This is an abbreviated form of the published article at
The holy spirit of larrikinism in Australian religious verse
|
Trait |
|||
|
poet |
Bruce Dawe |
Noel Rowe |
Judith Wright |
|
era |
1954-1978 |
1986 |
1949 |
|
length |
29 lines |
20 lines |
19 lines |
|
theme |
The Nazarene was different |
The structure of reality is mercy |
redemption does not reach everyone |
|
structure |
5 uneven free verses |
10 couplets |
5 verses of 5,5,5,4 lines |
|
tone |
unorthodox realist perspective |
I should have known |
painful regret |
|
narrator/ voice |
unwilling Roman guard |
Mary Mother of Jesus |
sympathetic third person |
|
diction |
colloquial |
simple, direct |
formal. ritualistic |
|
technical features |
amusing diction, simile, bathos |
rhyming couplets, puns, irony |
lyric repetition, paradox, |
|
assessment |
effectively amusing, riveting realism |
a gem, shocking, mysterious |
highly empathetic, striking point of view |
This discussion covers Bruce Dawe's And a Good Friday Was Had By All, Noel Rowe's The Structure of the Real, and Judith Wright's Eli, Eli. The selection comes from 1949-1978, that defining era in Australia's emerging nationhood through the post World War II era of immigration, prosperity and prospects. Counter-cultural cross currents showed Australia reassessing its roots when all was open for critical inspection. Events like the post war contradiction of the fair go, the 1967 Referendum entitling Aboriginies to the vote, and the 1972 Vietnam war with the anti-war movement and conscription, challenged how Australians saw themselves in the world. The new relationship with US imperialism had put on the agenda the need to describe Australians as not just "sun browned British" but as a distinct people. All icons, sacred and secular, were "up for grabs."
Firstly, Dawe's And a Good Friday Was Had By All is a twenty-nine line poem appearing in five stanzas of irregular length without rhymes. Its plain language is very accessible. Cinematically, it opens with the barked orders of a centurion to control the crowd at Jesus' crucifixion. Dawe's riveting realism impacts immediately and segues quickly into interior monologue as a counterpoint to the sacred drama in progress. The speaker muses how being press-ganged into the Roman Army is just another slavery when forcing one to do such work as this.
This very realistic speaker, obviously an average proletarian bloke easy to relate to, observes that of all the crosses he has done, this Good Friday one was difficult. His lamb-like passivity did not provoke any irrational outburst and justifying violence in themselves "so you can do your block and take it out on them" (line 11). He recounts how his mate Silenus and he had to do the hammering, despite the unnerving wailing of the women and the dull crushing of His bones. Again the realism and ordinariness in the voice undercuts any pious accounts readers may have heard previously. This 'foreign' perspective is just what Dawe crafts, to get to the facts without the rhetorical claptrap. The worker's perspective is one very dear to Australians' hearts, as it bears typical complains about duty and the hiding of sympathy necessary in this work: "orders is orders" he says in his vernacular way which designates his lower class status in society.
The mental narrative takes on a theological purpose in the final verse, as he observes that the spread arms on the cross once it is hauled up, seemingly spread over the men who "had it in for him", and indeed over the whole damned world. The ironic pun in "damned", lost on the speaker in his colloquial language, is not lost on readers, for indeed that's why the Lamb of God died - to redeem a damned world. Christian readers will recall the centurion's similar testimony in Scripture, "Truly this man was a Son of God" (Mk 15:39). Dawe's dispassionate, sideline vignette evokes these multi-layered connotations. The title does the same: a first level reading shocks with off-hand, satirical larrikinism but in fact a second level reading offers the theological truth that we were all saved by that Good Friday. Finally, that the Man's followers were wailing women and a blind man is not just an additionally remembered detail but in it Dawe more centrally dramatises His rejection by the Establishment for these were His only faithful followers.
Dawe's character here is the familiar larrikin. Dawe's choice of the worker's point of view, his unpretentious lower class origins and his unfazed reactions to the army-enforced work must inevitably touch a chord in Australian readers. This poem does not just borrow from the Bible; it dramatises a truth from it.
Secondly, Rowe's twenty line poem, The Structure of the Real , catches one side of a conversation with one Simeon by Jesus' mother Mary renewing remembrances of "my son, born among the dung." She muses on some key, miraculous events in his life such as Cana (John 2:1-12), the man born blind (John 9), Zaccheus (Luke 19:1), Lazarus (John 11), and the bread and fish (John. 5:1-15). Rowe's theme is that "Sacred irreverence. . . is a gift to those found free in the spirit" (line 11). In other words, what really counts in life is mercy and the secret about life is that the structure of the real is mercy, that elusive capacity to forgive. This is Mary's wisdom in hindsight; she regrets not having realised it despite having seen so many miracles "when he set about making contradiction" (2).
Rowe couches his poem in accessible vocabulary and an open couplet format. His striking imagery is at times irreverent, e.g., "sauntering round in his shroud" and "expecting stones, a crowd got instead some bread and fish." Scripture may be idealised in liturgy but in Rowe's people's poetry, its central message is truly conveyed nonetheless. The relatively few rhyming couplets: "changed his mind/born blind, amazed/amazed, glorias sung/among the dung" tingle and jingle. The poem's tone and voice in the convincing reality of her reminiscence surprises. Just as pomposity, hype, ambivalence, and prevarication were foreign to Jesus, so the poet eschews any religious props which obscure the central message of Christianity in its transmission. Quite rightly, he infers that Christianity is about how to live authentically, not how to behave religiously.
This is not a poem to trivialise the Gospel message but rather sheds new light on its central message. The poet offers a fictionalised dialogue from a privileged point of view with great impact. Rowe's gift is to deliver raw reality in the persona of Mary. While her own suffering as Our Lady of Dolours is picked out, her humour ("he would test his muscles on the stone"), adventure and faithfulness come through strongly too. The reader must inevitably be struck upon reading it; its brevity belies its gravity. He is respectful of characters and persons but effectively reviews events in that off-hand, open Australian way we find in unguarded speech. This is not the Fatima statue talking; this is a feeling, suffering Mother of the Saviour dumbstruck with amazement like his fearful disciples. Rowe's poem is another excellent example of the larrikin strain in recent Australian religious poetry.
Thirdly, to an Australia predominantly Christian in character and history and aware of Gospel references, Wright's title, Eli, Eli , is readily familiar. The Calvary atmosphere of pathos is immediately evoked in her title, truncated from Matthew 27:46, "Eli, Eli lama sabachthani? that is, My God, My God, why has Thou forsaken me?" The eeriness of the Aramaic language and strangeness of those hours offers her richly nested settings, both physical, allegorical and religious, in which to develop quite a dramatic meditation on the many reversals enacted there that day. From the viewpoint of Christ, Wright enumerates some key paradoxes of seeming failure that His death is and the more cosmic dimensions of its meaning. In nineteen lines of free verse, four stanzas of five lines each with the last of four, and with choric repetition of key ideas, Wright's character is given an interior voice of acute hurt and pain:
to see them go by drowning in the river- /. . ./ that was his cross, and not the cross they gave him . . . . To hold the invisible wand and not to save them/ . . ./ this was the wound, more than the wound they dealt him . . . . To hold out love . . . and faith/ and knew they dared not take it/ . . . betrayed him.
If Australian religious poetry has the purpose of eliciting insight, then this poem succeeds. It challenges readers with the central character's interior anguish voiced in muted soliloquy. To die and see the world fail to take up the wand of healing or the power to believe and so save themselves, focuses on the central act of salvation and its seeming irrelevance to those for whom it was done: "To hold out . . . all he could give, and there was none to take it" (line 14). The poem's pathos and paradox rivet home this very human and theological aspects of his dying for the salvation of the world. Yet the redemption does not reach everyone, not through accident or design but through sheer ignorance, neglect, fear or apathy.
Wright is a poet speaking to her generation. In this 1949 anthology, the poem appears between "The Flood" and "The Builders" effectively bridging the faith of Noah with the courage of our pioneers. In "Eli, Eli", she decries mindless selfishness in the increasingly secular society. It brings superficiality, feigning ignorance, fear and apathy. This Zeitgeist piques Wright's finely attuned sense of justice. Newspaper images of Holocaust or Cambodian genocide victims readily come to mind today, while the cries of the victims of war, torture, disaster and genocide through the history of the world ring across our collective memories. As a Man limited to the time and place of the Cross, and as the Divine Saviour of the World, Jesus Christ "watched" powerless, and yet meek, knowing yet All Knowing of their fate. Wright challenges their dependency. Unlike in the Reformers' rallying cry sola fides, Wright's anthropology suggests that twentieth century humans are masters of their own destiny, that they are not passively saved but must actively save themselves; they must give their fiat too: that "they themselves could save them" (9).
The poem's enthymematic argument emerges soon enough. Rapidly changing the figurative scene in the final punch line, "he knew there was no river" (19). Like in Catholic doctrine, Wright avers that salvation is not automatic, it is not enough to float along with the current of time or the political or religious status quo but it is necessary to have both faith and do good works. To be saved, she infers, one must respond to His divine invitation. The pathos of "Eli, Eli " demands a personal empathy, an empathetic response. It says that any redemption already won has still to be applied in the concrete details of daily life, that that gift demands full personal assent in response.
© G. Smith 1/3/01
Source of this webpage: http://home.pacific.net.au/~greg.hub/larrikinpoets.html
March 2001.