A POET'S TRAGEDY

Star (Christchurch), Issue 10143, 3 May 1911, Page 3

A POET'S TRAGEDY

Twenty years ago the best known woman, poet in Australia was Grace .Jennings Garmichael. The tragedy of her young life is told sympathetically in "The New Idea" by Gwen Serjeant W'liate, much of tho article dealing with the rescue of her three boys from an English workhouse by Australian sympathisers. All three are now in Victoria, where they are being severally adopted and given suitable advantages by kind friends. The little fellows, it seems, have inherited much of their mother's charm and mental power, and . thero is good ground to hope that the dark clouds that obscured their earliest years are dispelled from this time onward. The subscriptions which poured in from those who remembered their mother, together with the generosity of their adopted parents, will, it seems, suffice to give them a srtart in life.

"The life of Jennings Garmichael was pathetically short, and her end a desperately sad one," says White. "She was born in Ballarat, \ictoria, in 1868, and died in 1904, at the age of tliirty-six. Of the intervening years there is not much on record. She spent her early childhood in Ballarat. Then, when her widowed mother married again, she went to live near Orbost, where her stepfather managed a large station property. One can understand that to an imaginative child of nine years of age this change from town life to the fascinating wilds of the Gippsland bush must have been nothing less than delightful. ' 0 native bush!' she herself wroto, when she afterwards found expression. 'My heart amidst thy vastness grows full with perfect rest!' Innately a lover of Nature in all its aspects, she absorbed the influences which surrounded her at this happy period of her life to sitch an extent that the fragrance of the bush flowers still cling to some of her poems. But even as the dominant not© of the bush is insistently sad, so the chord to which, the young singer attuned her heart was ever in the minor. Indeed, there is a strange sadness in all her songs that appeals to <?ur sympathy more thoroughly to-day, in tho face of the after events than any trill of joyoiis spontaneity could ever have done. Jennings Garmichael loved Australia with all her heart. In a homesick little poem—the very one which headed the subscription lists which were sent around in. aid of her children—she tells how much "a little spray of Gippsland wattle" brought back to her in her weary loneliness. All! little flower I loved of old, Dear little downy heads of gold! Truly, mine eyes are full of tears, As, o'er the long, dividing years, The past comes back to me.

Surely thou lcnowest not from home — Thy home and mine—l willing roam. Ah, couldst thou guess how fancy flies To those bush shades r.nd forest bMps, Far from these city-stones'

But it was not only of the bush that Miss Carmicliael sang. In the later eighties she went to Melbourne—where she had been previously educated—and there she entered the Children's Hospital as a nurse. ■ She was devotedly attached to children, more especially to suffering ones; and she remained at the hospital until 1890, when she obtained her nurse's certificate. What may be termed the record of these few years was bound into book form in 1891 under the title of " Hospital Children." At this time her verse and prose sketches found place in the different journals almost weekly; and she became known in the literary circle to which she belonged as '' The Gippsland Poetess;" Mr Bruntou Stephens designating her " The Australian Jean Ingelow."

As one reads her poems even the most unthinking person cannot but be struck with their pathetic application to the troubles afterwards endured by her own children. This is particularly noticeable in the poem entitled '' For Someone's Sake," which was written as an appeal for the little inmates of the Children's Hospital. In it we find the following two verses:

Surely, somewhere, in the world of little children, There's a tiny face that meets your loving eye; There's a childish form you'd shelter from all sorrow. Ah! you couldn't bear to hear that little creature's cry. For the sake of one be pitiful and tender, Helping; all who pine in anguish and in woe; For wo never know how sorely they were stricken, Ivor how soon our dear ones may be crying so! Hearken, fathers! to the voices of the children ; Listen, mothers! to the pathos of their cry; Be not deaf to childish misery and sorrow— There is anguish that we must not hurry by! Stretch your loving; open arms a little wider, To your heart the world of little children take; In remembering those your love may yet be calling For tho aid you (five to-day For Someone's Sake!

Truly, in the_ ears of those working to relieve the distress of Jennings Carmichael s own children, the living voice of the dead mother must have sounded very clearly ! Her hospital training completed, MissCarmichael took up private nursing in St Kilda, where she attended to a poor little boy—in an afflicted sense—-for some considerable time; but she still kept on writing. A poem, which was perhaps her favourite, called " Tomboy Madge," appeared about this period. It begins thus:

O for a swim through the running river, And one long pull with the boys at dawn! O for a ride on my dear old Rover, One tennis round on the grassy lawn! 0 could 1 watch the Bun on the wide sea, And feel the cool foam around my feet! O breezes wild, come blowing about m®, And fill the bush with your music sweet!

In 1895 all Jennings Carmichael's poems were collected and published in book form, and shortly before this realisation of her girlish literary ambitions she married Francis Mullis, an architect. Before leaving Australia to goi with him to England, she lectured at a great many Australian towns upon "The Spirit of the Bush," a subject of which she was said to be a perfect exponent. By many she was considered to be a beautiful woman personally, and all who knew her recognised the sterling quality of her character. She was loved and admired, by all her friends.

One feels more than a passing throb of pity when one hears of her undeserved end. In London, Francis Mullis deserted his wife and children—left them alone, unknown and uncared for, in a strange laud. What happened exactly during the early part of those seven wretched years, and subsequently, no one can for certain say. But one can imagine the futile struggle against overwhelming _ circumstances, the sickening disappointments ending in helpless resignation born of the despair which must have numbed her every hope. There were five children of this unhappy marriage, two of whom are now dead. One of these was a little girl, and her mother must have been utterly thankful that she was taken, and so spared the dire deprivations and cruel poverty which beset herself and her boys. She must have realised the truth of her own words: God's fulness waits beyond our earthly loss, Drink thy Gethsemane in faith and prayer; The shadow of the garden will grow fair, And sweet will seem the story of the Cross.

Jennings Carmichael died towards the end of the bitter English winter, on February 9 1904, in the workhouse at Levton. The sordid, ironic tragedy of it all! For the woman used to roaming the wide sunny spaces' of the Australian country to die alone in the biting English cold, pent up between the rour prison-like walls of a poorhouse ! Besides all this, the one awful thought which must have obliterated every other misery with its intensity—that she was leaving her three boys, as she thought, humanly unprotected. May there be a happier fate in store for her three boys ! It is a satisfaction to hear that they have been given the

legal right to bear their mother's name—a name which is dear to many an Australian reader.