Waterfall

Lauris Dorothy Edmund

(1924-2000)
“A poem is a confrontation with experience. It’s
not an idea.”

Lauris Dorothy Edmund

◦ New Zealand poet and writer from

◦ Pioneer in the field of contemporary women’s writing in New
Zealand. Came to prominence as a writer late in her life at the
age of 51. Emerged as a writer after years of marriage and
motherhood.
◦ Prodigious output- Wrote eleven collections of poetry and
three volumes of autobiography. In addition, she published a
novel, wrote radio and stage drama, and edited Letters of
A.R.D. Fairburn (1981) and Young Writing for PEN (1979).
◦ Received Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship in 1981,
the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1985 for her Selected
Poems (1984), the OBE in 1986 and an Honorary DLitt of
Massey University in 1988.
◦ Major themes such as childbirth, friendship, love, growing
old, loneliness, loss, the encroachment of death,
momentariness and transience of time
“My first collection of poems was published in 1975, public reading was becoming common, though it was not nearly as popular and established as it is now. I began
nervously to do it too, occasionally by travelling to other places, I published more books, and in 1981 went off to France for my year as the Katherine Mansfield
Menton Fellow. All through the eighties I read often in various parts of the country and began to attend writers’ festivals overseas.
The question of who I was – which really meant where had I been before, since clearly I had lived some other life before this fairly visible one – came up constantly,
in talks after readings and at other times. Women who cherished unsatisfied ambitions to ‘do their own thing’ were particularly curious about the facts of my life. I
could never find an answer, or not one that was in any way appropriate to these conversations. As I wrote in a poem at the time, everything was ‘too much to say, or
too little’. At the same time I had begun to meet other women – the American poet Amy Clampitt was one – who had published a first book in middle age, and whose
early lives seemed, like mine, obscure and mysterious.
From the flippant ‘Oh, I wasn’t anywhere’, which even as I said it induced in me an uncomfortable sense of betrayal, I moved a long way in my own thinking, though
not in my power to explain what ‘anywhere’ (or the ‘nowhere’ it implied) might be; still less how the transition had occurred, which was of course what they really
wanted to know.
Life Number One, as I began to call it, the years I had spent living in country towns and bringing up my family, had been vital, authoritative and comprehensive. I
strongly (though privately) resisted the assumption, which I could see many people made, that Life Number One had merely been a matter of waiting around for Life
Number Two to take over.
This was the time when the Women’s Movement in New Zealand was maturing, becoming more historically aware. A number of books appeared, examining
women’s changing life patterns, especially the late start on careers. I contributed to several of them, but each time I finished an article or an interview it seemed that
I had merely set the stage for the real story. One perceptive reader, Ian Reid at Deakin University in Australia where I was working while I wrote one of them,
observed that it was less a finished statement than a preparation for something larger and more searching. I seemed to be giving the reasons for my life to fall into
two distinct and separate phases, but not how it actually happened.
Other women’s experience offered parallels, but mine seemed a particularly clear-cut, not to say dramatic example of what I was coming to see as a phenomenon
of my generation. Although we had all learned to speak of our shaping influences as ‘conditioning’, I knew that there was a much larger question to be asked than
that of a simple change of occupation. The process had been one in which my outlook, my habits of living and my assumptions about the nature of experience had
all been overturned. It had been long and tumultuous, and it had altered for ever the world in which I did, or could, continue to live.”

(Excerpt from Only Connect: The Making of an Autobiography. Lauris Edmond

Originally published in Landfall 188 (November 1994): 247-54)
“Over the last few months I have been working on a revised, slightly reduced, but in essentials unchanged, single-volume
version of the autobiography. In the author’s note I have prepared this time, I have thanked my readers. An unusual
gesture for a writer, but one I think it is important to put on record. Initially readers actually enabled me to carry on;
throughout the writing of Hot October I was racked by doubts (‘everyone’s got a life of their own, why do they want to know
all this stuff about mine?’). Then other people took my story to themselves, showing me that my desire to understand,
however tentative and unsure it had been at first, had echoes in innumerable other lives. People said to me more times
than I can count or remember that, though the details might be different, in telling my story I had also told theirs.
I know now that there is a theory of autobiographical writing which proposes that men and women characteristically take
different approaches to it. Men tend to write from the centre of a world in which they have an established position, often a
record of success, which the autobiography documents. Women on the other hand write from the outside; they have no
secure, given place and so must find it. They must, as I had discovered when I set out on my own enterprise, constantly
ask why things are as they are. They write their own story in order to find out.
The quality and depth of my response from readers – men as well as women – has suggested to me that the second
method, the search for reasons and connections, is the broader quest. If it is, will this change as the world puts a more
searching spotlight on men’s experience, while it accommodates a greater range of action and aspirations for women? It’s
a question that of course I cannot answer, but one which the discoveries inherent in writing my own story keep constantly
in my mind.”
(Excerpt from Only Connect: The Making of an Autobiography. Lauris Edmond
Originally published in Landfall 188 (November 1994): 247-54)
Aspects to consider for annotation and analysis
◦ Structure- frame
◦ Sound and rhythm- syllabic and metric pattern
◦ Language- Devices, word choice, and tone
◦ Voice – First person, second person, omniscient narrator et cetera
◦ Theme- Central idea and subject matter or the message conveyed through figurative language. Multiple
perspectives
◦ Context- The who, where, when, and why of a poem – Historical, social, cultural, physical and situational
(cursory or beginner level reference for 9 th IGCSE- term 1)

Reference
How to Analyze Poetry: 10 Steps for Analyzing a Poem - 2021 - MasterClass
I do not ask for youth, nor for delay
in the rising of time's irreversible river
that takes the jewelled arc of the waterfall
in which I glimpse, minute by glinting minute,
all that I have and all I am always losing
as sunlight lights each drop fast, fast falling.

I do not dream that you, young again,

might come to me darkly in love's green darkness
where the dust of the bracken spices the air
moss, crushed, gives out an astringent sweetness
and water holds our reflections
motionless, as if for ever.
It is enough now to come into a room
and find the kindness we have for each other
— calling it love — in eyes that are shrewd
but trustful still, face chastened by years
of careful judgement; to sit in the afternoons
in mild conversation, without nostalgia.

But when you leave me, with your jauntiness

sinewed by resolution more than strength
— suddenly then I love you with a quick
intensity, remembering that water,
however luminous and grand, falls fast
and only once to the dark pool below.
Ideas and underlying implications

The poem begins with a declarative tone that establishes that the poetic persona is reminiscing the passing of time by comparing it with the placid
and steady flow of a waterfall.
Demonstrates an awareness of loss and grief as the persona savours moments from the past (second stanza).
Uses luminous and bright imagery to depict the scintillating effect of the waterfall on the reader.
Themes- transience of time, passing of love, passing of youth (ageing), reconciling with the progress of time, acceptance of mortality. Naturalism
in the poem- nature imagery to convey a deeply profound acceptance of the passing of time.
Uses a familiar natural imagery like a waterfall to describe a familiar concept such as growing old and accepting the progression of life and love.
Yet, the beauty of the poem rests in how the poet portrays sudden moments of significance and yearning in this very familiar theme and imagery.
The poem reinforces the vitality of a familiar image and sentiment. The theme innumerably echoes with every individual’s life.
There is no morbidity or affliction with fatalism. Human mortality is depicted as an inevitable background against which love, and friendship
stand as relief.
Urbane simplicity of diction and syntax. No experimental form or abstruse word games or erudite references.
Is the poem autobiographical in nature? How does the use of familiary natural imagery and simple diction to portray the passing of time impact
you as a reader?