson to get to this point. Indeed, the density of the Thomson allusions is in the first part of his poem; he goes past that. Besides, though his eye had been listless, it was nevertheless enquiring; just as in “Midsummer Noon” the meditating mind had not turned over to slumber in the noontide hour, but was awake and alert to the stillness and quietness. In his own way Harpur seems to have stumbled on Wordsworth's recognition of the appropriate condition of the mind for the creative process to begin; though in the case of “A Storm in the Mountains” the distinction has to be made between the mind or eye as passive and perceiving, and the mind as actively engaging with experience—here, of the storm.

What Harpur shows is, I think, particularly his own: he has positioned himself in the midst of the storm, and yet he is virtually detached from it, daring, heedless, secured by some destined charm, some deep intimation that all this is to be patterned, is to be created or recreated, by the novel, innovating soul. And in this I see Harpur as formulating a response to experience, taking up an attitude to experience, that seems on the evidence characteristic of Australian writing—a narrative relationship of half-commitment, partly involved in and partly removed from what is being said, passive and active agent simultaneously—just as we find in novels and short stories and autobiographies participants who tell their own story by telling someone else's story, or fail to notice that they're in fact telling their own. Like David Malouf's Frank Harland, they stand side on to their own art. Harpur does not write as the Thomsonian philosopher poet in Stoic contemplation of the greater harmonies of the universe; nor does he really grapple with the Wordsworthian “something far more deeply interfused”, though both those are of interest to him. He recognized the difficult moral and spiritual progress we have made, and he recognized the precariousness of that attainment: he did not have Wordsworth's confidence about that. Yet it is both the difficulty and the precariousness of the attainment that makes it meaningful, valuable, to Harpur. In the mundane world he railed against the fragile social order, and in his personal life likewise he had only the most tenuous control—witness his distress at the death of his favourite son, his anger at the death of his father. On the mountain, in the midst of the storm, Harpur met something grander and greater, something which took him out of himself while it enclosed and included him completely; which happened, but which also he encountered in some equivalent form in Thomson's poem. What we find in “A Storm in the Mountains” is Harpur being both imitative and original, continuing a tradition and evolving his own response. He went past Thomson, but Thomson gave him his start. It is that combination of conventionality and independence that defines the colonial moment.

But poetry is not defined in terms of moments, colonial, post-colonial or any other; at least not in Harpur's estimation of it. In an incompletely revised “Discourse on Poetry” which Harpur had intended to be introductory to the whole of his poems, he wrote of it as “a high and even sacred thing”.

And it is the peculiar office of the Poet, to bring these vital, but subtle influences into the mental neighbourhood of all men;—to make them intimately felt by all. But he does not create them. Everywhere existing in the constitution of the universe in its relation to Man, and thence by reflection in whatever is truly reproduced from it by human invention or art, they are but ingathered, as to a magnetic centre, by his sovereign imagination; not so much for self-enjoyment, as to be again given forth in immortal Poetry—that is condensed or sublimated in spirit, and chastened or harmonized formally.

(Mitchell Library MS A87)

He is like Coleridge perhaps—“The further I ascend from animated Nature (i.e. the embracements of rocks and hills), from men and cattle, and the common birds of the woods and fields, the greater becomes in me the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then a universal spirit that neither has nor can have an opposite.”¹⁶ If the colonial wilderness was undifferentiated experience, invoking the storm, it is no small thing for Charles Harpur to have discovered a means of ingathering sensation, and affirming life as an unopposed universal spirit.

Notes

1. See Phillip Mead, “Charles Harpur's Disfiguring Origins: Allegory in Colonial Poetry”, Australian Literary Studies, XIV.3 (May 1990), pp. 279-296.

2. Davie and the Goldsmith passage are quoted in the Introduction to The Seasons and the Castle of Indolence by James Thomson, ed. James Sambrook (Clarendon Press, 1972; 1984), p.xv.

3. Leonie Kramer, “Imitation and Originality in Australian Colonial Poetry: The Case of Charles Harpur”, The Yearbook of English Studies, XII.1983, pp.119-120.

4. G. A. Wilkes, ed., The Colonial Poets (Angus & Robertson, 1974), p.[viii].

5. Vivian Smith, “Poetry”, The Oxford History of Australian Literature, ed. Leonie Kramer (Oxford University Press, 1981), pp.279-280.

6. John Hunter, An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island … (fascimile, Library Board of South Australia, 1968), p.86.

7. Ibid., p.84.

8. Mary Ann Parker, A Voyage Round the World … (1975; reissued Hordern House Rare Books, 1991), pp. 65-68.

9. Samuel Johnston, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775; Penguin, 1984), p.45.

10. Charles Sturt, Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia (Smith, Elder and Co., 1833), vol II, pp.18-19.

11. See Ralph Abercromby, Three Essays on Australian Weather (White, 1896). He draws attention particularly to “the so called ‘Southerly Burster’, which is perhaps the most remarkable of the ‘squall’ winds which are found in various parts of the earth” (p.iii).

12. Sambrook, pp.x-xi.

13. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Cornell University Press, 1959), p.333.

14. John Arthos, in The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1949), notes that it is as old as Democritus that the eagle announces thunder (p.35).

15. Sturt, vol. I, p.xiv.

16. Quoted W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood (Faber & Faber, 1951), p.75.