Baughan felt her poetry became mediocre after her youth, and (although she is a New Zealander) this poem, like many of her earlier works, reflects not New Zealand, but England. Her generation still called England “Home”, as did the one that followed. She became a social activist as her gifts faded, and as her biography notes.

In addition to her work for penal reform, Blanche Baughan was an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, a financial supporter of the Red Cross and a member of the Akaroa Borough Council. Baughan was recognised for her contribution to social services with the award of the King George V Jubilee Medal in 1935. For her literary work she deserves recognition for indicating new directions in the nation’s literary history and as a significant harbinger of change in early New Zealand poetry

As a poem, this is a bit too mystical in a nature-worship sense. A fault I find in most of the romantic poets. But then Baughan was more interested in Hinduism than Christianity: and without a truth to share one’s gifts do fade. Nic Cave knows this, and considers his inspiration no means of transport.

For poetry is song crystallized. For Neither Cave or Baughan, the muse is not a horse.

Five Prayers

To taste
Wild wine of the mountain-spring, fresh, living, strong,
Running and rushing like a triumph-song
Round hearts new-braced:

To smell
A growing cowslip, some glad morn of Spring,
And breathe the breath of every fragrant thing
From every bell:

To touch
A sliding wavelet, supple, smooth and thin,—
Just ere the pois’d and perfect crests begin
To bend too much:

To hear
Amid May twilight, by the murmuring sea,
Some blackbird warbling from a budded tree,
Tender and clear:

To see
Down young rose-petals how the deepening light
Glides gradually, till, somewhere out of sight,
What light must be!—

O Thou, intense
Rapture of Beauty! All-pervading Lord!
Is not this worship? So art Thou ador’d
By every sense!

Blanche Edith Baughan

I am on annual leave and travelling for the next three weeks. I will continue the daily lectionary, but the poems will restart when I am back at home.