The Poetry of Ursula Bethell

Abstract

The work of Mary Ursula Bethell stands apart from the comparatively brief tradition of New Zealand poetry, and at every turn one finds that her circumstances or her temperament and background of experience separate her from her contemporaries. Although she was brought out to New Zealand in 1874 as a baby, "kicking and scratching", as she said, in her unwillingness, and spent her early childhood here, she returned to England in her teens, and thereafter lived chiefly in England for many years. When she came to settle in Christchurch in 1924 it was as an English woman in a strange land that she began writing verse. She did not look on New Zealand with the urgent concern of the poets of the last two generations who have from their youth shown a keen awareness of the social and economic problems facing their own young but quickly developing country. Furthermore, unlike these poets, for most of whom the earning of a livelihood has made an urgent claim on time and vitality, Ursula Bethell was able to organise her time as she chose, and her poems bear witness to long hours of contemplation, and a certain aloofness from the quick tempo of the life around her. Another fact that separates Ursula Bethell's poetical career from that of her contemporaries is that she left no youthful poetry by which her development might be traced. Though her friends have always taken it for granted that she must have written verse in her youth, her first published work dates from 1924, when she was fifty. Nonetheless there is a clearly-marked and surprising advance in her technique and subject matter during the next fifteen years. As all her friends insist, Ursula Bethell was no ordinary person. Not only had she an extraordinarily wide background of travel and pursuits, but she was sensitive, with the gift of an outstanding intellect which enabled her to integrate her experience in to the rhythm of her thought.