Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells

by Ivor Indyk

‘Five Bells’ is often thought of as an elegy for Joe Lynch, who was a notable black-and-white artist of the 1920s, and a friend and colleague of Slessor’s on Smith’s Weekly. But Lynch had died in 1927, some ten years before the poem was composed. On the other hand, ‘Five Bells’ comes very late in Slessor’s relatively brief poetic career, and the collection to which it gave its name was Slessor’s last collection of new poems. This has led some critics to argue that the poem might best be considered as an elegy to the poet’s own poetic inspiration. Certainly, there is something markedly literary about both the choice of the pastoral elegy, one of the most distinguished and venerable of literary forms, and the one in which poets traditionally assert their claim to fame; and the familiar figure that Joe Lynch cuts in it, which is very much that of the doomed late-romantic provincial poet, thwarted in his ambitions, and by his sense of being in the wrong time and place. This sense of belatedness and of dislocation had been a continuing preoccupation in  Slessor’s poetry, expressed in such poems as ‘Mangroves’, ‘Pan at Lane Cove’, ‘Winter Dawn’, ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’ and ‘Elegy in a Botanic Gardens’.

Clearly, as the title ‘Five Bells’ suggests, the poem is about time, and quite specifically, about the poet’s relation to the past, and to memory. Indeed, there is a doubling of this relation to time. First of all, the poet’s own difficult stance towards the past, and the memory of his dead friend, characterised early on as that of a thief –

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve
These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought
Anchored in time?

In this perspective, the past is recovered only in fragmentary form, as encrustations or sedimentations, or as brief, intense, but again partial or broken images transmitted intermittently across ‘the pygmy strait’ which separates life from death –

Yet something’s there, yet something forms its lips
And hits and cries against the ports of space,
Beating their sides to make its fury heard.

It’s in these fragmented images of uncertain significance which force themselves upon the present, that the deranged figure of Joe Lynch himself appears, ‘Groaning to God from Darlinghurst’ in his drunkenness and anger, and labouring under his own uneasy and ultimately self-destructive relation to time, ‘living backward’ as Slessor puts it, as if he were being sucked back into the past by the dominating and intimidating presence of his forebears, particularly his father –

…so each night
You crept a moment closer to the breast,
And they were living, all of them, those frames
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle’s neck…

On the one hand then, we have the poet’s sense of the past as present only in intermittent disjointed moments, and his stance towards it as essentially interrogative, from the other side of the glass or at a distance, as demonstrated by the persistent questioning in the poem, where none of the questions either presupposes or expects an answer –

If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are going, what purpose gave you breath
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?

But that voice, that direct communication between the dead and living, is precisely what the poem denies, ‘There’s not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait…’
On the other hand there is Joe Lynch, possessed by the past even before he is dead, portrayed in the poem first as a dishevelled and then as a disembodied presence, a string of broken utterances and a jumble of relics, one who creeps ‘closer to the breast’ as his blind old father, the graveyard mason, grows in stature and power, his monumental art staking a thousand men with ‘cargoes they had never thought to bear,/ those funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.’

This image of tombstones as funeral-cakes gives the past an alluring air – it is both sweet and deadly. It had that allure for Slessor in earlier poems which recall the past, particularly ‘Nuremberg’, ‘Taoist’, ‘Earth-Visitors’, ‘Wild Grapes’, ‘Country Towns’, and of course the fifth of the ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’. ‘Fixed in a sweet meniscus’ is how he describes the timeless moment in ‘Out of Time’.

And yet Slessor’s own relation to the past – particularly his German-Jewish past, on his father’s side – was complicated, highly coded when it appears in such poems as ‘Heine in Paris’, and barely acknowledged in real life except in enigmatic rituals of behaviour, such as the one Hal Porter observed in The Extra, when Slessor entertained him with a recording of Kurt Weil’s Threepenny Opera and a slice of ham. There was undoubtedly denial in Slessor’s stance to the past – but it was not his alone, for it spanned several generations, and would have left the past as a territory of uncertain and unreachable significance, precisely as Slessor describes it in ‘Five Bells’. This ambivalence, the mixture of attraction and fear, the temptation to succumb to a past which might hold presences larger or more powerful than his own, is characteristic of Slessor’s poetry as a whole, and not just of ‘Five Bells’, though it is given its most dramatic expression here.

In view of the instability of time in the poem, it is remarkable how definite the parameters of place are. There is no doubting the setting of the poem, in Sydney Harbour – ‘Deep and dissolving verticals of light/ Ferry the falls of moonshine down’ – whether one interprets the upside-down cross as the lights of King Cross or those of the Southern Cross, it doesn’t really matter; and one delights at the references to Darlinghurst and Labassa, the dramatic description of the barely settled Moorebank in ‘slab dark’, or Sydney ‘by the spent aquarium-flare/ of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper’, or Melbourne’s ‘sodden ecstasies of rectitude’. When the poet looks out his window after the questioning of the past is done, after the torment of time, and mystery, and memory and the flood which, against its nature, does not flow, the spirit of place flares out from the waves lapping the harbour shore with a striking immediacy of vision and sound, the two intimately combined in a way which is evident nowhere else in the poem.

I looked out of my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze

This is the powerful presence of the place itself, enacted in the language of the poem, so the effect is physical in its sounding and not only a matter of imagery – the definition provided by the palatial ‘c’s in ‘quill’ and ‘comb’ support the fine delineations suggested by these metaphors, and contain and intensify the energies opened up by the ‘a’ sounds in the marvellous line which follows, ‘that arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand’.

The poem’s relation to the past may be uncertain, but its relation to place here, if only momentarily, is not – which is why ‘Five Bells’ has become the great poem of Sydney Harbour, and one of the best-known poems in Australia. The struggle to come to terms with the past should not be regarded, however, as a secondary component in this achievement. It is precisely this struggle with time that makes place such an emphatic presence in ‘Five Bells’, as if the true significance of place was not its continuity, but its ability to embody the discontinuities of time, to absorb the drama of memory, and to offer the recognitions that the past cannot