[In the following essay, Wallace-Crabbe argues that Hope's poetry resists easy categorizations and investigates the poet's relationship to symbolism.]

Attempts to characterise A. D. Hope's poetry fail very frequently because of a common tendency to see his oeuvre holistically. Simple caricatures emerge, portraying him in bold strokes as neoclassical, parnassian, art nouveau, anti-modernist, remorselessly iambic or whatever. All such categorisations underplay the extent to which Hope's poetry is strategically restless and subversive. The old tales he tells are nearly always undermined. The commonly bland critical prose sorts oddly with the poetic violence: indeed, much of his suaver criticism seems remote from the feminist high spirits of A Midsummer Eve's Dream. And the physical density of his compressed narratives is held with difficulty and at some cost between a declared thirst for glimpses of transcendence and the fear of non-being:

The solid bone dissolving just
As this dim pulp about the bone;
And whirling in its void alone
Yearns a fine interstitial dust.
The ray that melts away my skin
Pales at that sub-atomic wave:
This shows my image in the grave,
But that the emptiness within

Like Slessor—in most respects a very different poet—Hope practises a whole series of sleights against entropy, anomie, dissolution, silence.

The above stanzas, from ‘X-Ray Photograph’, epitomise one of the paradoxes available to poetry, in that they give syntactically coherent, formally shapely utterance to assertions of annihilation. In this they resemble much of the writing of Wallace Stevens. Stevens is a poet about whom Hope has always maintained critical silence, but I can remember a moralist colleague of mine years ago launching an attack on the American poet on the grounds that his metres continued to assert coherence while his overt discourse bespoke the dissolution of all certainties. Yet what he complained of is true of all writing which treats of destruction. No writer pursues the imitative fallacy all the way down to chaos.

We could say that if the above lines have an overt, constructive syntax, they also have an imaginatively powerful counter-syntax which runs, dissolving-dim pulp-void-yearns-melts-pales-grave-emptiness. The two information systems meet at the problematised noun, ‘image’, which is both what we clearly want from a poem and what is undermined by X-ray photography. This rhetorically compelling poem self-deconstructs all the way down the line.

Hope leaves his readers ill at ease. Often it is his double blow which disconcerts them, in that he both presents them with a myth or story which they believe, for ideological reasons, not to be accessible to contemporary readers and dismantles or vulgarises the tale as he tells it. The powerful ‘Lot and His Daughters’ diptych is disturbing in just this way. It generates a chain of puzzled questions. Why take an Old Testament story? Why so obscure a one? Why focus on Lot, without his salted wife? Why write poems about incest? What is the point, for us, in Lot's forceful dream about spearing the lioness? How can the poetic voice end by endorsing ‘that best wisdom, which is not to know’? Why are poems which drive from an instructive source so immoral? The Lot poems keep us scanning to and fro for comfort, trying to strike a balance between assertions of the Lord's will, the beautiful daughters' willingness, drunken assertions of moral truth and what it could possibly have meant to be the only just man in Sodom. And the narrative of these poems is so clear that a reader may well feel abashed at not being able to replace it with moral paraphrase, not being able to state firmly what wine, genital intercourse and God's word stand for in poetry which teases the allegorical sense.

Similar problems of stance, viewpoint and the possibility of judgement haunt a scattering of Hope's poems, among them ‘Flower Poem’, ‘Easter Hymn’, ‘Rawhead and Bloody Bones’ and ‘The Watcher’. We do not know how much cultural baggage we are allowed, or expected, to bring to the poems. More common are the poems which seem to work to a coherent schema, proffering a lucidly coherent narrative which withholds nothing but its final significance. ‘A Visit to the Ruins’, ‘Dragon Music’ and ‘Crossing the Frontier’ all move to an ending by way of this modernist tactic of waived import. The last-named is a particularly striking example. Modern in setting, inhabiting the psychologised frontier world of Auden and Rex Warner, it baffles us as we try to place it on the intertextual map. The frontier is depoliticised after the first few lines; stanzas two and three suggest early Auden's transformations of Groddeck (‘His father, rampant, nursed the Family Shame’: here it seems as though we are waiting for the arrival of the Truly Strong Man); stanza four echoes the stillnesses of Edwin Muir (which brings to mind Seamus Heaney's recent suggestion that in the work of Muir and early Auden English poetry had its moment when it might have acceded to international Modernism); and at the climax melodramatic power exceeds the possibility of interpretation. If we contextualise the poem, turning back to the early ‘Return from the Freudian Isles’, we may be tempted to read ‘Crossing the Frontier’ as anti-Freudian, but nothing useful comes of that. Perhaps the cyclical message is that after the Oedipal rebellion, and despite it, the rescue will not take place. But such resignation does not account for the poem's power, either. Hope's poems resist reduction.

This resistance of the poems to interpretation leads us towards the question of Hope's relations to symbolism, and this is a track besmeared with red herrings and obscured by camouflage devices. They need to be cleared away. Hope has his place, too, in that distinguished line of Australians who have been fascinated by French symbolist poetry. But I shall come back to the traces of this after a few formalist observations.

For many readers, one of the problems in coming to terms with Hope's poetry is founded in his excessive reliance on the iambic quatrain. When you flick through a collection of his poetry, there you will see the quatrains over and over again, laid out down the page like motel rooms. It could be, and has been, said that Hope needs their steadying influence to contain and dramatise the violence of his apprehensions, but this is far from a general truth, I am sure. In his best poems of the 1940s—‘Imperial Adam’, ‘Conquistador’, ‘X-Ray Photograph’, ‘The Pleasure of Princes’—it is possible to trace formally and syntactically how they work as little engines of narrative or as shock quanta. They seem inevitable, too, as the richly gilded, psychologically elaborate, mise-en-abîme love story of ‘The Double Looking Glass’ acts itself out: readers need the mental comfort of steady forms as much in this poem as they do in ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’. As in sung or recited ballads, the ABAB stanzas have each a little plot which combines into the overplot. Luring us on with rhymes, each stanza is lightly eroticised. Anticipation creates satisfaction. It is such dynamic coil and recoil that leads with seeming logic to the melodramatic shock of ‘What beards, what bald heads burst now from the bush!’ or ‘And the first murderer lay upon the earth’.

Again, some of the poems resemble ballads more closely: ‘The Watcher’, for example. But many readers have found, will find, too great a reliance on steady, rhyming quatrains in a number of other poems where the raw material seems almost to have been poured into a comfortable form. Moreover, some of these poems go on for too long. The pitcher need not be taken to the fountain so many times. Such poems are the work of that Hope who wrote ‘The Middle Way’ and ‘The Discursive Mode’: this is the poet, partly genuine, partly a stalking horse, who stands farthest off from the disorders of Modernism.

Given the terms and concepts which were available to characterise modern art movements in Australia in the 1940s, Humphrey McQueen is right to have characterised the shock of Hope's earlier poetry in terms of its relation to surrealism. Attending properly to the element of radical excess in this poetry, McQueen writes in The Black Swan of Trespass,

For all Hope's classical style, his poetry attacked the prevailing poetics far more profoundly than did any of the tricksy Modernists in Angry Penguins. The precision of Hope's materialism was built up through his granite hard images: … Such corrosive literalness horrified all those Surrealists, and other Romantics, who looked upon art as a dark cave in which “Life” could take refuge from life.

Hope achieved what the Surrealists claimed to want, but were mostly afraid to touch. Many of his early poems inhabited a cannibalising bestiary in which severed limbs and unspeakable horrors were born from the promise of great joy.

(86)

The reference to corrosive literalness here is a play upon James Gleeson's striking surrealist canvas of 1941, ‘We Inhabit the Corrosive Littoral of Habit’. The reference to ‘Hope's materialism’ is in the one throw fruitful and misleading. It is true about poetic method, in that the poet's mimetic procedures constantly sought to fill his discourse with tangible substances which could be, as we have seen, some kind of stay against oblivion. It is misleading about belief systems, since Hope has never been at ease in a world which can be defined materialistically.

Hope's positions and assertions have always been hard for critics to smooth over and harmonise. In a very early poem, ‘Pygmalion’, one can find these disconcerting lines:

I want your suffering: the intense and bare
Strain of your will. I want to see you dare
This difficult thing, to walk with agony on
The knives of my imagination, one
I scarcely know—why even in your hands'
Least moving something perfectly understands
All I created you to feel and be.

Admittedly these are spoken by a version of Pygmalion, but they anticipate most gendered criticisms of Hope's poetry and most disapprobations of his assumption of poetic power. Here the Protestant work-ethic, that sexiest of ideologies, walks hand in glove (like ‘The Lingam and the Yoni’) with poetic heroism, as S. L. Goldberg has defined it. The artist-hero actually confesses—like any strong, uncompromised writer—that ‘I want your suffering’, but want also archaically means ‘lack’; the creative artist can use pain, but is not so good at actually feeling it: because he is busy working, of course. The difficult middle clause calls for our attention: ‘one I scarcely know’ dangles, so that we do not know which of three referents it depends from. The woman may be effectively unknown to the artist, intent on his supreme fiction as he is; or he may find his imagination unknowable; or, most likely, it may be the whole ‘difficult thing’, the moral enterprise of living and surviving. The third interpretation sorts best with the kind of Protestant straining which is felt a few lines further down with ‘And in myself this man I have willed to know / Wakes at long last’. But it should be added that ‘Pygmalion’ is a most unusual poem since it is strenuously argumentative rather than narrative-symbolist in method.

For all that his explicit views and critical preferences have generally been as hostile to symbolist poetry as to Modernism, a concern of some kind for French symbolism has manifested itself again and again in Hope's writings. One source of this must lie in the line of French symbolist scholarship which has persisted in Sydney since the time of Brennan: John Passmore has observed that the study of modern French poetry has wider international recognition than any other aspect of the humanities in Australia. It should be added that Hope's younger friend, James McAuley, completed in 1940 a University of Sydney Master's thesis on ‘Symbolism: an Essay in Poetics’. It can hardly be doubted that symbolist poetic theory and practice was a frequent topic of discussion between McAuley and Hope.

While it is in such early criticism as that to be found in ‘Poetry and Platitude’ and ‘The Middle Way’ that rationalist positions are created, positions which could allow no space at all for symbolism, it is not until The New Cratylus of 1979 that Hope the critic meets the French head-on. The result is very interesting. It is to be found in chapter eleven, ‘Heresies of the Age’. Here Poe and to some extent Verlaine receive rough treatment; Mallarmé, however, a poet who is not mentioned in Hope's early criticism, appears in a very different light, for all that he contributed along the way to a cause which diminished the range of modern poetry. On pages 127 to 128 he is introduced with the paean, ‘Mallarmé will last forever, except for a few poems which are no more than literary curiosities in a museum which can exhibit specimens from nearly all of even the greatest poets’. Twelve pages further on, Mallarmé's greatness is mentioned again, along with Baudelaire's. Soon afterwards he is called ‘the master symbolist’ and quoted at some length on allusion.

Let me add that in a previous chapter on the relation between poetry and the dream processes Hope records one of his own dreams in which he quoted Mallarmé's line, ‘Un coup de dès jamais n'abolira la hasard’ (a line which I have always found aurally displeasing, but that is another matter). Admittedly the dream quotation was immediately plonked by an interlocutor's nonsense line, ‘Un chien qui manque de dents jamais ne pensera’, but it remains striking that the original was so firmly lodged in the poet's consciousness-kitty.

Somewhat earlier, in an essay on Browning which was added to the second edition of The Cave and the Spring in 1974, Hope had written that ‘It is this election for the moments of dramatic stasis, of events or characters poised excitingly in the balancing forces of an unresolved problem which illuminates what I believe to be Browning's real position as an intellectual poet’. This is itself most illuminating about Hope's idea of intellection, about the irresolvable balance of his own best poems and also about symbolist poetry in which the delineated components should always be ‘Poised excitingly in the balancing forces of an unresolved problem’. It could fruitfully be brought to bear on some of his less celebrated poems: on ‘The Bed’—a poem which only Goldberg seems to have marked out for notice—on ‘Three Romances’, ‘The Meeting’ and ‘Dalla Sua Pace’, for all its comic-ironic surface.

‘Dalla Sua Pace’, like a good many of Hope's poems, is queerly deceptive. It offers an easy version of itself, a textual surface which would appear to be straightforward secular subversion of one of the great European myths, that of Don Juan, who has with his tireless chutzpah desecrated the god that is in women. But the poem is concerned with absences: the wimp is onstage throughout but the Don is offstage after a brief flicker of swordplay. Ottavio-Fischblut keeps having his own life displaced by that of the absent Don Giovanni: thus at line four, ‘One eye reflects a bed and one an urn’ and, in the lovely mini-climax of the second stanza, ‘Gently he turns the corpse upon its back / And finds the hand he holds a fist of stone’. ‘Fischblut always wins’ goes the poem's boast; attuned it may be to Don Ottavio's beautiful song, but a more famous aria, one with a nickname (like an old friend), takes over and the poem ends with the wicked verb, ‘begins’. This points us back to the fact that to make his compact text Hope has debauched the chronology of the opera, not merely concertinaed the sequence of events. Perhaps nobody wins at all. The lines of this fascinating little poem keep undermining one another.

The Hope poem which owes most to the French symbolists is ‘The Double Looking Glass’. Not only does it refuse us the comfort of moral resolution or even of psychological certainty, but the poet himself has declared its lineage. In his introduction to the selection of his poems made by Douglas Stewart in 1963—a particularly brilliant selection despite Stewart's earlier indifference to Hope, and despite the omission of ‘Imperial Adam’—he wrote that ‘this subject or idea of a possible poem recurred to me at a time when I had the idea of writing a poem in a style suggested by certain poems of Mallarmé and Valéry’. He goes on to say that the poem changed its course somewhat in the writing; its narrative compulsion is typical enough of his own work. But its relation to ‘L'Après-midi d'un faune’ and, in lesser measure, to ‘Le Cimetière marin’, remains an important component in its peculiar power of tantalisation.

Essentially, though, the meaning of symbolism for an Australian writer had in some measure to be that of symbolism mediated by Christopher Brennan. Certainly the full scope and power of Brennan's speculations on French poetic theory could not have been felt until the publication of The Prose of Christopher Brennan in 1962 but, as I have already suggested, the main emphases of his thought had come down as an intellectual tradition at the University of Sydney.

Brennan believed that imagination gave one access to ‘the unity which is our true spiritual being’, that analytical language was too crude—or too ‘pure’—a medium to have access to such wholeness, which could only be shadowed forth in the play of symbols and revelatory analogies. In ‘Nineteenth Century Literature’ some of his accounts of the symbol are such as to harmonise easily with Hope's poetic practice. Thus, ‘The symbol is simply that image which, for the special purpose in hand, condenses in itself the greatest number of correspondences’. And again,

A real symbol directs and governs its poem: it is at once starting point and goal, starting point as plain image, goal as symbol: the poem rises out of it, develops within its limits, and builds it up by successive correspondences.

Such observations could with point be read into ‘The Pleasure of Princes’, or into ‘The Coasts of Cerigo’ or ‘Ascent into Hell’, for all the revenant narrative traction of the last-named.

Elsewhere in this essay we can find a more stubborn and challenging passage:

To return to Mallarmé and his theory of style: the symbol governs the whole organism of the poem down to the syntax and what one might call the design of the sense; the phrase should model itself and bend itself to the rhythm of nature that gives the image. Thus in Hérodiade, what any English translation could not give you is the quality of the whole, a smooth dusky limpidity with still points of light here and there, like the jewels of Hérodiade reflected in her shadowy mirror. Or in the Faun the rhythm of the sense, here thronged and pressed together and there escaping into a large sense of fulgency, is just the rhythm of sunlight and shade in the forest …

The second and third sentences of this passage are such lovely examples of criticism as prose poetry, scrumptious and ravishing, that they almost persuade us that what they are offering is a mimetic theory of poetry: until you actually ask yourself how language could ever begin to attempt to mime jewels reflected in a shadowy mirror. Impossible. So we have to turn back to the first sentence and its crucial, slippery phrase, ‘the design of the sense’. It is this which points us to a sense of something like Significant Form at the heart of the symbolist project; to a gestalt which can be intuitively apprehended or which can be grasped by some developed aesthetic sense. It seems to me that Hope's poetry has never gone far along that track. His narratives or arguments are symbolically condensed, but his syntax is open, traditional and relatively even-paced, never attempting the grammatical elisions and metamorphoses which one finds in, say, John Tranter.

This has often, I think, been a source of readers' puzzlement with Hope's practice. One of his poems will put forward concepts which are disconcerting, even subversive, but will put them forward in a soothing, harmonious syntactical flow. The opening stanza of ‘The School of Night’, an intriguing poem, will make my point well enough:

What did I study in your School of Night?
When your mouth's first unfathomable yes
Opened your body to be my book, I read
My answers there and learned the spell aright.
Yet, though I searched and searched, could never guess
What spirits it raised nor where their questions led.

Does the poem really need ‘aright’? Does ‘searched’ have to be doubled? Both of these details are part of a conservative rhetorical tranquillity in the verse which cannot be said to be ‘bending itself to the rhythm of nature that gives the image’. Or, to put it another way, we feel that certain habits of discursive language will not yield their authority to the imaginative gestalt.

When Brennan represents the symbolist task as heroic he stands far closer to Hope; as for instance when he writes in ‘Fact and Idea’ of the need

To see ourselves sub specie aeternitatis, all human interests being united and the whole Human set over against the world, to take the last values and decide what it is that accords with Eternity—what it is that deserves to last; such is the reconciliation, such is our deliverance; the moment of Thought, no trimming of fear-bred tales.

This is very close to the spirit in which Hope chose as epigraph to The Wandering Islands the following lines ironically plucked out from McAuley's poetry:

Men must either bear their guilt and weakness
Or be a servile instrument to powers
That darken knowledge and corrupt the heart.

Both quotations could certainly find a lodging within a libertarian ethic of pride and freedom.

Brennan's account of visionary power, the motor of symbolic apprehension, as it is presented in ‘Vision, Imagination and Reality’, is also akin to that transcendent mode of apprehension which Hope dubbed ‘the creative way’ in the essay ‘Three Faces of Love’. But I have discussed this in another essay.

A final meeting point for these two poets is to be found in their uses of Baudelaire. From the sexual and theological shock tactics of The Wandering Islands onward, one can find gestures and moods in Hope's poetry which are reminiscent of Baudelaire, though the rendered squalor of those Paris alleys and boulevards finds no equivalent. Brennan wrote of the French poet:

It is because Baudelaire was morbid that poetry can again be healthy and glad. The romantics had infected their age with a vague melancholy and incapacity for living. Baudelaire took this on himself and lived it in its full intensity, so that what had been vague became precise and the malady, being thus exasperated, was taken away from us.

Under this rubric, Hope's most Baudelairean poem is ‘The Damnation of Byron’; it is there that the disputed territory between excitement and ennui is made precise and turned into a sort of fable.

But the work in which Hope makes his homage explicit is the ‘Sonnets to Baudelaire’. Using that difficult, slithery Elizabethan bag of tricks, the sonnet sequence, he hangs his poem on moments or aspects of Baudelaire's life (and even on the death of Pushkin). The method has very little in common with that of the addressee, and no affinities with later symbolists. One tends to read the sequence as a discontinuous narrative strung upon certain themes. It is also tempting to read it alongside, or against, ‘The Planctus’, a contemporaneous sonnet sequence of some obscurity, but with strong, undeclared, personal components. In the end one slides off the tiles of both these sequences, fascinated but baffled.

The chief distinction between Hope's poetry and that of the symbolists surely lies in his reliance on narrative traction. It could be said that he has commonly wanted to preserve the concentric fizz, the concatenation, the éclat, of a symbolist poem while keeping the traditional channels of discourse open, sequential. In the circumstances plot becomes important. Things happen. One thing leads to another. We read on to find out what happens next, what monsters await us in the final stanza.

Where you have plot you have people, things and events located in time, even if the plot be miniature and the poem shortish. That which is temporally sequential is also consequential. But a symbolist poem is not like this at all. Its components are organised into—or held in—a harmonious stasis. Form holds them in a balance which suggests no more than the possibility of movement or the shadows of past movement. At its challenging purest, this suggestive inaction can be found in the last three lines of an untranslatable Mallarmé sonnet;

Elle, defunte nue en le miroir, encore
Que, dans l'oubli fermé par le cadre, se fixe
De scintillations sitôt le septuor.

At other times, as with the Faun, the promise of possible action is stronger. After all, we need it to keep us interested: a poem should not be all resistance. It was to this end that Frank Kermode fixed on the figure of the dancer in his study of symbolism, Romantic Image. The dancer moves, but within enclosed space, and her dancing carves an abstract form in the air she breathes. Thus she can represent both movement and the stillness which ideal forms inhabit. How shall we know the body from the pirouette? Poetry makes nothing happen: symbolist poetry allows nothing to happen. It comes as no surprise, then, when Kermode refers to the ‘life-in-death, death-in-life of the Romantic Image’.

More vulgar, more vitalist or it may be more Australian, Hope's poetry has commonly rejected the charms of such passivity. Even his reflective version of the Faun, Susannah, is finally bailed up by the baldheads from the bush. He cannot easily resist telling a story which will have an ending, however morally or cognitively obscure that ending may be. The impersonality of the symbolists can attract him, but not their sustained indeterminacy. Perhaps the poem which goes closest to the suspended, masque-like mood of symbolism is that high-spirited and frequently end-stopped poem, ‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica’, the poem which Douglas Stewart placed at the head of the 1963 Selected Poems:

Let reason ignore the reasons of the heart
Pure knowledge is a sow that eats her farrow;
But wisdom's children may hear mermaids sing
In latitudes not found on any chart.
Fledged without feet, to miss the hunter's arrow
The bird of paradise keeps on the wing.

It is in the first stanza of the same poem that we can read the extremely comforting line, ‘True tales and false alike work by suggestion’. We could add that the house of suggestion has many mansions.

Works Cited

Chisholm, A. R. and J. J. Quinn, eds. The Prose of Christopher Brennan. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1962. All Brennan excerpts are taken from this.

Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue: the 1986 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings. London: Faber, 1988.

Hope, A. D. The Cave and the Spring: Essay in Poetry. 2nd ed. Sydney: Sydney UP, 1974.

———. Collected Poems 1930-1965. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1966.

———. A Late Picking. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1975.

———. A Midsummer Eve's Dream: Variations on a Theme by William Dunbar. Canberra: ANU Press, 1970.

———. The New Cratylus: Notes on the Craft of Poetry. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1979.

Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. London: Routledge, 1957.

McQueen, Humphrey. The Black Swan of Trespass: the Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944. Sydney: Alternative Publishing Cooperative, 1979.

Mallarmé, Stephane. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.

Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. Melbourne or the Bush: Essays on Australian Literature and Society. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974.