A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF EDWIN JAMES BRADY - Mallacoota ...

96
Master! I mourned, it is so written,
But…we suffer…
And from the High Calvary fell a sad Voice
Chiding me:
“Have I not also suffered? 1
It is the suffering in and of the mind, rather than physical suffering, which is to be
feared most. So the seaman blinded by a knife suffers emotionally, feeling acute
deprivation from participation in the enjoyments of ships and the sea. His mental
suffering is heightened by a sense of victimisation, that he is being penalised beyond
what is meted out to even the lowliest criminal. He cries: “Blind! blind! oh, my God,
as a crawling mole! and never again to see - / A star in the sky of the meanest thief,
but a starless Night for me..” 2 In this case, the only recourse is a union with his
beloved nature by burial from a clipper ship “under the roll”.
Death too, has a quite prominent place in Brady’s philosophising. It is the great
leveller, obviously inescapable. “Of all the living host that pains / To live, not one
the life remains / That all lives cherish”, is the law propounded when looking at the
transience of all natural phenomena and contrasting the beauty and grandeur of
freshness and growth 3 with the starkness of age and death. The cyclical nature of this
existence is further stressed in the humorous poem, “The Whaler’s Pig”, where the
hypocritical and greedy pig fattens himself on whale blubber, ultimately to feed the
man; but the process does not end there, for we are reminded: “First whale, then pig,
then man. Some day / The worm will make it square.” 4 This question of death is
discussed by a body of poems in The Earthen Floor entitled “The House of Death”.
The first if these is “The Quiet City” where a kind of suspended animation
predominates – a world wherein there is a lack of definition of place and time,
situated as it is “By the shore of the Shoreless River that turns to a Tideless Sea”.
Visiting this city “In the year of Ever-Never, in the time of Night-and-Day” the poet
and his lover muse on its meaning, yet under the lady’s constant questioning he can
only answer in half-truths, revealing no real knowledge. Fittingly the conversation
ends in a respectful silence, with both meditating on the poet’s remark that while he
cannot answer fully, there is consolation in the fact that “The River rolls backward
not ever, but onward at last to the Sea”. It must be remembered though that this poem
first appeared in The Bulletin in 1898, almost certainly being written immediately
before publication as Brady was struggling hard at the time to make ends meet, and
reflects the stage of agnosticism through which he is passing. His progression from a
strong faith in religion in his youth (noticeable in his Juvenilia in the 1880’s) was
replaced by his doubts arising from enquiries into socialism and Darwinian
evolutionary theory. It was further supplemented subsequently by the rationalisthumanist
strain of philosophy he often expounds to his correspondents.
In his consideration of death, too, Brady betrays a strong element of fatalism. At
times his mottos seems to be “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”, but
more frequently there are obvious reservations that this attitude is not the solution,
merely and anodyne:
1 Ibid.
2 “His Lights Are Out”. The Earthen Floor.
3 “The Dead Tree”, Bells and Hobbles.
4 The Ways of Many Waters