Drawing the Dobson poems together: storytelling throughout time

Consider the role of storytelling throughout time to express and reflect particular lives and cultures.

In the preface to her 1963 Selected Poems, Dobson says that her work falls into groups: “poems about paintings, poems arising from European myths and legends, and poems about what might be termed human responsibility” (Brady)

 “Young Girl at a Window”, “Summer’s End”, “Cock Crow” and “Amy Caroline” represent individuals grappling with their human responsibility, and their ethical burdens and challenges typify those of their generation, often of women of their generation. “Over the Hill” arises from stories about the ancient Greek god Apollo, and “The Conversation” evokes the archetypal fools and madmen of the Western canon, as well as the three fates, who spin, weave and cut the thread of human life. Our poems could be said to fall into these two categories, but most all fall into both. Though all are vivid, painterly, imagist, none is explicitly ekphrastic, and most of the poems explore both human responsibility and draw on storytelling from the European tradition.

In Dobson’s poetry stories from European culture carry the freight of archetypal experience and evoke particular moments and experiences. “Over the Hill” vests a workman with the majesty of the Greek pantheon by evoking Apollo, not through narrative but through imagery that calls to mind the Greek sun-god and the stories woven around him. This evocation of Apollo reveals the wonder and beauty in ordinary people, and the divine potential of the individual to transcend their societally imposed roles. The transcendence of social roles is central to “Amy Caroline”, whose saintly generosity is evoked through allusions to biblical story, even as her humble aspirations to a little worldly wealth are made fun of through allusion to Banjo Paterson’s narrative ballad “Mulga Bill’s Bicycle” and Mulga Bill’s own worldliness and silliness.

Dobson engages in conversation with these three traditions throughout her oeuvre. “Amy Caroline” nods to the balladic tradition of colonial Australian poetry through the refrain “in Bendigo and Eaglehawk”, anecdotes set in colonial Australia and the narrative device of Amy Caroline’s desire for a horse and cart, while the free-form verse transcends the rigidity of the narrative ballad as well as its thematic scope. These narrative allusions ground Amy Caroline culturally, while the biblical and Shakespearean reference to a sparrow, in whose fall there is “special providence” (Hamlet), carries the force of an elegy, because this poem is a lament for the deceased Amy Caroline, and her Old Testament readiness to welcome the stranger locates her in the pantheon of Judaeo-Christian saints. These stories, dispersed through time and intertwined in this poem, capture Amy Caroline’s cultural moment and the web of aspirations, spiritual and worldly, which uphold her. Their interweaving enables the reader to experience Amy Caroline ourselves through our collective treasury of narrative and archetypes.

“The Conversation” is a dialogue of genres, traditions and story. The tale of The Three Fates, which is the title of another Dobson poem, is encoded in the references to combing, spinning and winding in the mist; their menace dissipates when the “excellent old madman…weaves…his hand to the horizon”, naively stealing their sinister power. He evokes the tradition of wise Shakespearean fools and the biblical tales of reversal of worldly priorities in a divine revaluing of folly and status; he is the locus of the convergence of the biblical and the classical narratives in a celebration of innocence. Dobson’s assertion that “only / Children and fools may try” to express the ineffable, to gain access to beauty, is given credence by the intersection of these archetypal narratives. The image of the mist, or life, or beauty, as “white scoured wool” that is “spread about”, also taps into the narrative tradition of early Australian ballads, songs and folk tales about shearers, and the confluence of these three traditions ascribes the depth, complexity and richness of the European and Judaeo-Christian traditions to colonial Australia. Dobson’s use of stories across times and continents refuses the cultural cringe that was part of the early settlers’ humorous self-reflection and invests her Australian experience with the gravitas and dignity of philosophical and ethical inquiry, and of the quest for beauty.

“Summer’s End” ventures further back in time to acknowledge implicitly the stories of the Aboriginal Dreaming. In the second part of the diptych, “Picnic”, the persona reaches into her past to connect with the child that she once was, but her language strains further: “Dreaming by the fire I called myself, watching / For a child to run back through Time to a picnic.” The word “Dreaming” and the image of the persona, seated and barefoot by a campfire, yearns towards the vast oral histories and unfathomable experiences of the First Nations people of Australia, and thereby suggests a collective identity which extends far beyond the individual. The poem is a cry of yearning for the lost “state of grace” which Dobson claimed was “fugitively glimpsed” in poetry but remained unattainable. Its Edenic evocation of the Australian landscape, following an elegy for the damage caused by modern civilisation, is more than a celebration of wildness, as the poem seeks redemption through story, intimacy with nature and a unified human identity.

However, the most obvious invocation of story in “Summer’s End” is of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Sea Maid”. The “lonely mermaid / Who married a mortal” suffers the loneliness of the mute; “the sand is like knives to her feet” because she, like Andersen’s sea-maid, has sacrificed her beautiful voice for love, and her fish tail, which supports her in water, her native element, for feet which must walk as if on knives. The lonely mermaid is an analogy for the mother and poet, who renounces her poetic voice and her literary community for the sake of her loved ones. The “foam and splash of departure” recall the foam which the mermaids, on their death, must become, not having an immortal soul; although the poem’s narrative diverges from the fairy tale in a few points (the “lonely mermaid” did marry her mortal, unlike the little sea maid, and Andersen’s sea maid is eventually granted an immortal soul, while the foam here, littered with the debris of the material world, is not redeemed) it retains the sense of grief at separation from the world of beauty for which the persona-poet yearns. The weeping mermaid walks the liminal space of the shoreline, much as in “Cock Crow” the persona paces “that lonely stretch”  “between the lit house and the town”, seeking a way to resolve the anguish of her divided allegiances.

“Cock Crow” draws on a few seminal narratives from past ages: the most apparent of these is the betrayal of Jesus by Peter, who promises never to deny him but does so, as Jesus has predicted, three times before the cock crows in the night. In the poem it is unclear who is being betrayed and by whom. The persona feels that she is betraying her sleeping mother and daughter by leaving them for her night time walks; she is reminded of her duty towards them on her return by the cock crow as she re-enters the house: “I heard the cock crow on the hill, / And turned the handle of the door / Thinking I knew his meaning well.” The cock is elevated, crowing from a hilltop, claiming moral ascendancy over the persona as he judges her for contemplating abandonment of her responsibility. His maleness is emphasised as he is personified the last line of the poem; he conveys the judgement by patriarchal society of the negligent mother. But although Dobson allows him the last word, her persona judges him too, “thinking” about his judgement, evaluating it in turn. She has returned to the house, conforming to society’s value systems, but she can see that the judgement comes from the patriarchy, and she is able to weigh it up even as she complies with it. The poet herself knows she has been denied, betrayed. “And I that stood between denied” – the enjambment which ends this line allows the full ambiguity of the subject of the verb “denied” to resonate. The line continues, “I that stood between denied / Their needs in shutting-to the door,” acknowledging an obligation to supply the needs of her family; but if it were allowed to finish where Dobson leaves it hanging, the persona herself is denied, caught between needy dependents when she herself has unmet needs. In a further allusion to the narrative of the betrayal of Jesus, it is as the persona’s mother and child “slept” that she is denied: like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, praying, thinking through his options, obligations and torment while his disciples sleep, she is neglected by her sleeping dependents in her hour of need. The persona is both Christ and Peter in this narrative.

There are allusions to other narratives in this poem. The Romantic grand narrative is invoked by the ambiguous gothic image of the “dark trees that closed me round”, either enfolding or threatening the persona with their wildness and concealment. The Delphic maxim “Know thyself!” is invoked by the fact that the persona finally “Knew myself, separate and alone”; betraying her loved ones, according to the Christian code, is in fact fulfilling her Apollonian mission, obeying the Greek gods; the two moral codes clash in this poem. The persona longs for freedom from “love that grows about the bone”, which alludes to metaphysical poet John Donne’s poem “The Relic”, in which an idealistic lover dreams of being bound to his lover in the grave by “a bracelet of bright hair about the bone”.  This allusion highlights the anguish both of the claustrophobic bond and of its removal, which would be to cleave away one’s own flesh. The allusion to Donne emphasises the duration of a loving bond, which can dominate one’s identity beyond life and into death, and her modification of the image points out the centrality of one’s loving bonds, even when they are burdensome, to our own self.

“Canberra Morning” alludes immediately to the “long shadows” cast by other narratives on the fresh morning of each new human experience. Looking “slantwise”, she is able to see the attraction of the hopeless existential narrative for the bus driver who has “a book by Sartre in his pocket”, embracing intellectualism despite his maudlin enthusiasm for pop culture and “the Top Forty”. She generates a new narrative as she describes his “dark glasses”, which imply the long shadows of story that shape his present life into recovery from a hangover or a desire for concealment. In this poem, however, she renounces humorously the burden of responsibility and the Christian grand narrative, using deliberately irreligious language (“not giving a damn”). 

“Young Girl at a Window” alludes to chivalric narratives of swordsmanship and a medieval journey “Through grass and sheaves and, lastly, snow.” Typically, Dobson transcends the narrative she has invoked, as there is no honourable duel; one may attack Time but the slaughter of an enemy does not stop that enemy from continuing to define one’s existence. Nor is Time clearly inimical, as the persona’s grief for Time’s death is implied in the red stain of the air, in the motionless corpse. Ethics have become complicated as “more than mortal swords are crossed”. There is no longer the innocence of pure good and evil for the persona, whose own narrative of maturation has seen her grow into moral ambiguity. The persona’s journey recalls the visceral encounter of medieval peasants or pilgrims with nature and the elements, which represent the inevitability of death, now the only certainty. However, the cruelty of this knowledge is softened by the fact that the hills of future challenge are “gently turning”, unstable but not hostile. Dobson invokes chivalric narratives to undermine their assumption the absolute nature of good or evil, and of the cruelty of death, the collective human fate.

E. Maddox