Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

Attribution vii Key to Abbreviations of Books viii Introduction 1

1. Chapter 1 7

2. Chapter 2 18

3. Chapter 3 32

4. Chapter 4 57

Bibliography 67

Attribution

A thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in English Literature. Eric Hornsby 1986 The University of Queensland

vii Key to Abbreviations of Books

Books by Margaret Atwood: CG – The Circle Game AC – The Animals in that Country PU – Procedures for Underground PP – Power Politics YAH – You are Happy SP – Selected Poems THP – Two Headed Poems TS – True Stories

Books by Gwen Harwood: P – Poems P2 – Poems Volume 2 SP – Selected Poems LB – The Lion’s Bride

viii Introduction

In the foreword to a seminal work of comparative Australian and Canadian literary criticism – J.P. Matthew’s Tradition in Exile – Claude Bissell observed that “comparisons are most effective and helpful when they deal with divergences from 1 a strong common base”. His comment (and its context) provides a pertinent point of entry into a discussion of the lyric poetry of Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood. In being women (and mothers), in writing out of the recognisably analogous psychic and cultural environments of ‘post-colonial’ Australia and Canada; in having achieved positions of eminence in the critical acclaim of the literary establishments of their respective countries, the two poets would seem, superficially at least, to share ‘a strong common base’ in the circumstances of their artistic production. Equally obvious, in this initial cursory glance, would be the apparently great differences, or ‘divergences’ between the

1. C. Bissell: Foreword to Tradition in Exile, by J. P. Matthews, Cheshire Publishing Ltd, Melbourne, (1962), pp. v-vi 1 ERIC HORNSBY

stylistic and formal aspects of their work, the voices employed and the mythopoetic worlds given expression in their poems. Typographically, their poems look different. Where 2 Margaret Atwood’s poetry is recognisably modern, eschewing the structural conventions of traditional prosody, Gwen Harwood not infrequently writes sonnets and often uses regular stanzaic patterns, metres and rhyme structures. Atwood’s characteristic laconic, often apophthegmatic voice would seem to contrast sharply with much of the almost romantic voicing of Harwood. The overtly political nature of Atwood’s explicit analyses of the post-colonial dilemma in Canada; of the feminist dilemma and of the schisms they produce in perception, identity and human relationship, seems, at a glance, quite divorced from the reflective, often elegeic or pastoral tone of many of Harwood’s poems and their fascination and intimate engagement with the music, art and philosophy of a European cultural heritage. Perhaps a clue to these ‘divergences’ may be found in a comparative cultural context. Beryl Langer, in a paper delivered at the inaugural conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Canadian Studies, held in Sydney in 1983, called Presence and Absence: Women and Cultural Creation in Canada and Australia, argues persuasively that historically and geographically explicable differences in the conception of national identity in the two countries

2. I will be mainly concerned with Atwood’s longer collections beginning with The Circle Game in 1966, mentioning only briefly her earlier, more traditionally conventional work – none of which appears in her Selected Poems. 2 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

promote a difference in the cultural status accorded to writing by women. She concludes that the greater ‘presence’ of women writers in contemporary Canadian literature compared to that in Australian, is due to the fact that “while women’s search for self is constructed as outside the bounds of legitimate culture in the Australian context, and perceived in an essentially adversary way, in the Canadian context it becomes a metaphor for the national quest, and takes its place 3 within the cultural mainstream”. The greater popular awareness that this would suggest exists in Canada of the metaphorical connection between women’s exploration of the concept of identity and an examination of the problematic axiomatics of post-colonialism suggests, perhaps, an explanation for the more explicit treatment those axiomatics receive in Atwood’s work compared to that of Harwood. Similarly, the suggestion that legitimation is more problematic for women writers in the Australian cultural context, and there are certainly none given the status of Atwood or Margaret Lawrence in Canada, may partially explain Gwen Harwood’s preoccupation with formal structure – making her poems look more like poems – and certainly helps us to understand some of the insecurity about her work that drives her to constantly test herself against

3. B. D. Langer: Presence and Absence: Women and Cultural Creation in Canada and Australia, in Theory and Practice in Comparative Studies: Canada, Australia and New Zealand, edited by Peter Crabb, from the first conference of ANZACS, Sydney, (1983), Macquarie University, 287-298, pp. 296 (Langer’s emphases). 3 ERIC HORNSBY the critical establishment with her various pseudonyms. I will have more to say about Harwood’s use of pseudonyms and poetic personae later in this thesis, but at this point I merely wish to point out that there may be culturally explicable reasons for some of the differences between the two poets’ work. In the ensuing examinations of their poetry, my general thesis will be that, despite the inevitable differences of their individual approaches to their poetry and of the cultural contexts in which they make those approaches, they share a number of characteristics and intrinsic, especially thematic, preoccupations that facilitate a comparative perspective on their work and justify the view that, just as the cultural contexts of Australia and Canada can be seen to be ‘divergences from a strong common base’, so too can the very different poems of Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood be seen to be ultimately derivative of a similar source – individual but related manifestations of the same difficult, schizophrenic Muse of female, post-colonial and (subsuming these metonymically) human dilemmas of existence. This compression of terminology perhaps needs some further clarifying explanation – some kind of de-elaboration. In a more exploded view (hence the fragments) I believe that the quests for meaning in the work of these two poets reflect their heightened consciousness of the dichotomies intrinsic to living as a human being in the Western World. The inevitably schizoid Weltanschauung of feminism: a recognition of the political implications of the ‘self’ being defined as ‘other’ in a phallogocentric universe; and of post-

4 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

colonialism: the awareness of the disjunctive consequences of a dislocation of one’s cultural heritage (the identity crisis encapsulated in Northrop Frye’s ‘Who am I / Where is here?’ 4 reframing ) – these perceptions of schisms in identity, and their inevitable problematization of the inherited language that embodies and therefore propagates them, can be seen to be part of and figures for, more general apprehensions of dichotomy. This thesis will attempt to broadly outline some of these dichotomies as they appear in and inform the lyric poetry of Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood. In doing so, it will try to avoid what I consider to be the artificiality of comparing the poets too closely – trying to force them to conform to the expectations of similarity adumbrated by the comparative context. Ultimately, I seek merely to juxtapose the two poets’ work in the belief that in doing so, the very real correspondences between them will make themselves apparent all the more validly for their life-like uncertainty and inconsistency.

4. In his 1971 book, The Bush Garden, Northrop Frye mused: "It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question 'Who am I?' than by some such riddle as 'Where is here?'" 5

It is no longer possible to be both human and alive. 1 – Atwood The dualities of human existence have been a central concern throughout both these poets’ work. Even the titles of some of Atwood’s collections reflect her preoccupation with a bifurcated reality: Double Persephone, The Animals in that Country, Procedures for Underground, Two-headed Poems. For Atwood, this duality is explicitly linked to the schizophrenia of female experience and of the post-colonial position in Canada. Her first major collection, The Circle Game, published in 1966, presents a world in which landscape functions as a metaphor for ‘self’. The first poem in the

1. Margaret Atwood, Power Politics, House of Anansi Press, Toronto, (1972), pp. 30. Future references to quotes from the two poets are cited in the text in parentheses. Titles of collections are abbreviated in accordance with the Key to Abbreviations of Books given earlier. 7 ERIC HORNSBY

collection, This is a Photograph of Me, introduces and explains the way this metaphor will function. It begins with a desription of the photograph – “smeared / print : blurred lines and grey flecks / blended with the paper”. The reader is led, as the description continues, through the surface of the photograph into the landscape it depicts – “slope, a small framed house.// In the background there is a lake, / and beyond that, some low hills”. The precise matter-of-fact voice in the poem makes the lake in the picture as accessible as the sea in A Descent Through the Carpet”, until the characteristically parenthetical disclosure of the fact that “the photograph was taken / the day after I drowned”. The speaker is “in the lake, in the centre / of the picture, just under the surface” – the submerged voice of the Canadian drowned 2 poet. Both senses of the duplicity of this shift in speaking position – from next to us holding up the photograph to dead body in the lake in the photograph – reveal to us the nature of the poets we are reading. Firstly, she has been ‘double’ to us with her ventriloquist’s trick and secondly, she warns us that much that is submerged will be made to speak. Her opening poem, appropriately enough, thus provides us with a heuristic for reading her poetry: “but if you look long enough, / eventually / you will be able to see me”. It also emphasizes the importance of the poet’s relationship to landscape, which will remain an important theme in her work, and announces

2. For an analysis of the ‘drowned poet’ as an archetype of Canadian literature, see Milton Wilson: Klein’s Drowned Poet, Canadian Variations on an Old Theme, in Canadian Literature, 6 (Autumn, 1960), pp. 14. 8 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood or adumbrates some of her other major concerns – surfaces that reflect, conceal and distort; metaphorical journeys in search of a fundamentally split self; polarizations of speaker/ audience, self/other, stasis/movement, appearance and reality. The dualism of the speaking voice and the bipartite structure of the poem with its central twist of perspective herald the irony essential to Atwood’s examination of such dualities.

Interestingly, Gwen Harwood also begins her first collection, Poems, published in 1963, with a poem that announces themes of duality. In Alter Ego (SP. 3), the poet seeks for that other self “whose pulse is mine… knows what I was, will be / and all I am”, but “who will not answer me”. Beginning with the rhetorical question, “who stands beside me still, / nameless… ?”, Harwood reflects musingly on the nature of her alter ego – that part of herself which exists “beyond / time’s desolating drift”. The immortal soul, or whatever we wish to call it, is characteristically related to music – a vital interest in Harwood’s life (she has herself taught music and was for a time the organist of All Saints’ Church, Brisbane) and consistently an important theme in her poems. Mozart is evokes, part of Harwood’s characteristic engagement with, and constant allusion to, other artistic figures. His ability to “hear / a symphony complete, … plain in his inward ear / in time without extent”, is equated with the complete, temporally unlimited knowledge of “this one, whom I greet / yet cannot name”. The mention of Mozart leads us into the narrative context

9 ERIC HORNSBY of the poem, the situation out of which these reflections arise: it is evening, the poet is practising her music – “I rehearse / Mozart’s cascading thirds / Lights lingering tones disperse”. The ‘lingering tones’ of light reflect Harwood’s use of music as a complete metaphor for the temporal flux of existence. “Music and thought reverse / their flow (brilliantly continuing the flux image of ‘Mozart’s cascading thirds’) as the poet remembers, again very characteristically, the epiphany of mortality that accompanies first love and ends the static idyll of childhood as a ‘blown flame’ disrupts ‘steady air’: “time will reclaim / all music manifest”. But for now, life continues – in this evening reverie, the poet turns to address her alter ego directly. As in Margaret Atwood’s poetry, there is an awareness of many different kinds of voices – here the ‘questioning voices’ of time and music – that the poets will trace in her humble journey to knowledge of herself: I trace their questioning voices, know little, but learn and go on paths of love and pain to meet you, face to face (P. 4) Like Atwood’s This is a Photograph of Me, Alter Ego ends with the suggestion that the other self can be seen or met or eventually comprehended with effort and close attention. The structure of Harwood’s poem, contrasting sharply as it does with Atwood’s stylistic approach, brings me to note this fundamental difference between the works of the two

10 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

poets. Harwood’s characteristic (but not inevitable) regular stanzaic patterns and often complex rhyming schemes, such as the A B A A C B of Alter Ego, reflect both her fascination with music and her attitude to poetry. In a very interesting interview with Rodney Hall in 1975, she says that “the only way to learn from poems is to live in them, commit them to 3 memory”. The musical qualities of regular, rhymed poetic structures would, of course, facilitate a poem’s committal to memory, but far more interesting, I think, is what she reveals in this interview about the almost antithetical nature of language and form. She says she loves to “wrestle the language against the form like Jacob wrestling the angel”. I will discuss this question of the fundamental stylistic differences between the two poets later on in this thesis, but I will preempt some of my argument by suggesting that Harwood’s sense of the opposition of language and form, ‘wrestling’ her poems into conventional structures, is in fact symptomatic of the same awareness of dualities that informs Atwood’s poetry. Atwood’s contemporary free verse, which characterizes her work from The Circle Game on, but actually developed from her more traditionally conventional earlier poetry, is her most comfortable poetic medium for examining the paradoxes of life, just as more formal (more musical?) poetry is often Harwood’s. The kinds of paradoxes, or dualities , brought into focus in each poet’s work are quite individual, but there is much common ground between them. Atwood , by far the more

3. From An interview with Rodney Hall, ABC Audio Record, No. 38 (1975). 11 ERIC HORNSBY political of the two poets, explicitly examines the alienated and dissociated sensibility of the ‘colonial ‘ in the ‘colonized’ land. This is particularly important in The Circle Game, The Animals in That Country, and Procedures for Underground. It is also the central theme in her third book, which will not be discussed in this thesis, The Journals of Susanna Moodie. The specific intertextuality of Atwood ‘s book and the real Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush takes this collection beyond the scope of my thesis, except, perhaps, to note in passing that Harwood, too, has written back to, and out of, other works of literature – her Meditations on Wyatt I and II (SP . 106) , for example, or the Tristan and Isolde poems in The Lion’ s Bride. The landscape of the drowned, introduced in This is a Photograph of Me, continues as an essential feature of other Atwood poems such as After the Flood, We; A Descent Through the Carpet; Winter Sleeping; Pre-Amphibean; Attitudes to the Mainland. Surfacing from the submerged state is a figure of birth and waking, and is seen to be inextricably linked to an estrangement from the flux of the watery, pre-amphibean element of subconscious pre-life or sleep. In the largely implied narrative of A Descent Through the Carpet” the narrator is brought back to the surface by the Vancouver nine o’ clock canon ‘s blast . Her surfacing is imaged harshly: “emerged and / beached on the carpet”, “I was born / dredged up from time” (CG. 31 ) . The submerged world beneath the carpet is not depicted as a less difficult place than conscious ‘reality’ . There are “no edens in the waste ocean”. Its inhabitants are seen ‘realistically’: “blind, insatiable, all

12 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

/gaping jaws and famine” – “the voracious eater / the voracious eaten”. Yet they form the primal base of our authentic ancestry. Atwood reiterates this in Pre-amphibean (CG. 77 ): “sluggish in our blood / all ancestors / are warm fish moving”. To be born, to wake, is to be “stranded, astounded / in a drying world, the “air / ungainly in our new lungs / with sunlight streaming merciless on the shores of morning “. (ne thinks immediately of Kenneth Slessor’s poem, Sleep, which ends: ” life with remorseless forceps beckoning – / 4 pangs and betrayal of harsh birth”. ) Air is the element of consciousness, cut off from flux “the element / where we/ must calculate according to solidities”. This is the same “thin marooning air” of Notes from Various Pasts (AC. 11 ), another of Atwood ‘s poems of surfacing . In this one, the poet is more concerned with the duality of the experience of surfacing. On the one hand, “eyes and lungs” are gained, ” freedom / to tell the morning from the night / to breathe”, but on the other hand, the severing effect of consciousness is lamented – “have I lost / an electric wisdom / in the thin marooning air ?” A kind of innate knowledge, the flux of preconsciousness (the alter ego beyond time’s desolating drift ?) is lost in “the journey upwards to the blue- grey surface, the transition”. The poet is left at the end, beached, trying but unable to decipher the “once-living / and phosphorescent meanings / fading in [her] hands”. “The

4. Kenneth Slessor: Sleep in Selected Poems, Angus and Robertson, Modern Poets Edition, Sydney (1977) pp. 106. 13 ERIC HORNSBY words lie washed ashore / on the margins, mangled by the journey”. This very post-colonial awareness of ‘margins’ and ‘transitions’ is typical of Atwood. Her poetry frequently involves the denial of the centre/periphery paradigms of imperialism and concerns itself with giving voice to the colonial, the one transformed by the journey (and to the female self which is also marginalized by the hegemony). In the early poem Evening Trainstation Before Departure (CG. 22), she says: “I live / on all the edges there are”. (We might note that a surface is another kind of edge.) This poem involves the kind of journey that becomes more than geographical in Atwood’s metaphorical association of landscape and self. Journey to the Interior (CG. 70) is another obvious example where this metaphor is central. The correlation of the journey of self-discovery with the journey of the pioneer is developed in a rhetorical structure of comparison and contrast – “there are similarities / I notice … there are differences / of course”. The poem ends with the ultimate allegory of a post-colonial sense of landscape as self: “it is easier for me to lose my way / forever here, than in other landscapes”. The pioneer in Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer (AC. 36) does in fact lose his way. His desperate attempt to superimpose an imported order on the natural flux of life in ‘the interior ‘ ends inevitably in disintegration . Atwood ‘s poetic mythology of an antediluvian landscape and of the

14 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood submerged ancestors which need to be acknowledged, find s expression in part VI of the poem : if he had known unstructured space is a deluge and stocked his log-house boat with all the animals even the wolves, he might have floated. (AC. 38) But the pioneer suffers, to use Northrop Frye’s term, from the ‘garrison mentality ‘ of the colonist – the ‘metal spacesuit’ of the speaker in A Fortification (AC. 16); the “lake – enclosed island with no bridges” of the children in The Circle Game (CG. 48). His attempt to convert bush into garden confronts him with all the dilemmas of the self/other, subject/object, stasis/process, consciousness/unconsciousness dichotomies that Atwood herself examines in her poetry. His concepts of bush and garden “have their roots in another land” ( see Two Gardens (PU. 16-17)). and in the end through eyes made ragged by his effort, the tension between subject and object, the green vision, the unnamed whale invaded (AC. 39)

15 ERIC HORNSBY

The green vision (the organic landscape with its ordered absence rather than absence of order) that annihilates the pioneer and his artificial dichotomies is significantly imaged as ‘the unnamed whale’, tying this poem to the earlier Migration: C.P.R (CG. 69). The whale is both representative of the pre-amphibean ancestors – the spirits of place alien to the coloniser – and, more importantly, alludes to Frye’s description of Canada, in his Conclusion to The Literary History of Canada, as an alien continent. “The traveler from Europe”, he notes, “edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an 5 inconceivably large whale”. The pioneer in this poem is a visionary (like the ancient mariner figure of the addressee in Procedures for Underground (PU. 24)) and his disintegration is, to a large extent, compassionated as an archetype of the conscious human mind’s struggle to overcome its sense of alienation. His is, in fact, a dis-integration. He is compassionated because of his failure to colonize, or, more specifically, because of his recognition of that inevitable failure. Other failing, would- be colonists are not compassionated because they lack the sensibility of their failure. They are usually negatively associated with technology and rationality (the chain-saw reasoning of The Surveyors (AC.4)); with established authority (the insane political conspirators who are The City Planners (CG. 36)) and ultimately with the Western cultural heritage

5. Northrop Frye: Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada – quoted in The Where of Here: Atwood and a Canadian Tradition by Sandra Djwa in Davidson and Davidson eds., The Art of Margaret Atwood, Toronto, House of Anansi (1981), pp. 18. 16 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood and its patriarchy (the “methodist grandfathers with jaws / carved as wood pulpits” whose “language is law” in Migration: C.P.R (CG. 65)).

17 2

Hearts are said to pound Atwood What makes this an extremely difficult thesis to write is my regret at having to omit so much . To do justice to Atwood ‘s poetry, one could spend the whole thesis discussing just one small aspect of it . Since the same could be said of Harwood’s, much will inevitably be left unsaid . Given this apology, I will now be really reductive and suggest that most of the overtly post-colonial theme in Atwood’s poetry can be seen to be encapsulated in any one of a number of individual poems: The Circle Game; Migration: C.P.R; A Place: Fragments; The Reincarnation of Captain Cook; Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer. One particularly simple and effective example, which nonetheless seems to epitomize Atwood’s most characteristic features, is Comic Books vs History (PU. 48). The duality implied in the title is an explicitly antithetical one – the illusory comic books are not just different but

18 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood antagonistic to the actual, though meager and fragmentary history. Atwood speaks directly out of the infinite irony of her personal dualistic vision. The parenthetical subtitle (reminding us that if we look long enough we will be able to see her): (1949, 1969), is a simple parataxis of dates invoking for us the schism between the ten-year-old Atwood and the thirty-year-old – the innocent and the experienced. For the child, the blackboard map of “your country” (most obviously, the United States) was “blank, waiting / to be filled with whatever shapes / we chose”. It is the “place of absolute / unformed beginning” sought in Migration: C.P.R. It is also the place of unlimited potential that is the human imagination. The ‘shapes’ chosen to fill it are the exotic steel cities of the comic books and the larger-than-life super-heroes and beautifully surreal violence that inhabit them. “Our side” (Canada, prosaic reality) “held only / real sized explorers, confined / to animal skin coats”, who plodded and eventually died, most unglamorously, of scurvy. Twenty years later, “when I reached that other / shore finally”, the comic book mythology is exploded bythe iconoclastic revelation of the “decaying magic” of the illusion: “the riddled buildings”, the heroes “collapsed inside / their rubber suits”. The “beautiful orange collisions” of surreal violence quickly fade before the real, largely psychological violence of American society with its multiplying “statistics and diseased labels”. In the end, the voice of experience, now the singular first person because the disillusionment is a personal experience, returns to Canada to “search / for the

19 ERIC HORNSBY actual”. The overpowering need is that of the post-colonial for an authentic mythology that suits the ‘where’ of ‘here’. Atwood was, in fact, greatly influenced by Frye’s critical theory and Comic Books vs History is a brilliantly concise poetic statement of the Canadian poet’s need to make Canada the mythic centre of her imaginative reality. Naming is still problematic (the whale still unnamed), the cry is still implicitly that of the speaker in The Circle Game or The Reincarnation of Captain Cook : “erase all maps”. As is usual in Atwood, ‘the actual ‘ is a cryptic and fragmentary heritage or organic relics – lost bones, burnt logs, pieces of fur. This echo of the “remnants of ancestors … fossil bones and fangs”, found upon surfacing from A Descent Through the Carpet, links the post-colonial exigencies of the Canadian poet with the more general dichotomies of human consciousness. The passage from innocent to experienced here is also that of a recognition of the gap between the potentials of human imagination and the limitations of ‘reality’. The analogy between the dualities of post-colonial existence and those of female existence is made explicit in part 4 of The Circle Game (CG. 49). The adversary relationship of the sexes, so integral to Atwood ‘s poetic world of dualities (and the controlling motif of Power Politics) is imaged here in terms of Atwood’s self-as-landscape trope. Here the ‘I’ is woman-as-map while the male adversary ‘you’ is portrayed as a “tracer of maps” and, another great signifier of the imperialist mentality for Atwood, “a memorizer / of names”. Naming is an attempt “to hold / these places / in their proper

20 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood places”. The female self, subjected to the imprisoning definitions of phallogocentrism, is imaged as the map “transfixed / by your eyes / cold blue thumbtacks”. The eye imagery here connects with the whole undercurrent of the imagery of vision in Atwood’s poetry. Its figuring of the duplicity of the appearance/reality dichotomy introduced in This is a Photograph of Me, is often used to expose the essential falsity of any monistic assertion of dominance. This is true of the imperialist assertion of dominance of the pioneer in Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer: obstinate he stated, the land is solid … watching his foot sink down through stone up to the knee (AC. 38) It is also true of the male assertion of a phallogocentric reality. Tricks with Mirrors (YAH. 24-7), for example, is a very complex poetic sequence that uses a developing mirror metaphor to challenge the underlying assumption of such an assertion . It is (if one may make such a statement) pure Atwood – the laconic voice so conscious of the poignancy of irony in every scenario. Beginning, “it ‘s no coincidence / this is a used / furniture warehouse”, the poem evokes the last part of Migration: C.P.R. – “there are more secondhand / stores here than expected” (CG. 6 8). Where the ‘we’ of the earlier poem were unsuccessfully seeking to escape from colonial

21 ERIC HORNSBY

“allegories in the misty east” (only to find the West not a place of “unformed beginning”, but a place of secondhand stores catering for the ‘needs’ they unwittingly brought with them), the female first person persona of Tricks with Mirrors seeks to escape from definitions of identity imposed on her by the male’s cultural gender expectations – part of the used furniture of the warehouse, repository of patriarchal values. She describes herself ironically as a mirror, initially merely reflecting the image the man, her lover ‘has’ of her. He would, in fact, like to see her as his mirror image. But then, by elaborating on the mirror metaphor, she begins to subvert this image. “Think about the frame”, she says, the nails, the marks in the wood, “they are important too”. There is more to the mirror, to the woman, than what her lover sees reflected in her – his own image (of women). “Don’t assume it is passive / or easy”, this relegation of the authentic female self to the margin – the forgotten ‘frame’ around the merely reflective surface of the mirror. “Consider the restraint it takes” to effect the suppression of self necessary for the illusion “that you are suspended in me // beautiful and frozen”. The mirror metaphor has evolved into one of ice. Stasis is, as usual in Atwood, a sign of the artificial. Real life, real female identity, should be organic, a flux. I wanted to stop this, this life flattened against the wall … this life of vision only, split and remote, a lucid impasse (YAH. 27)

22 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

The image of this life of appearances, “of vision only” (as usual, the enjambment is highly significant in Atwood’s verse), completes the woman-as-mirror metaphor in the poem. “I confess this is not a mirror, / it is a door I am trapped behind”. Atwood’s female speaker in the poem is trapped by the man’s failure to recognize that the female self is more than a mirror for the male ego: “I wanted you to see me here … Instead you stand in front of me / combing your hair”. The poem ends, or rather, refuses to end, with a final deconstruction of the mirror metaphor: “Perhaps I am not a mirror. / Perhaps I am a pool. // Think about pools”. In the context of Atwood’s poetic world of water and submerged voices, this is the ultimate resistance of closure – particularly appropriate in a poem that asserts the female self’s own resistance to the closure of phallogocentric definition. The two dimensionality (ironic in this study of duality) of the “life flattened against the wall” of the woman-as-mirror recalls the billboard lady of On the Streets, Love (CG. 38). This cardboard image of a woman, a stereotype of male concepts of femininity also resists closure – brought to vampirish life by the passing men in the street: “in her / veins flows the drained / blood of their desire”. Similarly, the “grey man … glides from his poster”, enlivened by the “voracious women” who masochistically wish to possess him, or perhaps the even more abstract image of a memory of him – “are you dead? are you dead? / they say hoping”. With both sexes thus trapped in stereotypical gender roles (equally unable to open the door

23 ERIC HORNSBY of perception in the wall that separates them – see Tricks with Mirrors part IV), love becomes: a matter for either scavengers (turning death to life) or (turning life to death) for predators (CG. 38) This pathological nature of the love relationship receives its most extended treatment in Power Politics, but it has been a dominant theme for Atwood since her earliest poetry, receiving particularly brilliant treatment in poems like On the Streets Love; The Circle Game; Letters Towards and Away II (CG. 82 ); The Circe/Mud Poems (YAH. 45-71); The Right Hand Fights the Left (THP. 56); Marrying the Hangman (THP. 48); and True Romances (TS. 40-5). The famous ‘ epigraph ‘ of the fish hook and the open eye introduces the destructiveness of the relationship in Power Politics: “You fit into me / like a hook into an eye”. Its manifold irony prefigures the range of irony in the rest of the book – from the sterile acerbity of Their Attitudes Differ (PP. 10) to the bathetic farce of They Eat Out (PP. 5) to the anguished tenderness of part 2 of Small Tactics (PP. 17). Pervading all is a sense of the tragic inevitability about the failure of the protagonists in the ‘love affair’ to make meaningful contact with each other. Both ‘I’ and ‘ you ‘ in Power Politics suffer from the dissociation of consciousness, the alienation of self that seems

24 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

to Atwood to be an inevitable part of the modern human condition. The wish to return to the pre-conscious flux of nature, lost to us in the estranging surfacings of birth and waking, is here dismissed as impossible. We are essentially split: But face it … … our heads float several inches above our necks moored to us by rubber tubes 1 (PP. 9) The remorseless forceps of life that beckoned to Slessor have become, for Atwood , internalised as a remorselessly analytic and sterile consciousness – the difficult legacy of being both alive and human. Thus the first person persona will “approach this love / like a biologist / pulling on [her] rubber gloves and white labcoat”. The essential dichotomy of human life that leads to such a dissociation of sensibility is readily understood by Atwood’s female speaker , since the very experience of being female in the phallogocentrically defined world involves the schizophrenic duality of being both mirror and frame , other and self . The awareness of one such duality fractures a monistic perspective on life, inevitably leading to the recognition of others. Hence the analogy of the feminist position with the post-colonial in

1. Note the characteristically brilliant irony of the word ‘several’ here – both quantitatively and qualitatively describing the severing ‘inches’ between head and body. All of Atwood’s verse should be read with such close attention – as she points out in This is a Photograph of Me. 25 ERIC HORNSBY

Atwood’s work (and, according to Beryl Langer, in Canadian literature generally – see my introduction). The post-colonial experience is also one that fractures a monistic perspective revealing the arbitrariness of centres and affirmed realities, the effort required to maintain the tension between subject and object. The ‘I’ in Power Politics (like the backdrop in Backdrop addresses Cowboy (AC. 50-51)) is both feminist and post-colonial: Imperialist, keep off the trees I said. No use: you walk backwards, admiring your own footprints. (PP. 15) Human destructiveness is linked to the oblivious assertion of a monistic perspective – that of the narcissistic male, the narrow-minded imperialist. The female self, who can readily identify with the colonized landscape, the cowboy ‘s backdrop, is “the space you desecrate / as you pass through” ( AC. 5 1 ). The violence of such desecration is imaged most horrifically in A Women’s Issue (TS.5 4) , where women are again identified with a colonized landscape – the vagina is “enemy territory , no man’ s / land”. The terrible ‘exhibits’ of various kinds of sexual violence done to women are used in the poem to image the destructive consequences of this imperialistic definition of women as ‘territory’ and as ‘ other ‘. The poem ‘s last line , “who invented the word love ?”, besides emphasising the problematic logos of phallogocentrism , echoes the ” How long will you demand /

26 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

I love you ? ” of the female persona of Power Politics . Again it is the phallogocentric imperialist who is the source of the destructiveness: You did it it was you who started the countdown… … you attempt merely power you accomplish merely suffering (PP. 32-33) The ‘countdown’, which begins the apocalyptic descent of the “demonic number zero”, is here a metaphor for the self- annihilating effect of ‘attempting merely power’ – cutting oneself off from the kind of osmotic communion with nature, the submerged pre-life and the lover, that constitutes spirituality in Atwood’s poetic mythology. It is characteristically opposed with the emblemata of self- destructive male technocracy. The loss of such spirituality in the dissociation of consciousness leads to the garrison mentality of the male imperialist which is painfully apparent to the female ‘I’ in Atwood’s poems. How long do you expect me to wait while you cauterize your senses, one after another turning yourself to an impervious glass tower ? (PP. 32) Atwood’s female ‘I’ (the ‘open eye’) is cursed with the iconoclastic and soul-destroying vision of this process in

27 ERIC HORNSBY operation. She is a Sibyl, forced to speak the truth of the loss of human spirituality, the inevitability of death, the impossibility of escape from garrisons which are ultimately prisons. She retreats into schizophrenia: I don’t care I leave that to my necessary sibyl (that’s what she’s for) with her safely bottled anguish and her glass despair (CG. 64) Or she is trapped into the masochistically cynical destructiveness of the Siren in The Siren Song: I don’t enjoy it here… with these two feathery maniacs, I don’t enjoy singing this trio, fatal and valuable … alas it is a boring song but it works every time (YAH. 39) Like Circe in Atwood’s rewriting of the male Odysseus myth, the (disenchanted?) Siren is trapped on her island by her own iconoclastic vision of the essential isolation of human consciousness. Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island.

28 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind. (YAH. 49). Duality features yet again in the title of this poem sequence: Circe/Mud Poems (YAH. 45-70). The love relationship of Circe and Odysseus, like that in Power Politics, provides the metaphorical arena in which Atwood explores the schizoid dilemmas of desire: this is not what I want but I want this also (YAH. 60) of female identity: Is this what you would like me to be, this mud woman ? Is this what I would like to be ? It would be so simple. (YAH. 61) of ‘reality’ itself: There are two islands at least. (YAH. 69) These dualities are seen as irresolvable, an irremediable crux of human life – like the faulty heart of The Woman who could not live with her faulty heart (THP. 14-15). The female ‘I’ in this poem, another of Atwood’s visionary personas, again sees beyond the phallocentric logos in her examination of her faulty heart: “I do not mean the symbol of love… I mean this lump of muscle”. It is still a symbol, of course, becoming (in

29 ERIC HORNSBY the context of Atwood’s poetic world) a synecdoche for the isolated human self: “this isolate, this caved hermit… all hearts float in their own deep oceans of no light”. Hearts are said to pound: this is to be expected, the heart’s regular struggle against being drowned. As we have seen, however, drowning is a two-way street in Atwood’s poetry. Most people are not visionaries, they are unaware of such dualities. Most hearts onomatopoeically express the imperialist monism: “I want, I want / I want, I want”. The heart of the visionary ‘I’, aware of dualism: is more duplicitous… It says I want, I don’t want, I want, and then a pause. It forces me to listen. The duplicitous heart, like Harwood’s ‘alter ego’, provides no answer to the intrinsic dualities of life. Yet, like the drowned ‘I’ in This is a photograph of Me, it exhorts us to the constant effort of vision, of trying to see the ‘actual’ truth of those dualities. at night it is the infra-red third eye that remains open while the other two are sleeping but refuses to say what it has seen. In the poetry of Margaret Atwood, it is ultimately the acceptance of the dualism of the faulty heart of human consciousness (and the schisms of female and post-colonial experience it encompasses) that allows the direct

30 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood communication with the disjointed self that enables the “uneasy truce” to be made when The Woman Makes Peace with her Faulty Heart (THP. 86-71).

31 3

the great wound of the world Harwood The poetic vision of Gwen Harwood too, is posited on such recognitions of fundamental dualities of human existence. The essential split between the self and the ‘alter ego’ is seen to be the product of ‘times’ desolating drift’, introducing to us the dualism of what is perhaps her major theme – the severing effects of time that produce the schism between the mortal corporeal self and the immortal spiritual self. This theme is described succinctly enough by the young woman in Boundary Conditions (P. 73 ) as: mankind’s old dichotomy: mind and matter; flesh and spirit; what has been and what will be; desire that flares beyond our fate. In her earlier poems especially, the awareness of this dichotomy, central to human existence, is expressed in terms

32 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

of a hunger of the spirit for some Platonic absolute that will transcend the mortal limitations of the flesh. This hunger is that of the man in The Wine is Drunk (P. 6) who finds, when “mortal fatigue has humbled his / exulting flesh”, that “all he’d seek / in a loved body’s gulfs and hollows // changes to otherness”. There is the same sense of self/other paradigms and of the fundamental isolation of the individual that we found in Atwood’s poetry. Here it is imaged as the “gross darkness” in which the man must “cherish more than all plenitude the hunger / that drives the spirit”. The wife in The Old Wives’ Tale (P. 22-23), who is terrified by the epiphany of her own mortality (another case of a mirror revealing the truth of the self), also felt her spirit “gave / a cry of hunger”. Her sense of the inadequacy of the world of ‘trivial cares ‘ as a place for the fulfillment of human spiritual potential elicits this impassioned plea: “Grant me more / than this bare sustenance, I crave / some combat worthy of my sword”. For Harwood, this hunger for transcendence is counterpoised with what Alison Hoddinott describes as her “twentieth century awareness from a woman’s point of view 1 of the Romantic dilemma of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. Certainly the disembodied, lifeless stasis of the Grecian Urn will not appease the hunger of the self for that other self, the alter ego beyond time’s desolating drift. In Harwood’s poetry, as in Atwood’s, flux is seen to be the true nature of human being. She would attempt to bring to life the

1. Alison Hoddinott: Gwen Harwood and the Philosophers, in Southerly, 41, (September 1981), pp. 276-7. 33 ERIC HORNSBY frozen pastoral scene on Keats’ urn. Thus Harwood’s poetic prerogative of remythologising is exercised to restore Daphne from her Ovidian metamorphosis into a tree. Like most of Harwood’s poems, Daphne Restored (P. 47 ) is an extremely complex poetic statement. Daphne, who in the myth was transformed into a laurel tree by her father (at her request) to protect her from the cupid-stung Apollo, is here returned into human form. As in Atwood’s process of surfacing, this re-transformation of Daphne is a figure of birth and waking as well as a confirmation of the reality of the human condition being one of constant change. Like Atwood’s pre-amphibean world, Daphne’s subconscious arboreal life is one of a kind of osmotic communion with nature that is irreconcilable with human consciousness. Its unattainability is implied simultaneously with its imaging – suggesting the inevitability of the severing effects of consciousness: Never will flesh and bone ascend in myriad green significance, never with bird or raindrop dance light-veined on shifting planes of wind. The awareness of the inexorability of time’s desolating drift and the consequent impossibility of stasis in human life (the “cherished molds” of The Old Wives’ Tale are broken by “time’s raining blows” (P. 23)) is implicitly associated with the fatal fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Biblical genesis myth. Daphne herself becomes the tree of knowledge from whose boughs the ‘pre-fallen’ lovers (“who unrehearsed in sorrow made / their time-annihilating vows”) plucked

34 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

“love’s classic fruit”. It is at this point in the poem that the transforming lightning strikes, metaphorically associating Daphne’s ‘rebirth’ (“Deep within the central spire… a pulse began”) with the ‘fall of man’ – both of which involve all the complexity of a new ‘conception’ of mortality. Harwood’s poetry often explores this moment of epiphany when the knowledge of one’s own mortality strikes, like lightning, in a painful illumination. The allusions to the allegory of the fall in her imaging of such an epiphany (the antithesis of that of the word’s etymological origin) symbolically associates the two, suggesting that the dichotomies of time and mortality that produce the schism between body and spirit are inherent in the nature of the human world – a world that is as intrinsically flawed as the irrevocably ‘fallen’ world of Christian mythology. Childhood is seen to be analogous to the static ‘pre-fallen’ state for Harwood, and is often ended by an iconoclastic revelation of the nature of love. The primal scene in The Glass Jar (P. 28) is one example of such a revelation. Another is the “new genesis” of the child in A Postcard (P. 32) on “that day my dolls did not return my kiss”. In this poem, the first person persona’s memory of her childhood epiphany is triggered upon seeing a postcard of a painting she used to view with her father as part of their father-daughter love relationship. Now herself a grandmother, her sense of loss at the inexorable passage of time, brought into sharp focus by the unchanged, static hunting scene in the postcard (now viewed by “my children’s children, with my father’s eyes”)

35 ERIC HORNSBY evokes the memory of the childhood epiphany that ended her innocence of mortality. The “blind, beaked hunger, crying… its bird-clear syllables of mortal pain”, that was born in the “new genesis” of this epiphany, is for Harwood, as essential to being both alive and human as the “authentic modes of breath” that Daphne is “freed” to learn. Inseparable from Daphne’s own ‘new genesis’ of authentic human existence is the fatal knowledge that will “suture / waking to waking grief”. This sense of there being, at the very heart of human being, some great core of sadness pervades the poetry of Gwen Harwood. The fundamental dichotomy of the body and the spirit is imaged in The Wound (P. 12) as “the great wound of the world”. Physical pain works for Harwood as an objective correlative for the pain attendant to the awareness of this dichotomy. Daphne is restored to authentic human form through the violence of lightning: “her bones in a twisting prism of fire”. Her metamorphosis is painful, but it restores the truth of her existence – she is in fact a person, not a tree. The speaker in At the Water’s Edge (P. 10), whose heart, aware of the human “kingdom of sorrowing change”, asks the question, “what is truth ?”, is told “You will suffer, and gaze at the fact / of the world until pain’s after-image / is as real as pain”. Yet there is the potential for such pain to be cathartic (like Daphne’s, a pathway to true knowledge of the self). “You will learn”, the heart at the water’s edge is told, “what was breathed into dust the sixth day”. The first person persona (the visionary ‘I’ ?) of In Hospital (P. 8) finds

36 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood that her pain annihilates her, but paradoxically leaves her free to accept the realities of her existence: a fire-talented tongue will choose its truth. I do not bear what’s gone, do not refuse what’s yet to come. In the much later poem, The Wasps (LB. 3- 5), it is “pain that leads us / to truth beyond the language game”. If Harwood’s vision of the human world sees it as fundamentally flawed by the painful schisms that time and mortality produce between the body and the spirit, what’s gone and what’s yet to come – an essentially ‘fallen’ world – she also envisages the capacity for some kind of redemption. In Alter Ego, the split between the temporal self and the immortal self may eventually be resolved. The “paths of love and pain” that the ‘I’ of the poem will travel in order to finally unite her dual selves, reveal that it is not just through the cathartic understanding of pain that the flawed human world may be redeemed, but also through love. The ‘I’ in The Wound (P. 13), who ‘sees’ “the great wound of the world”, says: “in man’s estate / let my flawed wholeness prove / the art and scope of love”. In fact, love and pain often seem to be concomitant on each other in Harwood’s Keatsian vision. The lover in Carpe Diem (SP. 25), for example, who seeks to arrest time, to ‘seize the day’ through love, is aware of this: “I give my body to be burned”. The offer of love’s ‘carpe diem’ is seen as “this charity of solitude”. The dichotomous nature of love is central to Harwood’s poetry. It is love that

37 ERIC HORNSBY both makes one aware of mortality and the painful isolation of the self (as in The Wine is Drunk; or the love that “like a blown flame “disrupts” childhood’s steady air in Alter Ego) and, paradoxically, also enables them to be transcended. Daphne, who is restored to humanity to know “the full measure of tears” and “the body’s weight, its urn / of unproliferating bones, can “still aspire above this” and “hope in love’s brief peace to drown / the whispering of the sleepless mind”. This is perhaps a little ironic since it was her rejection of the love of Apollo which caused her initial metamorphosis. Such irony is appropriate, however, since it reflects the irony of love’s paradoxical duality – the tension between the free giving of one’s self and the fear of possession. Harwood’s use of Christian mythology to depict the ‘fallen’ world of dichotomous human existence extends to her depict ion of its redemption – the resolution of the dualities of body and spirit, other and self. In Triste, Triste (P. 83 ) the title of which echoes the sadness of the human “kingdom of sorrowing change” expressed in At the Water’s Edge, the source of the imagery is, appropriately, the myth of the Resurrection: “In the space between love and sleep … Body rolls back like a stone, and risen / spirit walks to Easter light”. The heart, however, the mortal self, is left behind. in its ‘prison’ of flesh – imaging the essential split of the old dichotomy – and cries out for the spirit to “remember me”. The union of the body and sprit, the resolution of the old dichotomy, is made possible by love: “so the loved other is held / for mortal comfort”. The Easter analogy is completed

38 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood as the lovers drift off to sleep and ‘spirit’ descends as a Christ- like saviour to “harrow heart’s prison so heart may waken / to peace in the paradise of sleep”. Just as Daphne may find hope for the painful duality of her human condition in “love’s brief peace” (which must remind one, in this context, of the ‘uneasy truce’ made in Atwood’s The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart), so the lover in Triste, Triste finds that love may transcend the schism between the self and other to provide a kind of redeeming peace. Another kind of redemption possible in Harwood’s poetic world is through art. This is another of her most pervasive themes. Interestingly, she even uses the same analogy with Christ’s harrowing of Hell to describe the way in which the ‘Artist’ may transcend the “gross darkness” of human mortality. Using the figure of Giorgio Morandi (in Giorgio Morandi (P. 42)), the Italian painter renowned for his exclusive commitment to capturing the subtlety of tone in still-life painting (“transfiguring with gentle art, his earthen jugs”), the poet celebrates the power of the artist to redeem human life : Unfading light, proceed from this sabbath of paint, descend to harrow the obscure chasm where my heart grapples its deep, its rooted fears. For Harwood, art must endeavour to reflect true existence, engaging her again with the dilemma of Keats’ Grecian Urn. In a poem to the painter Edwin Tanner, The Red Leaf (P2. 27), the artist’s struggle is seen to be to “set down / the flux

39 ERIC HORNSBY of sense , in a new mode / of calm”. Similarly , in Clair De Lune (P. 35) it is the artist alone who can “seal and transfigure the changing face / of truth, which is living and moving with us as we walk”. Of Music (P.18), like Alter Ego, celebrates music too, as an art form that can express the true flux of existence – “being’s chromatic harmony”. Music is actually equated with time in this poem : time, smooth-jointed, modulates through all the tenses of to be scoring its enharmonic change on human features. In Beethoven, 1798 (P. 19), time is shown to be transcended by music – both in the content and the structure of the poem. The octave of this sonnet deals with the mortal human life of Beethoven: “his voice is shocking” and his famous scowl “pockmarked”. This depiction of the actual life of the composer, for whom “fate is knocking”, continues into the first line of the sextet , where the mortal pain ofthat life is concentrated into the howl of the critics, “Bizarre, tormented”, and the reminder that life is short: “half his life is gone”. The next line leaps forward in time to the present , where the poet listens to a performance of the music that survived the man. The sudden juxtaposition of 1798 and the present within the formal structure of the sonnet accords the two times a contiguity that annihilates the time difference. Beethoven’s music, like Morandi’s still-lifes, has the

40 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

capacity to recreate and transfigure a painfully limited human world : Now from your dolphin-hands I learn the strong leaping of spirit through a temporal sea of human love and grief. Pain breaks upon these notes in splintering trills; here, changed to song, wears the calm aspect of divinity. In another poem to Edwin Tanner , The Wasps (LB. 4) Harwood says: “pain you cannot paint”, invoking as she characteristically does in her later poetry, the philosopher Wittgenstein, for whom “the image of pain is not a picture”. 2 For Harwood, music is the most transcendent of the arts, since it can faithfully reproduce the verities of human existence – even pain. It is music that opens to the child in Four Impromptus (P. 240) a new world: whose joy transcends all temporal need, where the heart understands unquestionable shapes of truth, and mends its mortal wounds. The heart’s questioning, “what is truth ?”, in At the Water’s Edge, is both echoed and answered in Littoral (P2. 61) with a celebration of the power of music. How shall the heart’s true shape be known, spirit made manifest ? Beethoven

2. This is, as Alison Hoddinott (Gwen Harwood and the Philosophers, in Southerly, 41, (September 1981), pp. 286) points out, one of Wittgenstein’s ideas in his Philosophical Investigations. 41 ERIC HORNSBY

struggled through temporal misery to find that orm.f A Music Lesson (LB. 10-11) ends with the assertion of the redemptive power of music: “If God exists / then music is his love for me”. We might compare this with another ‘Kröte’ 3 poem, Soiree in which: ” Kröte floods the dim / room with a rain of notes that say / existence is God’s love for him”. Harwood’s intimate engagement with the arts in her poetry, and her elevation of art as a means of seeking the redemption of transcendent truths are, I think, symptomatic of her recognition of the inherent dichotomies of life that create the need for such transcendence . The imaging of such dichotomous existence as the ‘fallen’ world reappears in her poem To A.D. Hope (P2. 69-71), in which she describes a dream related to her by Hope. In his dream, he conducted an orchestra in a direct mental communion : themes springing instantly ”from [his ] composing mind / into the belly of each instrument”. For Harwood this dream provides a parable of ideal artistic creation : “Dream, parable: the marvelous translation of thought to act”. Harwood, however, like T.S. Eliot , is aware that “between the conception and the creation 4 … falls the Shadow”. The essential schism between ‘thought’ and ‘act’ in real life, outside the dream, is again

3. Published under the pseudonym of ‘Francis Geyer’, Soiree, in The Bulletin (6 October, 1962), pp.40. 4. T. S. Eliot: The Hollow Men in Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, London (1961), pp. 80. An interesting correspondence may be found in comparing Eliot’s statement here, “life is very long”, with Harwood’s “art is very long”, at the end of A Public Place (SP. 86). Both poems might be said to suggest that the art of the world ends with a whimper. 42 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood related by Harwood to the myth of the significantly named “Imperial Adam” and his “free-thinking partner”. The old dichotomy of human existence is again seen to be analogous to the fall: “word and thing no longer one, the running dialogue / of flesh and spirit failing at the spring”. But in this poem Harwood extends the analogy to explore yet another duality that contributes to the complexity of her poetic vision – the paradox of the ‘fortunate fall’. This paradox, which in Christian theology is the tense opposition of the loss of Eden’s paradise with the promise of redemption and entry in to heaven in the new covenant initiated by that fall, is implicit in Harwood’s Romantic assertion that knowledge derives from the painful intensity of personal experience – the epiphanies of love and mortality discussed earlier. It is encapsulated in her ironic questions: How could the heart in an unprepossessing coma of innocence have shown its range ? … and who on earth would sing, if song were an effortless warbling until kingdom omec ? The paradox is, of course, that without the painful awareness of the schisms in human life, afforded by the epiphanies of personal disillusionment, there would be no need for the art that struggles to transcend them. The infinite potential of the human spirit would have no reason to manifest itself, the poet suggests, if there didn’t exist the powerful incentive of the need to overcome the limitations of mortality. “Who would not bite the fruit, and bear the change ?”.

43 ERIC HORNSBY

Certainly, the poet’s persona in The Wasps (LB. 3-5) would. She is very much of this fallen world – even in her childhood ‘innocence’ she was already (as Blake said of Milton) “of the Devil ‘s party” without knowing it . Having gone through the epiphany of pain in the sting of the tygerish wasps , “Nobodaddy’s social workers”, she falls from ‘innocence’ to ‘experience’ and bears the change. “Build me art’s heaven in hell’s despite”, she demands of the artist . This explicit allusion to The Clod and the Pebble from Songs of Innocence and Experience (just one of the many allusions to Blake in the poem) reflects Harwood’s preoccupation with the dualities of innocence and experience in her interest in personal epiphany. The world she inhabits is definitely that of experience, in which one of the many dualities of existence is the artist’s paradox of the fortunate fall – there would be no ‘art’s heaven’ were it not for ‘hell’s despite’. Ultimately then, there is this paradox for Harwood even in the nature of art. She ironically satirizes, in A Public Place (SP. 86), her own apparent contention of ‘ars longa, vita brevis’. Her poetic world is thus one of dualities at all levels . Like that of Atwood, Harwood’s preoccupation with dualities can be seen to be linked to the significance of dichotomy in female experience. This is certainly an important theme in her poetry, and is explicitly related in several poems to the paradoxes of artistic creativity. It seems that one of the shadows that fall between the conception and the creation is that of being female in a patriarchal cultural hegemony. Hence the woman-as-artist finds herself locked in the horns

44 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood of the dilemma of her other roles of woman-as-housewife or woman-as-mother. Harwood the woman/poet, aware of the marginalization of women/poets by the hegemony, responds by writing poems of such traditionally conventionally ‘poetic’ quality, that they can imbue some of her un-conventionally- ‘poetic’ subjects with a new artistic credibility. The often complex, rigidly controlled rhyme schemes and stanzaic structures of many of her poems (especially the earlier ones, when she was perhaps less confident of herself), can be seen to provide, in the unobtrusive obviousness of their artifice, incontrovertible proof of ‘poesis’ – of the ‘makings’ of poetry. The Old Wive’s Tale (P. 22), for example, is converted (by the poem’s obvious ‘poetic’ quality) from being a very peripheral kind of story (like the ‘little woman’, one of those cultural commonplaces that inscribe patriarchal values by diminishing the authenticity of female experience) – the old wive’s tale is converted into ‘high art’. The ironic title of the poem emphasises the fact that women too, even those most marginalized and disregarded as having any artistic potential, can “crave some combat worthy of my sword”. What Beryl Langer suggested about women’s quest for identity being outside the cultural mainstream in the Australian context, and perceived as essentially adversary to it, is obviously relevant here and it is significant that Harwood (like ‘Henry Handel Richardson’ and ‘Miles Franklin’) has published under male pseudonyms. She has been Francis Geyer, Timothy Klein, Walter Lehmann. Some of her poems dealing most explicitly with the problematic legitimation of the spiritual and artistic

45 ERIC HORNSBY

identity of women, in section II of Poems, were actually first published by ‘Miriam Stone’, revealing Harwood’s own 5 insecurity about their critical reception. One of these poems, Suburban Sonnet (P. 230) (which affirms its poetic credibility by appealing to the authority of its standard Petrarchan sonnet form) depicts a woman placed beyond the reach of the critics. Unfortunately, this is only because her artistically creative life has been stifled by her suburban life. “She practices a fugue, though it can matter / to no one now if she plays well or not”. For her alienated creative self, the subject/object dichotomy of consciousness becomes more specifically defined as an adversary relationship: “subject and counter-subject” (also punning on ‘subjection’ and kitchen counters?). A “nausea” (as overwhelming of that of Jean-Paul Sartre) induced by her stifled life drains her of “zest and love”. She is still capable of comforting her children, however, in their epiphany of mortality with the dead mouse. The paper she wraps its “soft corpse” in ironically comments on the painful duality of her achievement: “Tasty dishes from stale bread”. Harwood has written several sonnets that similarly express the dualities of female existence – Suburban Sonnet: Boxing Day, for example, or In the Park.

5. The critical establishment, the front line of the cultural hegemony has often been attacked by Harwood for both its parasitism and its claims to discernment (see, for example, Critics Night Watch (P . 53-55)). The most famous occasion, of course, was the hoax of The Bulletin on August 5, 1961 (pp. 40), which published two acrostic sonnets purportedly by a ‘Walter Lehmann’: Aberlard to Eloise and Eloise to Abelard. The acrostics read “so long Bulletin” and “fuck all editors”. 46 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

Burning Sappho (P2. 29) is a poem in which a poet’s attempt to write is constantly frustrated by the demands made on her in her roles as housewife and mother. The first three of the four stanzas (all carefully rhymed: a b a c b c d d) each depict one such demanding interruption that prevents her from working (even when she has finished her work as a housewife): children, visitors, husbands all have their expectations of her. The schizophrenia of her position as woman/poet is imaged brilliantly in the epigrammatic couplet at the end of each verse (who was it that said the terminal couplet of some sonnets made one think of balloons and pins? Terminal indeed.): Inside my smile a monster grins and sticks her image through with pins … Invisible inside their placid hostess, a fiend pours prussic acid … The pulse of song grows faint and dies. Out of their pit the furies rise. The final stanza affirms this ‘burning sappho’s’ continuing commitment to the struggle that consumes her. The specific schizophrenia of female existence is related to the more general dichotomies of human existence identified in Harwood’s poetry: All’s quiet at last: the world, the flesh the devils burning in my brain… ..The mind

47 ERIC HORNSBY

with images of love and pain grapples down gulfs of sleep. I’ll find my truth, my poem, and grasp it yet. “The moon is gone, the Pleiads set…” The poem that the burning Sappho begins to ‘grasp’ in the last line would no doubt be an extremely interesting one. It would, perhaps, be a poem about the absence of women from the cultural mainstream – the ‘firmament’ of patriarchal society. The moon and the Pleiads, both traditionally associated with femininity, have both disappeared from this ‘firmament’ – subjected to the ultimate marginalization of being obscured by the limited horizons on the phallogocentric world? In the later poem, An Address to My Muse (LB. 12), Harwood more humorously addresses the difficulties of being a woman/poet in such a world. Here, the schizophrenic nature of the Muse is comically portrayed: “Dear Sir, or Madam, as the case is, / blest being of so many faces”. As well as being called a hermaphrodite, the intransigent Muse is playfully berated for being difficult. The specific difficulties of legitimation for the woman/poet are referred to in a clear statement of Harwood’s sense of the dualism of the female artistic experience and of the reasons for her preoccupation with formal structure: Male colleagues making open mention of how they’re spared the fearful tension of playing the two part invention which I must learn,

48 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

would never touch the metric pension I have to earn. (She must have written that with this thesis in mind.) The poet is still engaged with the same hunger for enlightenment that characterizes her work always, but here she approaches the ironies of that hunger with a healing humour. She alludes to her earlier poem, The Wine is Drunk (P. 6), in which she assumes a male persona (“The wine is drunk, the woman known” in order to cry “unmanly tears for what’s not found / in flesh, or anywhere”. In this later poem (“when the wine is known, / the woman’s drunk”), she rejects masking personae: “take off that mask”, she tells her multi-faceted Muse. Harwood identifies herself strongly as a woman/poet writing is a largely adversary relationship to the hegemony’s monopoly on access to the Muse’s flowing Hippocrene: Or is it that true and blushful pink water restricted? If it’s for men alone, I think I’ll be convicted. Harwood, like Atwood, is aware of the dualism of life for the woman/poet. She too recognizes that the source of these schisms lies partly in general human experience and partly in specifically female experience. In the epiphany ofThe Wine is Drunk, her male persona learns that “pride is a lie”. That this is male pride has a particular relevance in Harwood’s poetry – her two most notable personae (apart from the higher level masking of her nom de plumes), Professor Eisenbart and

49 ERIC HORNSBY

Kröte, are also used to explore, among other things, male pride. Kröte is largely compassionated as a failing musician – somewhat resembling Beethoven, somewhat grotesque (Kröte is German for ‘toad’) – but one of Harwood’s true artists earnestly seeking for a meaning that will resolve the dilemmas of existence, or, at least, always aware of them. His life as a music teacher is, in a way, similar to that of the housewife-poet figure: “Between the wrong notes and the howling / he must endure and earn his bread” (Afternoon (P2. 6)). He, like Harwood herself, is inclined to be contemptuous of the art establishment (see At the Arts Club or Flying Goddess), and his is also a hungering spirit trapped in a “sober prison where / an unintelligible text // is thrust at him” (Flying Goddess (P2. 23)). Kröte is in fact, I think, Gwen Harwood’s alter ego (though not the one beyond time’s desolating drift). He is named more personally (Dietrich) in The Silver Swan (LB. 70) by one of Harwood’s archetypal suppressed women/artists. He shares Harwood’s love of music and German, and Kröte (“Drunk he becomes a sacred clown” – At the Arts Club (P2. 3)) would appreciate Harwood’s An Address to My Muse, where she berates her Muse for not answering the request she makes for “‘Mehr Licht’, like Goethe / you left me, you hermaphrodite, / to drink with Kröte.” Harwood is still writing Kröte poems. Eisenbart, however, named for the Dr Eisenbart of the German student song about a doctor who cuts off both legs to cure gout, is the epitome of male pride and no longer appears

50 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood in Harwood’s poetry – except for a cameo role in Variations on the Theme (P2. 66). The Eisenbart sequence in Poems is a progression depicting the breakdown of that pride. The proud Professor (who gets no first name) suffers a reductio ad absurdum in the first two poems. In Prize-giving (P. 63), this is caused (significantly in the context of Harwood’s poetry) by a brilliant young female musician. Eisenbart becomes “a sage fool trapped / by music in a copper net of hair”. In Early Light (P. 65), he is symbolically associated, as he lies in his mistress’ bed (she is always designated by this epithet of duplicitous ownership – never as ‘lover’) with an “ithyphallic hunter dead” “beside his wounded prey”. The Professor, an atomic physicist, is associated with the same male emblemata of technological destruction as was Atwood’s ‘you’ “who started the countdown” in Power Politics (PP. 32). Eisenbart’s threat in Professor Eisenbart’s Evening (P. 66) is to blow up the “womanish” moon and, as his mistress (who refused his sexual advance because she is menstruating) ironically points out, “free poor men from her dominion”. It is the woman in these poems who is always a foil for Eisenbart’s egoism. His “fiat nox!” in Panther and Peacock (P. 69), contemptuously threatening the “dull-coupled citizens” at the zoo, is brilliantly deflated by the ironic duplicity of his image of himself as panther (and his dream of himself as peacock) and by his mistress’ bathetic remark: “What shocks await the bourgeois!”. It is she who identifies “mankind’s old dichotomy” in Boundary Conditions (P. 73) and points out (in response to Eisenbart’s grandiose remarks about the

51 ERIC HORNSBY

“exploding atomic bomb”) that “still in the heart more violence lies / than in the bomb”. Eisenbart’s detached rationality and proud, male self- assurance, which erects for him a detached ivory bell-tower, are eroded just as “thought’s campaniles fell to dust”. His failed homosexual encounter, ironically imaged in terms of 6 the divine descent of Zeus (in the form of an eagle ) on Gannymede (P. 75), leaves him “shocked, unmanned” and makes him turn for reassurance “to work in his own world, where symbols might / speak to him their sublime affirmative”. This desperate retreat of Eisenbart’s adumbrates his final anguished epiphany in the last poem of the series, Group from Tartarus (P. 78). Eisenbart, in this poem now an observer, not the solipsistic centre of attention, “still weary from his mistress’ bed”, witnesses the meeting of two people in a graveyard where they have come to mourn their dead loves: “the weight / his children and her ring might show // of earlier love, no passer-by except Professor Eisenbart interpreted”. Typically for Harwood, music is worked into Eisenbart’s epiphany of this group from Tartarus, the deepest hell of loss: “he read at sight, from eye to eye // their figure of love and loss, and traced / the stretto of their parting words”. Eisenbart is finally made aware of the desolating effects of his self-dissociating pride:

6. For a fascinating analysis of the bird imagery in the Eisenbart series, see R.F Brissenden: A Fire-talented Tongue: Some notes on the Poetry of Gwen Harwood, in Southerley, 38, (March, 1978), pp. 18-20. 52 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

Eisenbart felt, who prized his dry indifference to love and luck … the ripe waste of his heart’s decay: too old to love, too young to die. This is Eisenbart’s moment of naked vision, in which he is made aware of the schisms of time and mortality and of the pain of being the dissociated ‘I’. Eisenbart learns that despite his pride and his awful ‘fiat nox”, he is an ordinary mortal suffering from a dissociated consciousness. Given the musical stress in his epiphany on “sight-reading”, perhaps it is appropriate to describe it in the terms of another Harwood poem Naked Vision (LB. 47), in which one might find a parable (as Harwood is so fond of doing) for Eisenbart’s condition: a common paper bag; in that, a sterile jar; in that, a disembodied eye … the longing in that eye will haunt me till I die Since this longing, this hunger, is in Harwood’s poetic mythology a necessary precursor of redemption, it is possible there might now be some hope for Eisenbart. He might, in becoming the visionary ‘I’, in becoming vulnerable and afraid, be ready for love. Certainly there is no hope for that other dissociated consciousness who asserts himself with male pride: I Am The Captain Of My Soul (P. 51). The drunken Captain, who self-pityingly “gulps from his flagon of grief” in “his know-

53 ERIC HORNSBY nothing rage”, rejects as inadequate the potentially redeeming consolations offered by his crew – Hands, Eyes and Body. Hands and Eyes offer the consolation of art, both in its creation and illumination reception; Body offers the consolation of the perspective of procreativity – the continuation of the process of life. The Captain, however, locked in his self-destructive, existential pride, imperiously commands his crew to heel and “hands, eyes, body keel to the void as the drunken / Captain sings in his wilderness of water”. In choosing the void over the consolations offered him, the Captain resembles the male love in Dichterliebe (P. 15): “The world lies wide, and warm. No kiss / no child, no prayer will keep him here”. His solipsistic ego makes the love relationship in this poem as pathological and destructive for the female ‘I’ as that in Atwood’s Power Politics: “He’ll suck my sap and vigour down / the crude mouth of his private hell”. Again, in this poem it is the woman who acts as foil for the “stylish angst” and the grandiose delusions of male pride: “I’ll wash the floors. He’ll watch the stars. / I’ll salt his life with common sense”. This pathological love relationship, like those depicted in Seven Philosophical Poems, part 5 (LB. 8); Night Thoughts: Baby and Demon (SP. 103-5) or The Lion’s Bride (LB. 1), is symptomatic of the dissociated consciousness resulting from the ‘desires that flare beyond our fate’ and the other dualities of the ‘old dichotomy’ in Harwood’s poetic world. While Harwood is not overtly concerned, as Atwood is, with the themes of post-colonialism, one can, I think, see

54 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood the dualities of the post-colonial perspective to be operating, perhaps unconsciously, in her work. In Fever (P2. 9), for example, the ill Kröte shows himself to be one of Harwood’s true visionaries – recognizing that “by its own scope, the heart’s betrayed to monstrous dreams”. His vision of the void within himself (the space between the dualities of ‘the old dichotomy) is imaged in terms of the classic European attitude to the landscape of Australia: “Maps of an empty continent, himself”. Kröte is, after all, a German immigrant. The use of the Australian landscape as a metaphor for his desolate, empty self, a void, is consistent with his German, Eurocentric view. One might be reminded of Patrick White’s Voss in this context. Kröte’s difficulty with the word ‘gift’ (German for ‘poison) in this poem – “Gift Vergiftet. Caught / between two languages his mind / falters. Gift Poison” – reflects Harwood’s use of Kröte’s foreignness of nationality as a trope for the alienating effects of the fundamental dualities of life. The dichotomies of foreign vs native (Comic book vs History?) and the dualities of language, the schism between ‘gift’ and ‘poison’, become, in Flying Goddess (P2. 23-4), a figure for the old dichotomy of body and spirit and desire that flares beyond our fate: weightless in space he soars above the solid foreigner, whose face between one vision and the next is Kröte’s, to his native place in gentle, all-sustaining air far from his sober prison where

55 ERIC HORNSBY

an unintelligible text is thrust at him… Harwood’s preoccupation with the littoral region (At the Water’s Edge; Clair de Lune; At the Sea’s Edge; Ebb-tide; Estuary; Sea Anenomes…) and particularly those poems lamenting the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines (Looking towards Bruny; Evening, Oyster Cove), might suggest that she shares Atwood’s post-colonial sense of living on edges and of ancestors (the older ‘gods with fangs’ of Midnight Mass, Janitzio and All Souls, Janitzio) even though she doesn’t explicitly analyse post-comlonialism. She certainly shares Atwood’s cognizance of the dualities of existence, especially for women in the phallogocentric world. Harwood’s ultimate duality, like that of Atwood, is that of the sefl, the ‘alter ego’. One of her most beautifully eloquent statements of this duality comes (I admit to a slight personal bias) in the poem In Brisbane (P2. 43): My ghost, my self, most intimate stranger standing beneath these lyric trees with your one wineglassful of morning snatched from the rushing galaxies. For Harwood, as for Atwood, the awareness of the dualities of human existence does indeed make the self the most intimate stranger.

56 4

…vestiges of the pain that leads us to truth beyond the language game. Harwood (LB. 5) It is evident, even in a juxtaposition as limited and fragmentary as the one in this thesis, that there are undeniable correspondences between the poetic visions of Margaret Atwood and Gwen Harwood. Their central preoccupations with the dichotomies of life – that make of the self the most intimate stranger; that make it so difficult to be both human and alive – are consistent with the schizophrenic nature of their shared female and post-colonial experience of the world. The dualities inherent in such experience must, I believe, be acknowledged as a significant formative circumstance of artistic production for both poets. The feminist imperative of redressing the disjunctive consequences of self being defined as ‘other ‘ by a phallogocentric cultural hegemony, as well as the post-colonial exigencies of understanding and accepting

57 ERIC HORNSBY the ‘where of here’ – both of which necessitate a kind of reclamation of the foreground, the prerogatives of legitimation – combine, in the work of both these poets, with an awareness of the more general dichotomies on human existence: of love; of mortality; of subjectivity; of the dissociated consciousness. The result has been, for both, a commitment to uncompromising honesty in the attempted expression of a valid and viable poetic world, one capable of containing the dualities inherent in human existence. It is not surprising then that irony should be an important part of their poetry, since irony insists on a dualism of perspective. “There are differences, of course” (as Atwood says in Journey to the Interior (CG. 70)), which are equally obvious even in this brief study. I have tried to suggest (with the help of Beryl Langer) that some of these differences may be culturally explicable in terms of the different status accorded to women’s quest for identity in Australia and Canada, but obviously such differences are also the inevitable result of the poets’ individual personalities and perceptions. Atwood is by far the more obviously politically conscious and polemical of the two, as her overtly anti-imperialist poems and active membership of Amnesty International (which is reflected in such poems as It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers (AC. 30); Footnote to the Amnesty Report on Torture (THP. 45) or Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written (TS. 65-71)) would attest. Harwood, on the other hand, is much the more ‘artistic’ of the two – in the sense of being explicitly engaged with

58 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

the ‘canons’ and history of discourse of art and philosophy. These differences and the (obviously related) great stylistic differences between the two might, in the context ofthis thesis, be considered ‘divergences from a common source’. The last thing I wish to discuss (since I am severely limited by space) is also, I think, attributable to their ‘common source’ while being representative of their divergences from it. This is the attitude of the two poets to the language they use. Between the problematization for the feminist of the logos of phallogocentrism and the post-colonial recognition of the arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier and referent (a recognition facilitated by the inadequacy of the inherited language for the expression of the where of here), we might expect these two poets to be highly conscious of the limitations of language – and, of course, they are. In Harwood’s ‘fallen’ world of dualities, one of the central flaws is seen (in To A.D. Hope (P2. 70)) to be akind of schism particularly significant for the post-colonial position: “word and thing / no longer one”. Her association of childhood with the pre-fallen state of innocence of dichotomy is related to language in the statement she made in an interview in 1975 that children “don;t see the terrible divorce between language 1 and the world”. This divorce is what Kröte suffers from in Fever (P2. 9) when “caught // between two languages, his mind / falters”. In To Another Poet (P2. 54), Harwood notes that “we have no ready-learnt / paraphrase of the world”. This sense of the limitations of language is characteristically

1. An Interview with Rodney Hall , ABC Audio Record , No 38, (1975). 59 ERIC HORNSBY related to the philosophy of Wittgenstein, whose ideas about the ‘language game’ are examined in many of Harwood’s poems. In Thought is Surrounded by a Halo (SP. 108), the title of which, as the poet tells us, is a quote from Wittgenstein, she reflects that “language is not a perfect game, / and if it were, how could we play?”. Harwood’s liking for Wittgenstein’s philosophy is related to the struggle to understand the painful dichotomies of life that inspires her own poetry just as it inspired the philosopher. He appears as a character in her poem, Wittgenstein and Engelmann (LB. 32), in which his friend Engelmann, explaining what made them sympatico, makes this very characteristic statement for Harwood: I sought between the world that is and the world that ought to be, in my own troubled self the source of the discrepancy. This discrepancy, which for Harwood leads to an awareness of ‘the old dichotomy’ and to the hunger of the spirit, is related to the limitations of language in An Impromptu for Ann Jennings (SP. 77): when spirit cried in darkness “I will have…” but what? have what? There was no word to frame it, though spirit beat at flesh as in a grave from which it could not rise. In the appropriately named Beyond Metaphor (LB. 64), she again affirms Wittgenstein’s observations of the limitations of language with this paraphrase of the last sentence of his

60 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

Tractacus: “who was it said / of the end of the Tractacus: What you can’t say / you can’t say, and you can’t whistle it either”. 2

Harwood, in Evening, Oyster Cove (LB. 21), makes a passing comment on the role of naming in the imperialist assertion of power (the names ‘given’ to the supposedly last of the Tasmanian Aborigines are described as “white contemptuous names” that “cloaked the heartsickness of decline”), but she more typically associates ‘naming’ with the kind of “pure veracity” (Wittgenstein and Engelmann (LB. 32)) sought in art. This assertion of positive aspects of naming is consistent with her generally positive inclusion of the limitations of language into what I have previously termed her paradox of the fortunate fall – language and its flaws become part of the ‘hell’s despite’ that paradoxically enables ‘art’s heaven’ to be built. Thus, in To A.D.Hope, for example, the poet must “suffer the long / torment of waiting for a word toname / grief that must be resolved in healing song”. Naming is seen as a positive thing – in An Impromptu for Ann Jennings, she says “age is no prison / to hinder those whose joy has found its name”. The relationship of this aspect of naming to her view of the redemptive power of art to transcend mortality is obvious in Father and Child, II Nightfall (SP. 111): “Things truly named can never / vanish from earth”. In New Music (P2. 68), she praises the musician, Larry Sitsky, for

2. Alison Hoddinott quotes the last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractacus as being: “What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence”, in Gwen Harwood and the Philosophers (cited previously, pp. 284). 61 ERIC HORNSBY the artist’s struggle for expression that “strikes new sounds from the old names”. Harwood’s sense of the limitation of words is balanced against her elevation of music as a more transcendent ‘language’. In Four Impromptus III (P2. 41), for example, she notes that “words can never / contain, as music does, the unsayable”. Naming is also an affirmation of knowledge for Harwood, including knowledge of identity. In Dreaming’s an Art (LB. 30), for example, she addresses a lost lover in a dream: “I was happy / knowing that when I knew your name I’d know you / in the Old Testament sense”. For Margaret Atwood, as we have seen earlier in this thesis, naming is often more ominous – identified with the male imperialist attempt to superimpose an order on the flux of life. The ‘you’ in The Circle Game (CG. 49), for example, is: a memorizer of names (to hold these places in their proper places) It is representative of the differences in their work that Harwood should associate naming with the redemptive power of art while Atwood examines its political implications. Atwood is, however, as we would expect, aware of the same disjunction between ‘word and thing’ that is central to Harwood’s vision. She too associates this awareness with the dualistic world of adult ‘experience’ that both poets inhabit. In You Begin (THP. 111), she is drawing in crayons with a child who is beginning the sane process of expressing the ways s/he perceives the world as the poet herself is

62 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood engaged in: “You are right to smudge it that way / with the red and then / the orange: the world burns”. The poets explains to the child the duality of the world and language and the defining power of words: “The word hand anchors / your hand to this table”. In another poem in which the poet observes the learning process of her daughter, Spelling (TS. 63), learning to spell is associated with learning to cast spells. This very complex poem examines the relationship of women to words. Artistic creativity is metaphorically related to procreativity and both to the oppression of women: the woman in labour, “her thighs tied / together by the enemy / so she could not give birth”, is identified with the “Ancestress: the burning witch, / her mouth covered by leathers / to strangle words”. The ‘silencing’ of these women is recognised as part of the dynamics of sexual politics – “a word after word / after a word is power”. (This might remind us of Harwood’s “a word and then a word” which will “halt the waltzing” in Moonlight (LB. 28).) Atwood’s attitude to language is linked both to her ‘sibyl’s’ vision of a duplicitous existence and to the fracturing effects of that duplicitousness on language. This is evidenced in Spelling (TS. 64) in her self- reflexive description of metaphor: At the point where language falls away from the hot bones, …when the bones know they are hollow & the word splits & doubles & speaks the truth & the body

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itself becomes a mouth. This is a metaphor. At the end of this poem, Atwood returns to her daughter learning how to spell. Naming has been revealed as a potent force – the first ‘spell’ the child will cast is her own affirmation of identity: “your first naming, your first name / your first word”. Atwood, like many Canadians, is aware of the arbitrariness of language. In Two-headed Poems, which is a kind of ironic allegory of the political tensions between anglophone and francophone Canada (another kind of schizophrenia – that of the Siamese twins “joined head to head” (THB. 59)), the desire for ‘pure veracity’ in expression, linked to the post- colonial need to authentically express the where of here, is seen to be frustrated by the awareness of the arbitrariness of signifying systems: we wanted to describe the snow … in a language so precise and secret is was not even a code, it was snow, there could be no translation (THP. 65) Of course, the perception (hard to avoid in Canada where even the road signs are bilingual) that all languages are translations, gives Atwood a perspective on the limitations of language similar to that of Harwood and her reflections on Wittgenstein. Both poets are aware of polyphony, especially the many voices of nature, and of the eloquence of silence.

64 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

We might compare, as just one brief example that could provide the material for a thesis in itself, Atwood’s poem, Some Objects of Wood and Stone (CG. 73), with Harwood’s In Hospital (P. 8). For Atwood, “talking was difficult. Instead we gathered coloured pebbles”: sea pebbles thrown solid for an instant against the sky flight of words Harwood, with her characteristic movement towards transcendence, agrees that where words fail, the stones may take over: The grace of water rinsed, re-made these stones. My tongue’s betrayed by pain. They speak my prayer. Yet Atwood, too, seemingly without Harwood’s transcendent faith in the redemptive power of art, is also hopeful. She continues to write, after all, affirming the need for that hope to resolve the painful schisms in life, love and language in this dichotomous human world: Here is the handful of shadow I have brought back to you: this decay, this hope, this mouth- full of dirt, this poetry. Mushrooms (TS. 93) This persistence surely evinces some hope that might

65 ERIC HORNSBY temper the pain that leads these poets to search for truth in and beyond the language game. In the end, beyond all their differences, there is this ultimate correspondence between the poetry of Margaret Atwood and Gwen Harwood. With Atwood’s greater iconoclastic political consciousness and Harwood’s greater faith in the power of art to redeem the dichotomous human world, the two poets could be seen to be divergences definitely, but from a common source – the same schizophrenic muse of human, post-colonial and female experience in a ‘fallen’ world. Both are aware of the empty spaces, the void, between its irreconcilable opposites. I think Harwood’s final lines in her poem to another female poet, A Quartet for Dorothy Hewett (LB. 42) might appropriately be used to eulogize both her own and Margaret Atwood’s continuing commitment to their poetry: Heaven’s long emptied of its gods. Fill the void with a woman’s voice.

66 Primary Works

Atwood, Margaret The Circle Game Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1978. The Animals in That Country Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968. Procedures for Underground Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970. Power Politics Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1972. You are Happy Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974. Selected Poems Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976. Two-headed Poems Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978. True Stories London: Jonathon Cape Ltd, 1982. Harwood, Gwen Poems Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963.

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Poems / Volume Two Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1968. Selected Poems Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1975. The Lion’s Bride Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1981.

Secondary Works

On Atwood: Davidson, A. E. and Davidson, C.N., eds. The Art of Margaret Atwood. Toronto: Anansi Press, 1981. Grace, Sherrill. Violent Duality: a study of Margaret Atwood. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1980. Malinson, Jean. Margaret Atwood and her works. Toronto: E.C.W. Press, 1985. Onley, Gloria. Power Politics in Bluebeard’s Castle. Canadian Literature, 60 (Spring ’74), 21-42. Rosenberg, Jerome H. Margaret Atwood. Twayne’s World Authors Series. Boston: Twayne 1984. Sandler, Linda, ed. Margaret Atwood: A Symposium. Malahat Review, 41 (Jan ’77). On Harwood: Beston, John. Interview with Gwen Harwood. Quadrant, 99 (Oct ’75), 84-8. Brissenden, R.F. A Fire-talented Tongue: Some notes on the poetry of Gwen Harwood. Southerly, 38 (March ’78), 3-20.

68 A juxtaposition of poets : Gwen Harwood and Margaret Atwood

Dodwell, Dianne. Worlds beyond words: Gwen Harwood’s Selected Poems. Westerley, 2 (1977), 73-9. Hall, Rodney. An Interview with Rodney Hall. ABC Audio-Record 38, 1975. Hoddinott, A. Gwen Harwood and the Philosophers. Southerly, 41 (Sept ’81), 272-287. Lawson, Elizabeth. The Lion’s Bride. Luna, 15 (1982), 31-2. Nicklin, Cynthea. Images of Women in the Poetry of Gwen Harwood. Unpublished Master’s Thesis, 1985, University of Queensland, Fryer Memorial Library. Talbot, Norman. Truth beyond the Language Game: the Poetry of Gwen Harwood. Australian Literary Studies, 7 (May ’76), 241-5. Talbot, Norman. Women and Men (Both Dong and Ding): Gwen Harwood’s Poetry. Luna, 10 (1980), 16-24. Talbot, Norman. Gwen Harwood’s Liebestod. Quadrant, 188 (April ’83), 90-9?. Wallace-Crabbe, C. My Ghost, My Self: the Poetry of Gwen Harwood. Meanjin, 28 (1969), 264.

General

Brydon, Diana. Australian Literature and the Canadian Comparison. Meanjin, 38 (2) (1979), 154-165. Crabb, Peter. ed. Theory and Practice in Comparative Studies: Canada, Australia and New Zealand. First

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ANZACS Conference, Sydney, Macquarie University (1983). Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden. Toronto: Anansi Press, 1971. Matthews, J.P. Tradition in Exile.A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of ustrA alian and Canadian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century. Melbourne, Cheshire Publishing, (1962). Wilson, Milton. Klein’s Drowned Poet, Canadian Variations on an Old Theme. Canadian Literature, 6 (AUtumn 1960).