One of my favourite poems and poets. Ursula Bethell’s “Southerly Sunday”.
Born in England in 1874, she grew up in New Zealand, but was educated in Oxford and Switzerland. She returned more permanently to live in New Zealand in the 1920s, where she created a garden and was a committed High Anglican. She lived in the Cashmere Hills outside Christchurch, where this poem is set, before moving back into the city.
The great south wind has covered with cloud the whole of the river-plain,
soft white ocean of foaming mist, blotting out, billowing
fast to the east, where Pacific main surges on vaster bed.
But here, on the hills, south wind unvapoured encounters the sunshine,
lacing and interlocking, the invisible effervescence
you almost hear, and the laughter of light and air at play overhead.
Seabirds fly free; see the sharp flash of their underwings!
and high lifted up to the north, the mountains, the mighty, the white ones
rising sheer from the cloudy sea, light-crowned, establishéd.
This sparkling day is the Lord’s day. Let us be glad and rejoice in it;
for he cometh, he cometh to judge and redeem his beautiful universe,
and holds in his hands all worlds, all men, the quick and the dead.
Echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins?
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