My uncle lay on his side with his head resting on his fist and his elbow against the soil. His face was turned away from me. Near where I lay, but out of the view of my uncle, my wife of one week sat waiting for me among the tall grass. I surprised myself by not going at once to join her. I had thought I would enjoy being with my wife while my uncle was nearby and unsuspecting. But I was not so ready, when the time had come, to mock my uncle.
The man resting near me in the grass was a bachelor. As I understood the moral code of my family, my uncle’s being unmarried meant that he had had not much more contact with women than I had had. But the difference between us was that I would one day marry whereas he, so I had heard people say, would never marry. It seemed a little unfair that I could find in any of the paddocks around me the young woman I was sure to meet one day while he, almost forty years old, could see only an empty landscape.
He asked me after a while about my reading. I had told him already that I was top of my class in English literature and he expected me, I knew, to recommend to him some modern author that he could then pronounce much inferior to the writers he called great. I played his game by talking about the poetry of D. H. Lawrence. I praised free verse, which I had only recently discovered and which I was sure would be too revolutionary for my uncle. He made his objections and I heard him out. But I had to say more. My uncle was the only man I knew who read poetry. Even if he laughed at me, I had to hear the theories I had kept to myself for so long propounded at last to an interested audience in a setting of grass and sky and distant cliffs.
I began to talk about the welter of impressions bombarding our senses and crying out to be preserved in the form of poetry. I made my uncle listen to the buzzings and trillings of the unseen insects around us, and to the snatches of bird-song brought to us by the wind. I pointed out to him that the sound of the wind in the grass was irregular and unpredictable. If he watched the grass he would see that the waves and furrows made by the wind were of no discernible pattern. All this, I argued, should be the subject of poetry. He ought to read, and I intended one day to write, a poetry set free from the strict rules that ponderous and arrogant Europeans wanted to impose on the world. Where were we at that moment? I asked him rhetorically. We were at the very southern edge of an enormous land whose fund of poetic inspiration had barely been tapped. Neither he nor I knew of any poem celebrating the peculiar qualities of our little zone of bare hills lying between the emptiness of the Southern Ocean and the hazy plains inland. It was our responsibility to preserve in poetry what no one else had written about. And it was our right to be free to search for the most apt words unhindered by history or tradition. No one before us two had stood quite where we stood among those grassy hills or had seen and felt what we saw and felt. No one from before our time should cow us with their laws or customs. As poets and admirers of poetry we should be free. Only in free verse could a poet reveal his deepest feelings.
My uncle was staring into the middle distance, and I thought I must have said more than was decent between us. Perhaps the phrase “deepest feelings” had suggested to him that I saw a young woman at the heart of the landscape I was hoping to write about. And it was true that when I had mentioned free verse so often I was hoping my uncle would hear an echo of the phrase “free love,” which neither of us could have spoken to the other.
But I could not have tolerated for long any tension between us. So, when he challenged me to recite some of the poetry I was praising, and I tried but could not get past the first five words of “Cypresses” by D. H. Lawrence, I was just as relieved to have given him an opportunity for jeering at me as he would have been relieved to jeer. I thought I was sounding the right note to end the matter when I claimed that even Lawrence himself would not have expected me to recite his poem from memory; that such poetry was meant to be elusive and ephemeral; that if I myself happened one day to compose a poem about the places we saw around us just then, I would not expect my reader to remember my poem any more exactly than I would remember afterwards the shapes made by the wind in the grass while I was speaking.
My uncle did not bother to untangle my propositions. He simply told me that his father, my late grandfather, had said about some men that instead of talking they opened their mouths and let the wind blow their tongues around.
Then my uncle began to recite a poem. He had a queer smile when he began, and a hint of self-mockery in his voice. But while the poem went forward I was too much interested in the words to notice any pose in the man reciting them. In any case, I had soon turned my face away towards the paddocks in order to make things easier for both of us.
It was a long poem that I had never heard before. Every line ended in a rhyme and every alternate rhyme was the same sonorous vowel, which the man reciting stressed and prolonged so that it seemed to persist through the poem like the drone of a set of pipes. One of the lines with this repeating rhyme was a refrain that came at the end of every stanza.
The man recited the poem without stumbling. I tried to hold on to some of the lines. I knew he would refuse to repeat even a word for me afterwards and would probably change the subject from poetry to racing, or would ask me what I thought was wrong with the youth of Australia.
At first, while he was reciting, I was able to grasp only the single repeating line. But I kept alert for the climax to the poem, and when my uncle slowed his pace and rounded his vowels I tried to memorise every word I was hearing. Later, while he unfolded the racing page and then while he sat reading, I stood out of his view and pressed my hands to my head and tried to keep the words in mind.
Stumbling among tussocks and hoping I looked as though I was merely checking how far we had come from the road or how far we were still from the sea, I learned by heart what I discovered more than twenty years later was not a stanza but an assortment of lines, some of them garbled. Even at the time, I must have known I was misremembering my uncle’s poem; but I would have been satisfied just to keep for myself a form of words that would always recall what I had felt when the man had sat erect with only the bare paddocks around him and had recited faultlessly.
I acquired, finally, what seemed to me a poem in itself: four perfectly measured lines with a mournful sound in their vowels and a vague, melancholic meaning about the whole.
Remember now beside the wain …
The days of old are o’er;
This is our harvest of the plain,
And we return no more.
And although the first three lines might not have been in their right places, I knew the refrain was safely in my mind.
The “wain” and the “o’er” and the quaint word-order did not irritate me. From the other stanzas I recalled other nouns with what seemed a medieval reference (arrows, horns, abbot, minster) and a syntax that persuaded me the poem was a very old ballad. I placed it somewhere towards the middle of the wide blank that lay between the French Revolution and the Fall of the Roman Empire. I considered the poem a genuine poem of its age: a lament by a poet with a good reason for lamenting.
Although I had dedicated myself to free verse I was pleased to admire my uncle’s poem as a poem of its kind. Its faultless rhythms and unfailing rhymes would always seem to me (so it seemed to me in January 1954) the final perfection of a poetry that had had its day. I wanted to remember my uncle’s having recited the poem defiantly with his back against the ocean on the south edge of the last continent to be invaded by free verse. I recognised something grandly inappropriate in the man’s declaiming lines about jackdaws and minster towers after he had sat down to drag burrs from his socks and to squash flies in the corners of his eyes. While his neighbours were straining fenceposts or bailing hay, my uncle would have considered it his finest achievement of the day to have recalled every stanza of a poem that owed nothing to his surroundings.
Later that day I followed my uncle up to the cliffs above the ocean and searched with him for the bits of shells that he said were signs of Aborigines’ cooking-places. We took turns l
ooking through his binoculars at plovers and moorhens and dabchicks, and we found the nest of a white-fronted chat that my uncle had noticed fluttering among the rushes. We talked mostly about birds, and on another day I might have squirmed at his resembling some Most Unforgettable Character in a Reader’s Digest article—the custodian of the lore of woods and fields inducting his nephew into the ways of the Great Outdoors. What kept me from thinking such thoughts was the line of poetry that stayed in my mind.
And we return no more.
The line from the poem told me that my father’s brother was shut out—even if he would never have admitted as much in plain words—from what should have been his true country. No matter how many pleasant hollows and nesting-places he knew along the coast where he had lived all his life, he was barred from a much more desirable place. I thought I was rather acute at fifteen years in deciding that the country he had looked at but had later lost was the landscape where a man walked with his wife of only a few weeks.
My uncle had had girlfriends—three that I knew of. All three had been nursing sisters. My uncle had not had his girlfriends in close succession but at wide intervals during the ten years before I heard his poem. I remembered all three girlfriends. All had had pretty faces, but all three women had made me uncomfortable. They had talked a little too eagerly with me and had laughed a little too loudly when I said something clever. The first of the three had been probably in her late twenties and the latest in her middle thirties, but to me they had all seemed past their prime. Seeing one of these women in costly dress and hat, setting out with my uncle for a day at the races, or in slacks and sandals for a picnic at the beach, I had felt somewhat embarrassed. The woman and the man seemed to lack a certain dignity. If they looked into one another’s eyes or if their hands touched even briefly, I seemed to have caught them at something childish. I preferred not to imagine what my uncle and his girlfriend talked about when they sat in his car for hours after their outings. And I would not even speculate as to whether they spent all their time together talking earnestly about their future or whether they played sometimes at being a young man and his girlfriend.
The end of each of my uncle’s three romances had been roughly the same. He had come to Melbourne to visit my parents (or, in the case of the third girlfriend, to visit my widowed mother) and to sit at the kitchen table until midnight with his head in his hands explaining how easy it would be for him to marry and yet how selfish. It would be selfish because his duty was clearly to remain single for the sake of his widowed mother and his two unmarried sisters. A few weeks later the word around our house was that my uncle and his girlfriend had parted good friends. In each of the three cases, the former girlfriend had been engaged and then married to some other man within a year.
When I was fifteen it seemed clear to me that my uncle’s girlfriends were his lost country. I myself had been relieved each time to learn that my uncle would continue to be a bachelor, but on the day when he recited his poem I allowed that he might have been thinking of one or another of those three nursing sisters. All three had married farmers, as it turned out, so that my uncle could have thought afterwards of the women as still strolling among paddocks and swamps and patches of scrub but not, alas, his own.
I thought of other lost countries. When my uncle had first begun to recite his poem I had looked sideways at his face. I would not have looked into his eyes. We were not a family for staring into eyes. But I had sneaked a look at his face from the side. I had caught myself looking hard at the tiny black sprouts of whiskers on his jaw. He would have shaved only a few hours before, but already the hundreds of black spikes were forcing a way out of him. I tried not to think of black hairs uncoiling from the skin on his belly. One night he had sent me from the lounge room into his empty bedroom to fetch something. I had seen the book on his bedside table—his nightly reading: the Confessions of Saint Augustine. In the paddock I swung my head away from him. Perhaps his bachelor’s body was another sort of lost country.
Why was my uncle reciting the poem just then? Even at the time, I saw how hopeless it was for the grown man to appeal in any sense to the pimply boy who was—as the man surely knew—prevented by unspoken rules from answering. Any appeal must come to nothing. The boy could not have been expected to remember more than a few jumbled lines of the poem. The boy would probably never try to find the text of the poem among all the books of poetry on the shelves of the libraries of Melbourne. The poem itself was a lost country. The man had once learned it by heart, but the boy had heard it only once. The boy would remember afterwards only the pulse of the syllables and the drone of a certain vowel, as though he had tramped across a landscape and recalled afterwards only the sounds of his feet in the grass.
Perhaps I heard a warning sound in the poem. At the age of fifteen I would have disregarded any such warning, but my father’s brother might have been reminding me that I was connected with that district of low grassy hills ending in sudden cliffs. With that district in mind, I would choose at last for my own poem some unfashionable ballad with a tone of regret. At that time I could only have thought of one kind of loss that deserved to be regretted in my own poetry. I could only have thought of the loss of the young woman I had seen already that day in every green, sheltered place. Even then, I could not have imagined myself losing her after first having found her—as my uncle seemed to have lost each of his three girlfriends. I could only have imagined myself losing my imagined young woman in the sense of failing to find her.
The young woman I had seen near me on that day, and on every day for five years past, was, I imagined, an actual young woman. She was someone who lived in Melbourne as I did but who had not yet met me. On every day of our lives the young woman and I each took a step, figuratively speaking, towards one another. Perhaps the young woman noticed in the corner of a page of a newspaper a certain advertisement. On the following day she would go a little out of her usual way in order to look through the window of a shop whose address she had read in the newspaper. Near the shop the young woman would meet another young woman: someone she had not seen for five years. A long chain of acquaintances connected this second young woman to a house that I would one day visit … In the meanwhile I was following my own roundabout but inevitable route. When the young woman and I had met at last, we would try to trace backwards all those steps we had taken. Seeing the patterns of our paths towards one another, we could never think of undoing what had been so neatly completed. If the poem I had heard had been warning me of a loss of my own, I could only have supposed that either the young woman or myself had taken a wrong turning. It was almost unthinkable, but our paths were not going to meet after all. Twenty years from then, or so my uncle’s poem might have been warning me, I might have been a bachelor approaching middle age like the man who was trying to warn me. In that case, I could at least fall back on poetry such as his ballad of regretfulness.
At mid-afternoon my uncle and I turned away from the sea. We had left his car at the end of a grassy track two hours before; but in all our walking we had mostly wandered, and from the high cliff where we turned back I saw a glinting of the sun in glass about a mile away and supposed it was the windscreen of his Holden.
We walked back towards the car but through paddocks we had not crossed earlier. The nearest houses were still far away, in valleys sheltered from the sea-wind. The district was called Lake Gillear, but no township or post office was denoted by that name. I had seen the lake. It was not much more than a large swamp. I had seen it years before on another outing with my uncle. The season had been winter then, and whenever I had said the words Lake Gillear afterwards the sound of the last vowel had made me remember the shuddering of the grey water while the cold wind had blown across it.
My uncle was leading me, I suddenly noticed, towards a piece of level ground on the sheltered side of a hill. If I had been more observant I might have noticed sooner the few signs of what the place had been: the traces of a track leading up to it; the older, wooden fe
nceposts marking where a gate had once swung; and the one fruit-tree—a quince, my uncle told me later—leaning to the ground among the boxthorn bushes and the rabbit-scrapes.
The decaying tree hid until the last moment the few broken bricks and the scattering of jonquils. As soon as I knew we were standing on the site of a house of which nothing survived but the ruins of a chimney, and that my father’s brother had been intending all afternoon to lead me to that spot, I was apprehensive again. I thought I was in for a little ceremony—a rite of familial piety. I thought I might hear of some pilgrimage that the men of my father’s family had kept up for years. But nothing of the kind happened.
I followed my father’s brother into the level place where the grass was shorter and more yielding than the pastures around it. I felt the sudden dying-away of the sea-wind. The jonquils barely nodded. Of all the places I had observed that day, the green clearing with the hill behind and the shaggy tree in front was the most suitable for my meeting with a young woman.
My uncle had strode into the place with no change in his gait. He stopped only for long enough to glance around as though he had to deliver to someone afterwards a brief report on the crumbs of bricks and the neglected jonquils. Then he strode on again into the paddocks and towards the road.
I caught up with him and asked him off-handedly whose house we had just seen. He said I had just visited the home of the Cotters, who were among my forebears. The tone of his voice told me he had no banter just for the moment. But then, when I had already begun to see the Cotters as venerable husband and wife, my uncle went on to say that the Cotters had been his own great-uncles: two bachelor brothers of his grandmother who had spent the last twenty years of their lives in their cottage at Lake Gillear.
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