Ursula Bethell

Ursula Bethell Poems

Ursula Bethell Biography

Mary Ursula Bethell, usually known as Ursula Bethell (6 October 1874 – 15 January 1945) was a New Zealand social worker and poet. She was born in Horsell, Surrey, England on 6 October 1874, and arrived in New Zealand with her family in 1875. Bethell was the eldest daughter of the well-to-do sheep farmer Richard Bethell and his wife Isabel Anne, née Lillie. Her father had emigrated initially in the 1860s. She was educated at Rangiora primary school, Christchurch Girls' High School, a school in Oxford and Swiss finishing schools, before returning to New Zealand in 1892 and devoting herself to charitable work. Bethell returned to Europe in 1895 to study painting in Geneva and music in Dresden. Having enough private wealth to support herself, she took up social work in London with the Anglican organization Women Workers for God, or "Grey Ladies". By 1919 she was back permanently in New Zealand, in the Cashmere Hills near Christchurch, sharing a home, Rise Cottage in Westenra Terrace, with another New Zealander returnee, Effie Pollen. The theory that Bethell's relationship with Pollen was homosexual (which would have sat ill with her Anglicanism and her social aspirations in that period) was explored in some detail by the fellow poet Janet Charman, as a visiting scholar at the University of Auckland in 1997. Bethell began to write poetry at the age of about fifty, but she wrote little more after the death of Effie Pollen in 1934, when she moved down into Christchurch, so that most of her output dates from the single decade of 1924–1934. Vincent O'Sullivan remarks, "She was surprised that people admired her 'garden' poems, often written as casual messages to friends.... By the late 1920s, she was also writing the more deliberate and intellectually adventurous poems which took their place in her later two books." When the New Zealand man of letters Charles Brasch visited Bethell, he found her at "the centre of an astonishingly diverse circle of interesting people, many of the younger of whom were so close to her that she almost directed their lives." These included the crime writer Ngaio Marsh, the essayist M. H. Holcroft, the artists R. H. Field and Evelyn Margaret Page, the poets Blanche Edith Baughan and J. H. E. Schroder, and the musician Frederick Joseph Page. The poet and journalist Walter D'Arcy Cresswell argued that in literary terms, "New Zealand wasn’t truly discovered... until Ursula Bethell, 'very earnestly digging', raised her head to look at the mountains." All Bethell's work appeared anonymously, although in old age she became less keen to remain anonymous. She said her pseudonym, Evelyn Hayes, came from a great-great-grandfather, Sir Henry Hayes of Cork, who was "deported for life to Botany Bay for attempted abduction of a Quaker heiress." Ursula Bethell died in Christchurch on 15 January 1945.)

The Best Poem Of Ursula Bethell

Rock-Crystal

Routine-galled, dulled, by many years cumbered,
slipping halter holiday-wise,
away into the west land.

So much cool green to see; such deep silence
to hear; clear silence; bright waters;
such deep-green of tree-shade; such chiming
of gem necklaces - birds shaking,
concealed, the leaves with crystal songs.

To hear, at evening, young mountaineers,
come down godlike from sunlit pinnacles,
tell of prowess and peril, and, taken from pocket,
show faceted crystals from high rock-surfaces.

To muse: All this, it has been like to crystal,
cold-dropping waters, clearest bird-voice,
sheerest silence, light-flashing glacier.
To be invited: Please have this crystal.

And so, like fay-bestowed flower in the fairy-tale,
beauty, fast in a crystal, bearing,
back to the city.

Humanity has ever found it comfortable
to render richest experience portable,
heart to heart with a sign indenture,
sum up in symbol, most high adventure;
till, years gone by, and significance broken,
folk ask: What mean you by this token?

Let us in kindness covet for every man
one lovely memory at least in life-span
fit to be locked up in crystal reliquary,
so all may see it, yet none see, save he.

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