Rosemary Dobson's ‘The Continuance of Poetry’

by David McCooey

Rosemary Dobson’s ‘The Continuance of Poetry: Twelve Poems for David Campbell’ (1981) is a poem-sequence concerned with the relationships between poetry and experience, loss and continuity. Notable for its composed tone and its limpid imagery of friendship and good living, the sequence has darker concerns (most obviously regarding death and loss) and complex, intertextual poetic procedures. The sequence mobilises various tensions basic to poetry—simplicity and complexity, originality and repetition, antiquity and modernity—so as to discern the connections between the work’s two defining terms: ‘poetry’ and ‘continuance’.

Like Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’, ‘The Continuance of Poetry’ is an elegy - a short poem occasioned by the death of a friend, family member, or public figure. Elegy laments death, but unlike the dirge (a ‘pure’ form of lament) it also conventionally offers some kind of consolation regarding death. The subject of Dobson’s elegy is her friend and fellow poet, David Campbell. Dobson and Campbell had worked together on translating Russian poetry in the 1970s, a project that led to the publication of two collections: Moscow Trefoil (1975) and Seven Russian Poets (1979).

‘The Continuance of Poetry’ is a singularly powerful work. But, despite this singularity, Dobson situates her own poetry within a larger poetic network that includes not only Campbell’s poetry but also ancient Chinese poetry. Overt references to Chinese poetry, found in the second half of the sequence, relate to the Tang-era poets, Wang Wei and Li Po. More subtle references can be found throughout the sequence in Dobson’s skillful evocation of the themes, occasions, and techniques of such poets. These include formal compactness, imagistic representation of nature, allusiveness, and the valuing of suggestion over direct statement. 

Chinese poetry is an especially good choice to illustrate ‘the continuance of poetry’ since, as Arthur Cooper points out, it has a ‘continuity of tradition unknown in any other of the world’s literatures’ (p. 20), one that exceeds 3000 years. Throughout Dobson’s sequence, ancient Chinese poetry is shown to be surprisingly ‘continuous’ with modern Australian poetry. This continuity is seen clearly in the ninth poem, ‘Poems of the River Wang’. Only 12 lines long, this poem has three distinct sections. The first presents poetry and experience as continuous: ‘Two poets walking together / May pause suddenly and say, / Will this be your poem, or mine?’ (p. 186). The poem invokes courtesy as the basis of poetic friendships, as it was for ancient Chinese poets (something discussed by Paul Hetherington in Rosemary Dobson: A Celebration [2000]). The poem then tells of how Wang Wei and P’ei Ti ‘Made twenty poems each of the Wang River’. The poem ends: ‘Later Wang Wei wrote to his friend, // Could you join me once more? / Out walking now I see blond grass, / Wild orchids, black cattle, and the daylight moon’. Wang Wei’s question is implicitly Dobson’s question of her late friend. The oblique answer to this indirectly asked question is that Campbell will not come again, but his landscape and the landscape of his poems (blond grass and so on) continue to exist. The implication, too, is that one cannot separate Campbell’s pastoral landscape (he lived on various properties in the Canberra region) and the pastoral landscape of his poems.

As ‘Poems of the River Wang’ illustrates, ‘The Continuance of Poetry’ is profoundly indirect in its expression, operating through implication and juxtaposition. This might seem a strange procedure for an elegy, where one might expect clear expressions of grief, memorialisation, and consolation. ‘The Continuance of Poetry’ is notably muted in the way in which it laments and offers consolation for Campbell’s loss. Like most of Dobson’s work, the affective element of ‘The Continuance of Poetry’ is subdued, implied through the work’s imagery and procedures rather than overt expressions of grief or loss. As Dobson stated in 1996 about the writing of the sequence, ‘I like to express emotion—grief, loss of friendship and shared interests, the sadness of friends and so on—with reserve. The simplicity, even austerity of classical Chinese poetry provides a model, and I had been reading such poems’ (McCooey, p. 109).

Implication and juxtaposition turn out to be strongly related to the idea of poetic continuance. For instance, ‘The Messages’, the second poem in the sequence, begins with an indirect reference to Campbell’s death (‘your long journey’) and a reference to the sense of loss that this occasioned (‘Rooms resounded with the need of reassurance’ [p. 183]). The poem turns to Campbell’s ‘messages’, his poems, for consolation:

Here are poems: stones, shells, water.
This one weighs in the hand. This one is shining.

This one is yellow. And this smooth to the fingers.
Ching chink says this one clear as a wind-bell.

Poems are set about in the empty rooms of houses.
Windows open on clouds in the blue distance. (p. 184)

This passage is a good example of the sequence’s reliance on implication. Any link between the poems ‘in the empty rooms of houses’ and the windows that ‘open on clouds’ is entirely ‘latent’. Similarly, the continuity between poems and physical things (‘stones, shells, water’) is not explained. It is not clear if things are like poems or if poems are like things. Neither is the link between ‘Here are poems’ and Campbell’s ‘messages’ made clear. Such fluidity shows that ‘poetry’ and ‘the world’ are continuous, rather than distinct, categories.

In ‘White Flowers’ and ‘Exchanges’ we see that such continuity comes about through relentless exchange. In ‘Exchanges’ Dobson refers to books that she and Campbell once lent each other. The poem concludes with the lines ‘All, all were returned long ago. / Now they are gone I hold them’ (p. 184). The exchange between Dobson and Campbell mirrors the exchange between presence and loss figured in Dobson’s elegy, but also suggests something about poetry itself, which ‘gives’ us things that have been lost. As Marie-Louise Ayres writes, ‘For Dobson, art—in the form of paintings, poetry, printing, or music—both records a vanishing world and calls that world back into being’ (p. 101).
Another important form of exchange is translation, the activity that brought Dobson and Campbell together as poets. ‘Translations under the Trees’ begins with the image of ‘Poems blowing about’ while the translators work together outside: ‘Some we stalk like Li Po and the moon in the stream’ (p. 185). This seemingly casual opening leads to the central metaphor of the poem.

Pollen brushed from the table
Flies off to make forests
In faraway countries;
May change a landscape.

Poems blow away like pollen,
Find distant destinations,
Can seed new songs
In another language. (pp. 185-86)

The simile of the last stanza is, on the face of it, uncharacteristically explicit for this sequence. Translation as a form of pollination (and therefore continuance) is a clear-enough figure, but the imagery also suggests (especially coming after the reference to Li Po) that the poems of the dead pollinate the poems for the dead, whose songs are always, even when in English, ‘In another language’.
‘Translation under the Trees’ also draws attention to other types of translation present in Dobson’s sequence: the translation of experience into poetry, the translation of others’ poetry into experience, and the translation of life into death. This last form of translation is hinted at in the sequence’s penultimate poem, ‘The Good Host’, which ends: ‘Re-reading the poems / We are all late-stayers; / Guests in your country’ (p. 188). This country is not simply the country where Campbell lived and about which he wrote, but also the country of death which he now occupies. Dobson revisits her friend through poetry, but the poetry is also a kind of visitation. The continuance of Campbell’s poetry (and Wang Wei’s and Li Po’s), which is the continuance of poetry generally, occurs through its visitation, or haunting, of Dobson’s poetry, which in turn haunts the poetry of others. The continuance of poetry, as the sequence shows, occurs through the endless, intertextual interplay between originality and repetition found in all poetry.

This may have been an appropriate end for the sequence. However, the final poem furthers the image of continuance through the apparently paradoxical procedure of looking away from Campbell (elegy always being about putting distance between the living and the dead, as much as it is a form of homage and lament). In ‘After Receiving the Book of Poems by Li Po’ the landscape lacks Campbell’s ‘presence’, but the poem (and sequence) ends with the assertion that ‘looking into the landscape [we] find your poems’ (p. 188). The continuance of poetry, then, comes directly out of a particular attitude to absence. Such a reading is consistent with the poem’s probable intertext, Li Po’s ‘On Visiting a Taoist Master in the Tai-T’ien Mountains and Not Finding Him’. As Li Po’s translator, Arthur Cooper, states, ‘“Visiting a Hermit and Not Finding Him” is a very common theme in Chinese poetry....In such poems the wise hermit gives his “teaching without words” (or, more correctly, “teaching without telling”) by letting the poet wait and not even meet him’ (pp. 105-6). Dobson’s poem draws attention to the subject’s absence, as an elegy must, but does so in a context in which absence alone can be illuminating.

Given the desire to essay ‘the continuance of poetry’, it is appropriate that Dobson’s sequence for Campbell is an elegy. Elegy is one of the most ancient forms of poetry, and the impulses of elegy—mourning friends, understanding loss, and figuring continuity—are the impulses of ‘The Continuance of Poetry’. Despite its apparent simplicity, ‘The Continuance of Poetry’ is a work of complex exchanges, translations, and implications. It shows that poetry and experience, loss and continuity, are always strangely continuous.

WORKS CITED

Ayres, Marie-Louise, ‘Rosemary Dobson’, Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 260 : Australian Writers, 1915-1950, ed. Selina Samuels, Thomson Gale, Detroit, 2002, pp. 99-105.
Cooper, Arthur (trans & ed), Li Po and Tu Fu, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973.
Dobson, Rosemary, ‘The Continuance of Poetry: Twelve Poems for David Campbell’, Collected Poems, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1991, pp. 183-88.
Hetherington, Paul, ‘“An Irreplaceable Song”’, Rosemary Dobson: A Celebration, ed. Joy Hooton, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2000, pp. 45-59.
McCooey, David, ‘A Conversation with Rosemary Dobson’, Antipodes 10.2 (1996): 107-10.

DAVID McCOOEY
DEAKIN UNIVERSITY