Crawling Through the Archives: The Poetry of Blanche Edith Baughan

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 49, 1 January 2017, Page 9

Crawling Through the Archives: The Poetry of Blanche Edith Baughan

PAULA GREEN

In order to write a book on New Zealand women poets , 7am spending time with those first published locally. Initially, the early poetry feels like a foreign country, but these women are my foundation stones. I start with Jessie Mackay. Next, Blanche Edith Baughan. The shift from Mackay’s poetry to that of Baughan jolts because it is like moving to a guitar tuned to a different key. Again I flounder at the doorway because I can neither see nor hear my way into the poems. Mimicking my entry into the poetry of Mackay, I need to crawl through the archives in order to step across poetic thresholds.

Unlike Mackay, Baughan was bom and raised in England. Her biography unfolds and refolds in startling increments. She was born in 1870, in Surrey, England, the youngest of six children. Her father died when she was 10. She attended Royal Holloway College where she was its first student to graduate with a BA (Hons) in Classics. She worked in London slums, supported the suffragette movement, and taught Greek to the Duchess of Bedford. In the early 1890 s, Baughan travelled alone to Germany, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland. She toured New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, India and southern Africa, and saw the Victoria Falls. For a woman to travel the world alone at this point in time was not entirely unusual, but required a degree of daring. Baughan returned home to nurse her invalid mother for seven years. Upon her mother's death in 1900, she was free to return to New Zealand, where she based herself for the rest of her life. 1 After an undisclosed illness in 1909 or 1910, Baughan scarcely wrote poetry, but produced numerous travel pieces and fought hard for penal reform. She died in 1958.

In 1958, Baughan's best friend, Berta S. Burns, wrote down some informal memories of her friend for future scholars, but rewrote them with 'a little more justice' 11 years later. 2 Intriguingly, Burns also censored this new version in order to protect a British niece, Baughan's only surviving relative. Burns, however, had the missing facts witnessed and embargoed until there were no living descendants. 3

The facts were kept hidden for years, and I didn't discover them immediately.

Baughan's biography now shifts and resettles; the poetic threshold reforms.

Baughan's maternal grandfather was confined to Broadmoor after he was found guilty of insane homicide. Baughan's mother killed her husband (Baughan's father), and her invalid state was a psychiatric illness. Fearing the propensity to insanity and murder was a hereditary family trait, Baughan vowed she would neither marry nor have children. She fell profoundly in love with a Canadian engineer on a sea voyage and resisted marriage. Traces of this veiled narrative infiltrate her poetry, but in an unpublished novel, Two New Zealand Roses, the secret biography is made movingly clear. 4 In a letter to a friend at the Howard League for Penal Reform (1957), Baughan penned a biographical note resonant with confession and omission:

I was born at Putney (near London then) in 1870, of a Welsh father & an English mother, but lost the care of both parents very early. We were otherwise 'comfortably off,' but I was never very happy or very well. One day at school, in the early 80s, we had a lesson on New Zealand where there were 'no snakes, no small-pox & no strikes' but lots of sunshine and freedom. 'l'll go there when I'm grown up,' I decided, stuck to it, but had to wait till the turn of the century. I had already decided that wives had to have very dull stick-at-home lives, so I'd never marry. I stuck to that too. 5

Baughan published her first two poetry collections in Britain as B. E. Baughan (Verses, 1898; Reuben and Other Poems, 1903); they were lauded and automatically assumed to be those of a man. 6 The Morning Post claimed: Tf Mr Baughan can fulfil the promise shown, he may make for himself a name in literature ... undoubted genius ... May do great things'. 7 Burns suggests Baughan 'thought a fairer outlook would prevail if the signature were not self evidently female'. 8 Over a century later, Damien Love collected a small edition of Baughan's poetry and prose, claiming her as 'the first woman to write significant poetry in New Zealand'. 9 In his introduction, he admires Baughan's enthusiasm, her long, loose lines and rhythms, but retreats from her sentimentality and colloquialisms. In conclusion, he suggests that while we cannot select our founding mothers and fathers, and would rather a more 'cogent' choice, Baughan 'is what we have, and recognising the felicities in her minor verse may help save us from overestimating the minor verse of our own day'. 10

Allen Curnow had overlooked Baughan - as though she belonged in the literary wasteland he had identified post Mackay and William Pember Reeves - when he selected poets for his canon-building mid-century anthology. 11 Twenty years later, he reread Baughan in a restorative light; he lauded the vivid linguistic density, the rapid pace and the dramatic shifts of 'The Bush Section', to the extent that he claimed it 'the best New Zealand poem before Mason'. 12 He included it in his new anthology, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse.

Blanche Baughan is my second foundation stone. Side-tracked by neither the early rhetoric nor the conditional praise, the archives deliver my way in, and in her writing, I sight poetry as freedom, poetry as attachment, and poetry as enlightenment. 13

Poetry as freedom Baughan was a dutiful daughter. She cared for her invalid mother but she longed for elsewhere, as her first poems underline. Intrepid woman, she had already travelled to foreign places alone, by land and by sea. In her unpublished novel it is as though its protagonist, Rosy, speaks for Baughan: 'All that sky and sea, nothing but sky and sea, such a great lovely clear space, it did make me feel so free'. 14

Baughan's first poems veil the specifics of caring for a psychiatrically disturbed mother, the anxiety that she witnessed, the possibility of her future impaired self, and the need for women to shape new roles for themselves. If you step over the sentimental flourishes and the phrases that sound trite to our contemporary ear, you enter the heartbreaking pitch of a woman struggling to find her place and shape in the world. From youth to old age, Baughan would find a place to sit outside and lose herself in sky or seascape. 'What am I?' she asks and abandons in 'Death-in-Life'; and then plants a poignant gap for us to fill: 'No part of me but in the sunlight shares. /I am become a morsel of blue sky'. 15 She hides in the sky as she hides in the poem: in the sky, she has become '[ajnything, save a creature that hath cares'.

The yearning to be free is like an insistent Baughan motif that resonates in the sea, in the ships and the wings of birds. The world is wan or grey or hungry, and Baughan entreats 'would men were free / With no less liberty' than the waves. 16 In 'Golden-Mouth', the cry for freedom suggests it is not just out of daily toil but out of frustration with a world that short-changes humanity: 17

Long, long months my weary mind Had conn'd the griefs of humankind; Care had had my heart to school,

And sear'd it with her iron rule. 18 And a moment later: And are these wings, my spirit feels? And are wings growing at my heels? 19 Even when Baughan settled in New Zealand, she was always on the move, out walking in the hills, hungry for beauty and space.

Poetry as attachment Baughan suggests she was drawn to New Zealand because of the sunshine and freedom, yet New Zealand also offered a clean sheet for reinvention. She could re-establish herself away from the taint of her family history, with pressure neither to marry nor bear children - and the freedom to write afresh. Initially, she stayed on a friend's farm in Ormondville, in the middle of the North Island, and worked as a domestic. She later moved to an idyllic location on Banks Peninsula where she wrote Shingle-Short and Other Poems, her most admired collection, 20 and Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven, a book of prose pieces that detail pioneering life. 21 The poems in Shingle-Short represent a new freedom as they attach themselves to fresh settings with different voices and a resistance to the rhyme and rhythms of her early work. In a letter to Miss Higgins (Australian poet and essayist, Nettie Palmer) Baughan confesses that she has an aversion to poetic forms and that the necessity of rhyme in a sonnet 'makes me feel inclined to snort'. 22 The new poems feature interior monologues as though voice becomes a surrogate identity and a way of anchoring place. The poems represent a suite of attachments to the land and the people, and unlike Mackay's work, exhibit scant signs of what was left behind.

Baughan's first New Zealand poetry appeared in her second collection, Reuben and Other Poems. 'Young Hotspur' adopts the point of view of a young man about to depart for war, while The Old Place' depicts a shearer looking back on his life and home. 23 One poem is on edge with the vulnerability of a life to be lived and potentially lost, while the other balances on the knife edge of hard times, in a place that broke the shearer's heart, yet broke his heart to leave it. Departures are multiple, with the young man about to sail and the old man nearing death. Loved ones have gone and will go. Hovering about the duo of poems are the implied departures of Baughan; her lifetime of travel within and beyond New Zealand, and from all that is familiar and loved. The first poem that really struck me in Shingle-Short, with its clatter of change and stasis, was 'A Bush Section'. 24 The poem features the burning of bush to clear the land and renders the dead scene disconsolate and desolate: 'Dead, and not yet

re-born, / Made, unmade, and scarcely as yet in the making; / Ruin'd, forlorn, and blank'. 25 The poem resists rhyme and tidy rhythm, and sprawls across 10 pages, allowing Baughan room to reflect and observe. The scene is melancholic with meagre sign of life, the visual detail so evocative you can almost smell the pungent black, and running through, like a live wire, is the river. The river is life force, freedom, rejuvenating movement. Baughan catches the river's glint in a surprising simile that exudes the endless possibilities of making: 'Busy and bright as a needle in knitting'. 26 As I read the poem aloud, I hear the pace of the river accumulating waves and wash, the debris of living, and it feels like a poet bursting out of poetic rules. A train cuts through the scene and pulls you into the dream of travel with the lure of destinations, familiar or otherwise. There is a township off the edge of the poem with its bustle of people. Night falls and '[t]he sky is a wide black paddock, without any fences, / The Stars are its shining logs'. 27 The simile unsettles, as though this is a world slightly off kilter, hard to read, and in which it is even harder to locate one's upturned coordinates. Alongside the shuddering

movement of train and river, with their freedoms and not freedoms, contained and not contained, is Thor Raydon, the serious little boy, twice orphaned, the 'little Questioner'. He watches intently and he questions everything: What are you? Where do you come from? Who are you? Where do you go? He is the refrain of the train whistle, of the fluent river, and of the settlers' drive to claim and make their own home by unmaking and then remaking. The final stanza redirects the questions back to the little boy; he 'the bright promise on poverty's threshold'. The boy is the future off the edge of the poem that will build houses and roads and stock shops, and have babies. Yet there is also a ghost interrogation because these are the questions that ran through Baughan's first collection with the forceful glint of that river alive. Who am I? What am I? Where will I go? This is a settler poem, so bright and vivid in its rendition of problematic new beginnings, and it has been analysed by Jane Stafford and Mark Williams within this theoretical framework, but it also tenders a slender line to the hidden core of a poet reinventing herself. 28 In this poem, Baughan moors herself to New Zealand; unmaking in order to remake is the proclaimed job of the settler, but it also represents Baughan's lifelong itinerary for self. Writing was a crucial way for her to do this.

In a letter to W. F. Alexander, Baughan thanks him for launching her first New Zealand appearance with three poems in New Zealand Verse, and underlines what New Zealand means to her: 'I wish I had been born in New Zealand, so you can imagine if I am willing to be called a NZ writer!' 29 Place is secured through the hills, the tul and the karaka, the manuka and morepork, the creeks and the bush in Baughan's poetry, but it is also and most importantly attached to people. Reading the poems in the light of biographical

detail, I read the people poems firstly as substitute family. Rather than a collection of poems featuring a single woman making her way in the world, and appraising from a singular viewpoint, we get family poems that counterbalance the voices of mother, father, siblings. By this stage, Baughan had virtually no family alive, and the construction of make-believe families within the confines of a poem, with their domestic routines, hardships, calamities and causes for celebration, are doubly poignant. 'The Paddock', 69 pages in length, features a chorus of voices in which poetic registers shift to the point that dialogue heads towards prose and play script. 30 In this theatrical setting, the family is revealed through interior monologues. The mother who, with her husband, 'Built and blasted, stump'd and sow'd, / Logged-up, dug, and drain'd and hoed' to transform bush into paddock, has toiled her home into being. 31 She is singing out of duty, pleasure, work and love: 'We're alive! but work is pleasure'. 32 The sister Janet, in contrast, feels trapped by domestic routine and wants 'the whole live world' to 'see, and test, and tackle and take in'. 33 For her, home ought to be as wide as the world and draw upon strange and marvellous things. Anything else is shackles. The poem, a precursor to our contemporary novel-in-verse, ends with 'Song of the Ti', and now voice calls from the soil of cyclic pattern, roots embedded, birth growth death, birth growth death. 34

The burn-off seared the page in The Paddock', ready to stage a family so very different from Baughan's own. We know so little of Baughan's childhood in England, bar she loved her father and was 'never very happy nor well'. 35 In 'Early Days', a grandmother recounts the way her husband came home in the dark and cold to deliver supplies and stories to the family huddled by the warmth of firelight: 'Outside, the pouncing Dark, and cold, cold foam, — / Inside, all of us—and Father! safe back home'. 36 The father bore mesmerising traces of the world; the wildness of the sea outside was the beat of danger and elsewhere, and what kept her father away in the blot of the night. The speaking grandmother mourns the days where they had both less and more: makeshift dwellings, simple provisions and greater freedoms for the children to roam and invent. Family is predicated upon both dark and light, and again the ghost of Baughan's family stalks the poem, a shadow family, a family missing.

I am missing Blanche Baughan. There is a woman writing at her desk and she keeps things to herself. This is the way of the archives.

Baughan did not write in isolation but within a small matrix of women writers. She exchanged letters with Mackay and Ursula Bethell, and other women interested in both politics and literature. She acknowledged Mackay's critical assistance in the

preface to Shingle-Short, and wrote and dedicated a poem to Mackay (as Mackay did to her). This poem, The Eternal Children', is an ode to spring through the eyes of children and is sung in the lyrical key of her friend. 37 It is lush with shifting rhythmic patterns, an undulation of assonance and alliteration, and words that dart and weave in aural slips (paused/poised; yonder/wonder). While the poem sags a little in the middle and idealises children, there is a brightness that hurts as music becomes story, fable, metaphor and dream. The world becomes luminous in the looking and the telling: 'I lay with my heart in love with life, / And my soul alive with love'. 38 The children, so bright and light, leaping, laughing and singing, are unbearably poignant when we read: 'Ye Dream-Children of lovers / Childless upon earth!' 39 The poem bears surrogate children, untethered in a form of paradise and faraway from the absent father and the mother's toil, like a tacit connection between two childless women (Baughan, Mackay). The poem clearly represents potential maternal loss, but in its joyous and love-rich reverie, the giftpoem hides the complicated private struggle of Baughan's reinvention, almost as a secret shared with a dear friend:

—O'er the lone seas of Living, The bitter seas of Losing, The cold seas of Longing, So Love's light broke! To the dumb sands of Sorrow So Love's full tide spoke! In the happy valley, weeping, Smiling—l woke. 40

In 'Reuben', a childless couple live a life of toil and great happiness together. Again Baughan builds a make-believe family that life batters and soothes. One stanza strikes a poignant connection with the way Baughan wove a life with luminous pen, 'as some kind of colour'd arabesque fringe' to pain and loss and difficulty:

Hers Was a keen taste in little things; she loved That trivial, intimate, long-drawn-out talk Of daily happening, in-and-out details, And chance of new-old changes, by whose help Women in villages make shift to weave Some kind of colour'd arabesque as fringe To Life's web, hodden-gray. 41

Baughan was drawn to the marginalised, and dedicated a large portion of her life to improving conditions for prisoners. She looked beyond labels that straightjacketed a person, to find human worth. 'Shingle-Short', the long poem at the start of the collection, is Baughan favouring the underdog, as in many of her poems. 42 Written in a colloquial stream-of-consciousness rush ('cats an' kettles', 'senseless son of a gun', 'straight as cotton', 'stuck-in-the-mud'), we are inside the off-kilter musings of Barney. 43 He is not quite all there, yet he is so very there in the moment of making something from wood. Barney sees a boat in the log, and fiddles, scrapes, carves, borrows and tests, as his mind roves through his day and what is the good of him: 'You bloomin' looney'. 44 Back and forth through a day of 'getting things wrong', the ship becomes shingle-short, symptomatic of his failure and 'the bitter bad black stuff' of his heart, and he feels he ought to have made a milking stool. 45 Baughan again writes poetry that stages narrative, replete with directions for actions and setting in italics. The stream of internal thought is reminiscent of the drifting sentences of Virginia Woolf, and because we are inside Barney's head, nothing is filtered. We are looking at the way the 'rain got the paddicks green', 'all o' my cream churns out to grease', 'Webs a-twinkelin' on the rails', 'Missis cold as the porridge- plate' or 'Wa'n't I at home inside my heart?' 46 Baughan has discovered freedom to explore both what she wants to say and how she wants to say it within a poem. At 30 pages, 'Shingle-Short' resists economy, favouring instead a slow-building portrait that is without romanticism or empty lyrical flourishes. What etches the portrait of Barney so acutely is that it is neither didactic nor moralistic, which is in keeping with Baughan's views: 'I feel uncertain as to how far poetry can be directly written with a moral purpose [...] I incline to think your subject somewhat chooses you'. 47

I feel like I could write an entire book on the poetry of Blanche Baughan as it veers away from the tight secrets of her early life, veiling the past, her loss and grief, while conversely displaying her strong ideas on how to live, on the need to be generous not just to the less well-off but to all forms of difference. One poem in her first collection, however, is like a red hot stone lodged as a reminder of where she comes from, and how that shadow will always shape who she is, no matter how she plants new roots and takes new strides. 'Forgiven', 12 short lines, is a heartfelt eulogy to a mother, Baughan's mother I am inferring, as the poet shifts from pain to peace, and from arm's length to resolution: 'For Nature, holy, sweet and strong, / Hath drawn me back to her at last'. 48 Nature is Baughan's equilibrium broker. In a letter to Miss Higgins, Baughan had confessed, 'l've been sitting here reading [Bacchae] on a great green hill-side sloping down to a great blue sea, & under the shade of "dark pines" - the sun has been helping the poetry shine into me'. 49 Elsewhere, in all her poetry

collections, the power of the landscape to act as solace, restorative agent and gateway to writing is profuse. Never do we read gritty details of the hardship Baughan endured caring for her mother or of the loss of her beloved father. Instead there is a cryptic trail of clues. In this poem, daughter is now returned to mother, and the unsaid, the years of suffering, are signposted but not documented:

Mother! Loose not thy dear embrace From thy poor passionate child again! I could not even dream thy face In that wild agony of pain. so What augments the pathos of this poem, so restrained in the light of Baughan's predilection to write lengthy verse, is the way the poem also stands as an act of forgiveness. Daughter forgives mother for the loss of her father along with all the little forgivenesses buried within and necessitated by that cruel deed. It is as though this poem is the epiphany from which Baughan can proceed as both daughter and writer, as traveller and as activist: "'Rest now, poor soul! Thou art forgiven!"' 51

Poetry as enlightenment Baughan's relationship to spiritual matters formed a significant part of her life. She moved away from complete commitment to the Anglican faith, but opened herself to other options, chiefly the Vedanta philosophies. In 1915, she visited Indian Vedanta centres in California, and subsequently visited India. Burns recounts two transcendental, out-of-body experiences that affected Baughan deeply in 1905 and 1925 and which Winslow Hall included in Recorded Illuminates , 52 Baughan describes the first more intense experience: 'I felt one with everything and everybody; and somehow I knew that what I had experienced was Reality and that Reality is perfection. I would like to add that no words seem to me able to convey a thousandth part of the depth and reality of that experience, even so far as my own taste of it has gone'. 53

Baughan was an observer, inwardly and outwardly, and her poems and prose underline the depth of her contemplation: 'Wasn't it funny how you did suddenly kind of see things that you must have looked at over and over'. 54 Baughan's poetry comes out of both feeling and seeing the world and in that seeing and feeling she is reconstructing a version of home, a way to anchor herself: 'Home was ever so far away, down there under their feet, mile upon mile, ocean after ocean, month upon month away, but yet Home was the one real RIGHT place!' 55

Increasingly, however, home is granted spiritual coordinates. Two poems in Baughan's last collection, Poems from the Port Hills, a collection given limited critical credit, provide clues to Baughan's changing relations between spirituality and writing poetry. 56 In 'Sumner Estuary', the dog, Baughan's faithful companion, breathes in the same 'divineness of this place and day' as the poet, and 'the blessed light spread everywhere'. 57 Beauty is divine comfort, yet in this poem, the poet is ravenous for sight and then more sight, hungry to read the lettering beyond the Estuary's surface, and in the strain of the poet's soul, the legibility of the world changes. A fluctuating reading of the natural world perhaps launches a fluctuating ability to write the world. The final poem, Baughan's final poem published you could say, is entitled 'The Summit Track' and includes the teachings of Plotinus, Fechner and the Vedanta, along with the imprint of her transcendental experience. Baughan describes that experience 'conveying most clearly to the mind the absolute conviction that Reality is Perfection, and One-ness'. 58 Ideas are paramount in this poem. Man and nature are compared, with man capable of sustaining opposing directions. The poet yearns for a clear vision, a wider view. 'Beauty' is the 'home-word' while man so 'complicated and contrarious' is guilty of 'Hate, ignorance, greed of gain'. 59 Conversely, man is capable of 'Heroism, Worship, Wisdom, Art!' 60

Last words Around 1910, Baughan was ill with a mysterious illness, and while she continued to write prose, travel pieces in particular, her ability to write poetry left her. The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography entry suggests that after an illness, 'Baughan was aware that her creative talent was fading, at least as far as poetry was concerned'. 61 The word 'fading' offends me. Baughan describes this as 'a queer illness' that 'ended my writing power —a worse loss than the death of a husband and six children would have been to such as me'. 62 To Alexander she admonishes: 'Don't you subscribe to the absurd idea that BEB "sacrificed Poetry to Prisoners!" Nothing of the kind. The poor woman never abandoned Poetry. Poetry forsook her'N She then adds that this loss did not 'deprive her of the love of Beauty' or 'of the perception that the unseen Beauty can, & should, rule all our destinies & can be served in all sorts of ways'. 64 Stafford and Williams also see Baughan's post-illness relationship with poetry writing as complex, by no means dead, and strongly linked to her philosophical views. 65

I am drawn to The Summit Road' because it holds a potential key to Baughan's poetic rupture. In her writing, poetry is not necessarily of beauty, but is sustained by beauty, and beauty as poetry is unsayable, unfathomable, addictive. When Baughan is caught up in the looking, the reading of the world's beauty

script, and its Neo-Platonic ability to elevate one's soul, is essential. Baughan sacrificed motherhood, and it seems she waived poetry for different but equally vital reasons. A poet once confessed to me that in her search deep into self and the source of poetry, in a transcendental meditative way, she found a mystic core that rendered poetry writing redundant. I view Baughan's collections not in the light of a settler-poet inventing a way to forge a poetry-home and failing at every turn, but as a journey to recognise and find peace within her invented and reclaimed self. Her writing cannot be pigeonholed within poetic genres or colonial narratives without losing sight of the woman writing.

This is a story partly told. There are many walking tracks through Baughan's poems. I have used her skeleton biography to stake a provisional route. Other critics have preferred the way Baughan's poetry grapples with the challenge of writing within the slow and thorny genesis of an emerging New Zealand poetry. This theoretical impulse is the privilege of those critics reframing the material of the past. The ink in the woman's pen is not undercut by a lack of vocabulary or pioneering syntax. There are ways we can repack our knapsacks and absorb and feel her poems.

ENDNOTES 1 Nancy Harris, 'Baughan, Blanche Edith', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, http://www.teara.govt.nz/ en/biographies/3b17/baughan-blanche-edith, accessed 1 January, 2017. The unpublished 'Memories of B. E. Baughan', collected by Berta S. Burns and told to Peter Alcock in Pukerua Bay in 1968 provides useful biographical data, ATL MS-Papers-4850. A slightly different version dated 9 October 1969 can be found at ATL MS-Papers-0198-6. 2 ATL microfiche 0661-Folder 6). 3 This note was signed by Burns and Peter Alcock and to be kept in safekeeping, 11 December 1968, ATL MS-Papers-0198-7. 4 Blanche Baughan, 'Two New Zealand Roses', unpublished, dated 1940, ATL qMS-0143. 5 Blanche Baughan to Lincoln Efford, Howard League for Penal Reform, July 1957, MB 132 ref 80287). 6 B. E. Baughan, Verses (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1898); B. E. Baughan, Reuben and Other

Poems (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1903). 7 Cited at the start of Baughan's Reuben and Other Poems along with other review quotations. Glasgow Herald: 'Some of them are exquisite ... Mr Baughan's name is new to us, but it is sure to become better known'. Speaker: 'A book to give pleasure ... A vein of poetry fresh as a runnel in a waste ... A book of achievement and promise'. Publisher Circles: 'A promising volume ... charming little idylls, full of grace and melody'. 8 'Memories of B. E. Baughan', p. 2. ATL MS-Papers-4850. 9 Damien Love, 'lntroduction', in Selected Writings: Blanche Baughan (Wellington: Erewhon, 2015), p. 7. 10 Love, 'lntroduction', p. 9.

11 Allen Curnow, ed., A Book of New Zealand Verse (Christchurch: Caxton, 1949). 12 Allen Curnow, ed.. The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (Hammondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1960), pp. 38-39. 13 Emma K. Bond uses Michele Leggott's ground-breaking essay 'Opening the Archive' as a means to establish a new conversation with the work of Baughan, a conversation that reduces the authority of nationalist criticism and the way poetry was critiqued through a filter of distance, isolation, alienation. Her thesis favours new routes of connection. Emma Bond, 'Colloquy and Continuity: The Integrated Dialogues of B. E. Baughan', Unpublished MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 1998. See Michele Leggot, 'Opening the Archive: Robin Hyde, Eileen Duggan and the Persistence of Record', in Opening the Book: New Essays on New Zealand Writing, ed. by Michele Leggott and Mark Williams (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995), pp. 266-293. 14 Baughan, Two New Zealand Roses, p. 172. 15 Baughan, 'Death-in-Life', Verses, p. 18. 16 'Twilight by the Sea', Verses, p. 48. 17 'Golden-Mouth', Verses, pp. 14-15. 18 'Golden-Mouth', Verses, p. 14. 19 'Golden-Mouth', Verses, p. 15. 20 Blanche Baughan, Shingle-Short and Other Verses (Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1908). 21 Blanche Baughan, Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven (London: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1912). 22 Letter from Baughan to Miss Higgins (later known as Nettie Palmer), 11 August 1909, ATL MS-Papers-0198-1. 23 'Young Hotspur' and 'The Old Place', Verses, pp. 85-86; 87-89.

24 Baughan, 'A Bush Section', Shingle-Short, pp. 79-88. 25 'A Bush Section', p. 79. 26 'A Bush Section', p. 81. 27 'A Bush Section', p. 80. 28 In 'Blanche Baughan's Spiritual Nationalism', Williams and Stafford posit the burn-off in 'A Bush Section' as a transitional location where both the child within the poem and Baughan as colonial poet rely upon a 'paucity of expression' available. Their reading acknowledges that the poem privileges a settler narrative and signposts various tensions between form, content and implied ideas. Maoriland: New Zealand Literature, 1872-1914, ed. by Jane Stafford and Mark Williams (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006), pp. 201-225.

29 Baughan letter to Alexander, 8 February 1913. ATL MS-Papers-0423-1. New Zealand Verse, ed. by W. F. Alexander and A. E. Currie (London: Scott, 1906) and four poems appeared in an updated version, A Treasury of New Zealand Verse (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd., 1926). 30 'The Paddock', Shingle-Short, pp. 137-205. 31 'The Paddock', p. 144. 32 'The Paddock', p. 147 33 'The Paddock', p. 169. 34 'The Paddock', pp. 201-205.

35 Letter from Baughan to Efford, 26 July 1957, MB 132 ref 80287. 36 'Early Days', Shingle-Short, p. 76. 37 'The Eternal Children', Shingle-Short, pp. 117-33. 38 'The Eternal Children', p. 119. 39 'The Eternal Children', p. 132. 40 'The Eternal Children', p. 133. 41 B. E. Baughan, 'Reuben', Reuben and Other Poems, p. 12. 42 'Shingle-Short', Shingle-Short, pp. 11 -40. 43 'Shingle-Short', pp. 14-15. 44 'Shingle-Short', p. 24. 45 'Shingle-Short', p. 192. 46 'Shingle-Short', p. 39; 28; 40; 13; 15. 47 Baughan to Higgins, 11 August 1909, ATL MS-Papers-0198-1. 48 'Forgiven', Verses, p. 25. 49 Baughan to Higgins, 8 April 1909, ATL MS-Papers-0198-1. 50 'Forgiven', Shingle-Short, p. 25.

51 'Forgiven', p. 25. 52 Berta S. Burns, 'Memories of B. E. Baughan', p. 3, ATL MS-Papers-0198-6. 53 'Case 15', Blanche Baughan, from Recorded Illuminates, Winslow Hall, in Berta S. Burns, p. 26, ATL MS-Papers-0198-6. 54 Baughan, 'Two New Zealand Roses', p. 9, ATL qMS-0143. 55 Baughan, 'Two New Zealand Roses', pp. 41-42, ATL qMS-0143. 56 Blanche Baughan, Poems from the Port Hill (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1923). 57 Baughan, 'Sumner Estuary', Poems from the Port Hill, p. 22. 58 Baughan, Footnote to 'The Summit Track', Poems from the Port Hills, p. 31. 59 'The Summit Track', pp. 33-34. 60 'The Summit Track', p. 35

61 Nancy Harris, 'Baughan, Blanche Edith', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. 62 Baughan to Efford, 26 July 1957, MB 132 ref 80287. 63 Letter from Baughan to Alexander, 20 March 1937, ATL MS-Papers-0423-1. 64 Baughan to Alexander, 20 March 1937, ATL MS-Papers-0423-1. 65 Jane Stafford and Mark Williams, 'Blanche Baughan's Spiritual Nationalism', pp. 201-25.