Mary Ursula Bethell: Spring Snow and Tui

We said: there will surely be hawthorn out
down in the sun-holding folds of the hills by the sea;
but suddenly snow had forestalled the thorns there,
death-white and cold on their boughs hung the festival wreaths.

It is all one. The same hand scatters the blossoms 
of winter and spring-time. The black-robed psalmodist,
traversing swiftly the silent landscape like Azrael,
echoed in clear repetition his well-tuned antiphon;
a waking bugle it might be, a passing bell,
of life, death, life, life telling: it is all one.


Bethell (1874-1945) is one of the first three genuine poets writing in New Zealand (the others are Eileen Duggan and R.A.K. Mason, a prodigy who burnt out in his early twenties). Bethell's best poems are in simple plain-speaking, under the early influence of D.H. Lawrence; later, as when the tui appears in this poem, she was at times invaded by an impulse towards high-flown "poetry".  Not enough to drag the poem down, though: its mystical echoes remain long after its close.