Brennan’s Poems, on their appearance in 1914, represented something unique in Australian verse. This was the completion of a symbolist livre composé, the volume designed not as a collection of poems, but as a single poem, sustained through changing moods and verse-forms. It was a structure Brennan found in French poetry of the nineteenth century, specifically in Regnier’s Tel qu’en songe (‘that finest of all books written according to the symbolist formula’) and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, coming of Baudelaire’s resolve ‘to desert the separate genres and to condense all his poetry into one book which shall have its unity and its secret architecture’. The outcome was for Brennan ‘the sublimation of  a while imaginative life and experience into a subtly ordered series of poems, where each piece has, of course, its individual value, and yet cannot be interpreted save in relation to the whole’.1 This is the best description of his own Poems. The design has however remained to some degree inaccessible, as the volume was published in 1914 in a limited edition, and has never been republished since in exactly the form Brennan intended.

It is not simply a matter or reproducing the order of the poems. As Brennan conceived the art of the livre composé, there was a significance in the typography employed, in the placing of the poems on the page, and even in a page left blank. To hold the book in one’s hands, and to leaf through it, is to perceive something of its intention. The emphatic half-titles indicate the five sections or movements of the book, the first three consecutively dated— Towards the Source (1894–1897), The Forest of Night (1898–1902), The Wanderer (1902–  ) —and the remaining two, Pauca Mea and Epilogues, extending and recapitulating the development. Two different type-faces are employed, to distinguish levels in the action: the verses in bold face either have the function of commentary (in the ‘Lilith’ sequence, approximating to a chorus) or else serve as ‘interludes’ and ‘epigraphs’ linking one phase to the next. Poems like ‘Where the poppy-banners flow’ (No. 15) and ‘Chimera writhes beside the tragic flame’ (No. 65) have the more specialized role, through their mood and imagery, of establishing the ‘dominant motive’ or ‘setting the key’ of the series that follow them.2

The evolution of the livre composé can be traced through Brennan’s manuscripts from 1891 to 1913, as his purposes gradually became clear to him. The poems written up to February 1896 which he wished to preserve Brennan entered in a bound manuscript volume now in the Fisher Library, and in March of the next year he issued a selection from as XVIII Poems : Being the first collection of verse & prose. This rare volume, of which only eight copies were made, gave way in July 1897 to XXI Poems : Towards the Source, in which the form of the livre composé is first perceptible: the poems are arranged in three movements, with an envoi. In October 1897 Brennan drafted a prospectus for ‘a second and enlarged edition, wherein the unity of the book shall be more apparent’, and his correspondence with Brereton through the 1890s and after shows how the scheme evolved. As the extension of Towards the Source becomes The Book of Lilith (later The Forest of Night), he can be seen drawing up successive plans of the cycle, sending poems to Brereton as instalments of it, shifting them from one position to another as the scheme demands, or making minute revisions to preserve or extend some motif in the imagery. The plan sent to Brereton in c. May 1899 indicates something of his exasperation with these protracted labours (following page). There were to be changes within this pattern, as groupings only suggested here later emerged as distinct series (‘Secreta Silvarum’, ‘Wisdom’, ‘Twilights of the Gods and the Folk’), and ‘The Shadow of Lilith’ was renamed ‘The Quest of Silence’, the earlier title being reserved to the ‘Lilith’ sequence itself. The ‘Finale’ envisaged in this scheme was also displaced by a new series, The Wanderer, which suddenly came into existence in 1901–2.

 

 

DISPOSITION OF THE BOOK OF LILITH (TO BE PVBLISHED GOD-KNOWS-WHEN, BECAVSE IT’S ALL BLOODY ROT)

 

In the biographical note appended to the Poems, dated ‘22.xii.1913’, Brennan states that ‘the original plan has been carried out’. The necessity to complete the design has here there proved inimical to the poetry. Brennan had acknowledged to Brereton in a letter of October 1899 the ‘marks of forced work’ in what he had done, and later poems like No. 62 and No. 67 might be instanced as further evidence. The Poems nevertheless have an essential continuity, which derives from a process akin to problem-solving: in imaginative terms the cycle is an exploration and a testing, a movement from dream to reality.

Its genesis lies in some poems which Brennan later described  in an autobiographical note,3 as ‘certain sonnets in 1891 under inspiration of Swinburne and my philosophical (and other) experiences’. The ‘philosophical experiences’ are traceable in the copy of the University Calendar (now in the library of St John’s College) which Brennan possessed in 1889 and 1890, his second and third years as an Arts student. Against the date 3 March 1890 he wrote ‘H SPENCER Took out of Univ Library Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles” ‘, and this is followed by the entry ‘Agnosticism AGNOSTICISM’. There is a marginal comment ‘The irony of the thing is, that during this wk I attended a mission at our church, and at the same time was being converted to agnosticism’. The consequences were worked out philosophically in ‘The Metaphysic of Nescience’, and the MA thesis on which Brennan was engaged in 1891, and reflected in the only one of the 1891 poems that he published (in Hermes in November): ‘Farewell, the pleasant harbourage of Faith’.4

This sonnet is not included in the Poems, although ‘1908’ epilogue, dealing with Brennan’s rejection of his Catholic upbringing, recalls the experience behind it. It is nevertheless the starting-point: with the harbourage of Faith left behind, what other moorings can be found? Brennan was now set amid the philosophical currents of the nineteenth century, searching the Spencerian concepts of the Absolute and the Unknowable: he was later to describe himself as a ‘confirmed metaphysician … and one speaks also of confirmed drunkards’ (Prose, p. 40). The two years he spent in Germany on a travelling scholarship gave his thinking a particular direction. Continuing his study of classics and philosophy in Berlin, Brennan at the same time became absorbed in the work of the second generation of French romantic poets, finding in it an impulse that answered his own. The inspiration of Swinburne had already drawn him into the stream of English romanticism (in its ‘decadent’ phase) and the sonnets of 1891 betray a conviction that the self is illimitable, that the poet is a hero encountering experience, and that the transcendent—if for the moment mislaid—is ultimately within his reach.  

Brennan came to define his position more rigorously than this. He gave the simplest statement of it in his symbolism lectures in 1904, in advancing the proposition that ‘the first and most patent fact with which poetry has to do is the imperfection of our life: and this involves the contrary fact of its possible perfection’ (Prose, p. 67). He went on to describe the ‘two lives’ intimated in human experience:

The sense of another life, ‘radiant with love and beauty’, was what Brennan found in the French romantic poets, and from Mallarmé, whose work he discovered in 1893, he came to call it ‘Eden’. Brennan sent a copy of XXI Poems : Towards the Source to Mallarmé in 1897, and he replied ‘il y a de vous et moi certainement une parenté de songe’.5

On Mallarmé’s death in 1898, Brennan wrote a tribute for The Bulletin, declaring ‘to turn the steps of a generation towards the source, towards Eden, for this end Stephané Mallarmé lived’ (Prose, p. 282). Towards the Source is the title of the first movement of the Poems (based on XXI Poems of 1897) and the metaphysical drive that impels the cycle as a whole is felt here in its most romantic terms. The persona is solitary and heroic, on the threshold of some boundless experience: the ‘1897’ epilogue defines his position—

The lyrics of Towards the Source—in the versions of both 1897 an 1914—are to be interpreted in the light of Brennan’s relationship to Anna Elisabeth Werth, to whom he became engaged in Berlin in 1893, and who followed him to Sydney to be married in 1897. The first of the lyrics is set in Germany; in those that follow the seasons described or remembered are European, not Australian; time is measures as ‘four spring-times lost’. These are poems of separation, with memories of ‘the clear enchantments of our single year’ turning to thoughts of consummation, as though Eden might be found in human love.

The art of the livre composé, as Brennan controls it, is to allow each phase of the development its due intensity, and then let it fall  into perspective as the series moves on. In Towards the Source the feeling is at its most ardent and rhetorical: the persona is absorbed in his own attitudes and emotions, but not yet able to evaluate them to himself. From a standpoint later in the series, certain of these poems will appear overstated, while forms like the rondel and the Patmorian ode lend them a fin de siècle quality.  There is already an acknowledgment of naïveté towards the end of the sequence in a reflective piece like No. 28, looking back on the fervours celebrated earlier, and Towards the Source ends by recognizing the necessity to start again.

The ‘two lives’ that Brennan senses inhuman experience, the one tied to ‘dullness and mediocrity’, the other ‘unfettered, lying beyond good and evil’, were also he believed reflected in myth. Myths of the fall of man represented the passage from one state to the other; myths of the lost paradise, the golden age, the Fountain of Youth and the Land of Heart’s Desire tried to express a human sense of perfection lost or to come. The Forest of Night, the second broad movement of Poems (1914), undertakes the exploration of myth. The first two sections, ‘The Twilight of Disquietude’ and ‘The Quest of Silence’, are a parade of images of desolation, lost innocence, of outwardly seductive appearances which mask the evil or the unexplained. They hint at an exploration at a deeper level, the level of the subconscious mind. Poem after poem seems to move towards some unnerving discovery, or to recoil from the unknown:

‘This conscious mind’, Brennan wrote in 1904, ‘is but the surface of our mind. Below it stretches a dark region, the subconscious or subliminal, out of which every now and then something swims up into the sunlit region’ (Prose, p. 79).

He pursues these possibilities through The Forest of Night, finding an equivalent to the human subconscious in the figure of Lilith. Lilith was the first bride of Adam, whom he forsook for Eve, so that she then became an exile of the night. In Brennan’s reading of the myth, Adam’s rejection of Lilith is the true loss of paradise, and the ‘garden-state’ to which he comes is no more than an Eden of sense. And although the fallen Adam has lost nearly all knowledge of his earlier existence with Lilith, she revengefully visits him in dreams—one of the modes of the unconscious—as a presence he cannot identify, and destroys his present content. The plight of Adam is the plight of humanity caught between the ‘two lives’, bound to one existence but tormented by hints of another exceeding it, unable to satisfy these longings but unable to ignore them. Lilith appears in some myths as lamia or siren or vampire, a projection of human fears of her power.

The Forest of Night is the most intricate phase of the livre composé, in which it passes from a lyrical to a semi-dramatic form. The poems in ordinary type become the speeches of the actors, and the poems in bold face the commentary of a chorus. The transition is gradually made, the heading ‘The Watch at Midnight’ dimly suggesting a location, which is not specified further except by reference to the trees and the stars, until in the speech ‘O thou that achest, pulse o’ the unwed vast’ (in manuscript designated ‘The Voice of Man’) the watcher’s soliloquy begins.

Now ‘born into dividual life’ and ‘close-folded to his newer spouse’, Adam can remember no more of his previous life with Lilith than mankind (in myth) can recall of the golden age. His soliloquy shows him groping back into his subconscious, trying to identify the memories that linger there, knowing that ‘Nightly thy tempting comes’ and that somehow ‘I sicken with the long unsatisfied/waiting’. In a passage marked in manuscript il gran rifiuto (Inferno, III.60–61) he decides to reject these promptings and place his satisfaction in earthly things:

The speech answering this one (‘Nay, not thus lightly, heart the winds have mock’d!’) has a choric quality still, and is probably not yet attributed to Lilith herself. She declares herself, after the watcher has lapsed into sleep (‘Thou sleep, at least, receive and wrap me sure’), in the speech ‘Terrible, if he will not have me else’, which in manuscript was headed by the Hebrew symbols for ‘Lilith’. The dramatic mode means that the issues are put in terms of the relationships of the actors: rejected by Adam, Lilith promises to destroy all the surrogates in which he takes refuge—love, warfare, religion, greatness—prophesying that all will prove illusory, unable ever to replace the Eden he has forfeited. ‘The Labour of Night’, which follows, is a display of these illusions—entertained by the necromancer, the conqueror, the folk hero—and show them as an unending series, to be terminated only when the earth is consumed in fire.

As Towards the Source had analogues in the plastic arts in the versions of the ‘La Source’ theme by Ingres, Courbet and Clodion (a naked figure beside a spring), so the Lilith motif is represented too in the drawings of Althea Gyles (as the lithe serpent woman) or of Rossetti (as the enchantress with flowing hair). Brennan referred to Yeats’s discussion of the ‘Lilith’ of Althea Gyles6 in a letter to Brereton in 1899:

As Towards the Source had defined a phase of romantic sensibility, and then left it behind, so too does The Forest of Night. The ‘period’ features of Brennan’s Lilith are those with counterparts to contemporary art: the attributes of the Fatal Woman, the mistress of passion and sorceress over the powers of the mind. Brennan has nevertheless reconceived the tradition by relating Lilith to the subconscious, and by interpreting all the myths in which she figures as expressing the various attitudes of man to the dream of Eden. The singularity of The Forest of Night is that the examination is so uncompromising: from the premisses given, the consequences are remorselessly work out, until their full irony is established. The ‘paradisal instinct’ is show to be more imperious, more inescapable than ever before, at exactly the same time as dreams of romantic consummation are finally discredited and set aside. When the survey of human history through ‘The Labour of Night’ drives the persona to look to the end of the world as a release, with the faint prospect of a new Eden arising from its destruction, this is almost a counsel of despair.

The recovery of confidence occurs in The Wanderer. The manuscripts show that The Wanderer was not the subject of such premeditation and elaboration as The Forest of Night: the poems were by contrast written quickly, and eight of them were published as a sequence in Hermes in 1902. Their background is Brennan’s prose writings ‘Philosophy and Art’ and ‘Symbolism in Nineteenth Century Literature’, in which he makes clear his rejection of  ‘Absolutist’ metaphysics for the Pragmatism of F. C. S. Schiller and William James. The vast systems of philosophy are seen now as on the same level as the primitive myths, as part of man’s effort to explain his situation to himself. Yet whenever a hypothesis of any kind is found to correspond with the circumstances—a scientist writes the law of (say) gravitation, and nature seems to honour the cheque—this may be the token of a more genuine harmony to come. Although we must begin with ‘our undeniably broken life and our undeniably imperfect world’ (Prose, p. 79), pragmatism envisages the two drawing together, as though by trial and error, and shedding some of their imperfections in the process. Brennan came to see a similar prospect in the dealings of the conscious with the unconscious mind, regarded hitherto as only an area of strangeness and menace. If the subconscious is still evidence of a nature divided against itself, it is also the pledge of a total self that might be evolved and unified—with the added promise that the subconscious seems to mediate between the present limited existence and another beyond it.

As these convictions are reflected in The Wanderer, this stage of the cycle marks the repudiation of the Absolute which Brennan had courted since 1891. It is now seens as a spectre, a transcendental blank, and discarded for another synthesis—still somewhat romantically conceived, and still far off—that tries to deal with live experience and with the contingent world. The constraints that in The Forest of Night had been felt in the severity of the couplet and the Miltonic verse paragraph, or in the almost unvaried sonnet pattern of ‘The Labour of Night’ are now thrown off: The Wanderer is in the form of a monologue, and the emancipation may be sensed in its blank verse. Again the persona is isolated, and in the opening poems regrets his exclusion from the firelit windows along the way. At the eighth poem of the series—a transition marked by the page left blank—he rejects the life of the ‘souls that serve’ in their ‘prison-homes’, and exults in his apartness from other men. The series concludes in his acceptance of his lot:

In The Wanderer the cycle has become affirmative again. But besides this development within it from a mood of self-pity to a mood of defiance, there is another, and less obvious, progression. If the heroic role has been re-established, it is nevertheless muted at the close: the tone of ‘I am the wanderer of many years’ is almost one of resignation, tempering the challenge that had gone before. It is this second development that continues through Pauca Mea (a re-enactment of the themes of the The Wanderer, with diminishing resonance) to the final Epilogues.

The first of them, ‘Deep in my hidden country stands a peak’, headed ‘1897’, recalls the heroic attitude and the prospect of illimitable experience from which the series began. The second, ‘1908’, looks back over the distance travelled. It describes a tram ride one evening up from Broadway to the ‘four-turreted square tower’ of Sydney University, with the steeple of St Benedict’s passed on the way: these are the two spires from which the journey is measured. It is a winter’s evening, lit by the orange gaslamps as well as by ‘the electrics’ ghastly blue’, and attention fixes on the city crowd, lingering before the lighted shop-fronts but hurrying through the patches of darkness. These ‘pavement thralls’ are the same ‘souls that serve; whose stunted existence the Wanderer had despised, rejoicing in his solitary lot; now he recognizes his kinship with them:

The ‘1908’ epilogue completes the movement of the livre composé from lyrical to dramatic to reflective, in a progression which can be seen in retrospect to have allowed for the discords and aridities, and the moments of emotional extravagance and indulgence, experienced along the way. More importantly, it completes the process by which one role after another has been explored and discarded, as every later experience has compelled a revelation of an earlier one. The romantic fervours of Towards the Source yield to the trouble searchings and ironical discoveries of The Forest of Night, and those ironies are overcome in turn by the renewed confidence of The Wanderer, but the Wanderer’s role at the end, as he sees himself as a ‘fellow-pilgrim; of the crowd, is drawn into the common experience he had disdained. The Eden dream is still valid, but its context now is the life of these ‘listless captives of the street’,

The second of the ‘two lives’ has now to be sought within the first.

The present text

This is a facsimile of copy No. 32 of Poems (1914), inscribed by Brennan to E. R Holme, one of the subscribers to the edition. It departs from the original in one respect, in obedience to the principle of representing the intentions of the author. This is the re-ordering of poems 19–26, which appear in all known copies of the Poems in the sequence 23–26, 19–22, deviating from the ‘Table’ given at the end. In the proof copy of the Poems in the Mitchell Library (QA821/B838/2A6), dated by Brennan ‘20. xi. 1913’, poems 19–26 occur in the order of the ‘Table’, and it is possible to see from the proofs how the displacement could have been caused by a mistake in the binding. Brennan drew attention to the error in Paul Wenz’s copy (QA821/B838/2A3, inscribed as ‘Author’s corrected copy’ on ‘6. vi. 19131’), by adding a note to the ‘Table’ against the relevant poems: ‘19–26 true order given her disturbed by printer’. In the present text the original order has been restored.

There are two other places where the poems as printed diverge from the order of the ‘Table’, but in the absence of any authorial direction, no change has been made. ‘MDCCCXCIII: A Prelude’ (No. 1) is in the ‘Table’ placed before the half-title Towards the Source, as though it were a prelude to the whole cycle. In the text it follows the half-title, becoming the prelude to Towards the Source only. This placing seems the more appropriate, as ‘A Prelude’ sets the characteristic imagery of Towards the Source and identifies the experience behind it, and it is a placing confirmed in the proof copy. The other instance is in the ‘Wisdom’ series, Nos 73–76, which appear in the book in the sequence 74–76, 73. Again this is the order in the proof copy, and as ‘Wisdom’ is one of the series in which Brennan chose to number the poems, the compositor would presumably have had before him texts of Nos 74–76  headed ‘I’, ‘II’ and ‘III’, and of No. 73 headed ‘IIII’,  in order to have set them with these headings. The ‘Table’ may have been compiled hastily, for in itemizing No. 68 Brennan overlooked ‘Terrible, if he will not have me else’ as one of the units of ‘Lilith’.

In the text of the poems, as distinct from their order, Brennan corrected three literals and marked two omitted lines. The first two literals (in No. 1, ‘ecstacy’ for ‘ecstasy’ in stanza 23, and ‘gold-linked’ for ‘golden-linked’ in stanza 24) are corrected in the Wenz copy only, but the third (in No. 11, ‘soil’ for ‘soul’ in stanza seven) is corrected in a number of copies. (One might suggest a fourth, ‘plentitude’ for ‘plenitude’ ten lines from the end of No. 105, for although Brennan has not corrected it, ‘plenitude’ is his spelling in the manuscript.) The omission, marked in both the Wenz copy and the Piddington copy (Mitchell Library, C 890), is of a couplet from Lilith’s speech ‘Terrible, if he will not have me else’, seven lines from the end. The text should read (with omitted lines identified in italic):

Two minor textual problems remain. The first line of No. 72, ‘What gems chill glitter yon, thrice dipt’, reads in the ‘Table’ as ‘What gems’ chill glitter yon, thrice dipt. In No. 87, the first line reads in the text ‘Each day I see the long ships coming into port’, but in the ‘Table’ it reads ‘Daily I see the long ships coming into port’. These discrepancies may be noted, but there is no evidence sufficient to resolve them.

G. A. Wilkes

University of Sydney

August 1972