An Improver
Maisie’s been holding down her head all day,
Her little red head. And her pointed chin
Rests on her neck that slips so softly in
The square-cut low-necked darling dress she made
In such a way, since it’s high-waisted, too,
It lets you guess how fair young breasts begin
Under the gentle pleasant folds of blue.
But on the roof at lunch-time when the sun
Shone warmly and the wind was blowing free
She lifted up her head to let me see
A little rosy mark beneath the chin –
The mark of kisses. If her mother knew
She’d be ashamed, but a girl-friend like me
Made her feel proud to show her kisses to.
LESBIA HARFORD
****
The Australian poet and novelist Lesbia Harford, 1891-1927, was among the first women to graduate in law from the University of Melbourne. But her achievement was no passport to a life of middle-class ease. She became active in the radical labour movement and, despite suffering from congenital heart disease, for many years worked as a machinist in a clothing factory, asserting in her poem, Experience, “And I must hear the throb and hum / That moves to song in factory.” She was serious about writing poetry, seeing it as an extension of her social and political commitment.
Harford challenged convention in another significant way. Married to artist and fellow activist John Patrick Harford in 1920, she identified as bisexual and wrote many poems reflecting intense emotional responses to other women. An Improver is one of the poems which come alive to a less mechanical “throb and hum” in the factory environment.
“Improver” may designate a particular job title in clothing manufacture. Maisie might be sewing a garment to an important customer’s specification, explaining, perhaps, why she has to work so intently, “holding down her head all day”. The term might also suggest that she, like Lesbia, is engaged in the struggle for improved working conditions. But it’s likely Harford would also want the term to include some ironical layering. Maisie could be hoping for self-improvement through marriage. Her evident heterosexuality may be a chastisement for the bisexual narrator, a kind of moral improvement as the straight world would view it. The name Maisie is interesting, too; among its literary associations, Walter Scott’s Proud Maisie might be pertinent.
Sensuous detail and candidly informal diction in the first septet of this variant Petrarchan sonnet engage delightfully. Relish that long second sentence as it admires “[t]he square-cut low-necked darling dress” as well as the face and body Maisie’s home-sewn dress enhances. Harford often achieves a “voice” close to the idiom of the young working-class women of the period – which is one of her strengths as a poet.
In the second septet, where the women enjoy a roof-top lunch-break, the sun is a symbol of erotic and physical liberation. Harford has another “working-day” poem in which the sun transforms the moment. It’s worth quoting in full:
Each morning I pass …
Each morning I pass on my way to work
A clock in a tower
And I look towards it with anxious eyes
To make sure of the hour.
But the sun gets up at the back of the tower
With a flare and a blaze
Hiding the time and the tower from my sight
In a blissful haze.
‘I am the marker of time’ says the sun.
Taken unawares,
I believe for the nonce he is lord of the day
And am rid of my cares.
LESBIA HARFORD
In An Improver, Maisie lifts her chin, previously invisible as she bent over the work, to flaunt the “mark of kisses” to an understanding comrade. The ambiguity of “girl-friend” catches the ambiguity between the girl who is another girl’s friend, and the girl who is a “girl-friend”, specifically denoting an erotic relationship. The irony is subtle: the pain of the speaker, though, is recognisable through that unstable mask. Harford’s poetry is candid in its sexuality, but in the social context its would have been a difficult matter. Sometimes, it simply could not be overtly expressed. The grammatical “wobble” in the closing lines is idiomatic – and may be mimetic, too.
Harford’s poems are sometimes brilliant, and never less than engaging. Had she enjoyed better health and a longer life, the work might have created a bigger literary impact. Her diction, rhythms and range of subjects bring her closer to the present century than her own. Few poems were published during her short life. Nevertheless, she touchingly wrote, “I think each year should bring / Little fresh songs / Like flowers in spring.” The flowers of her art, usually “little” in the sense of “brief”, remain bright and dust-free to this day. See this edition of The Poems of Lesbia Harford for more.