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10. Martin Boyd

Chosen by:
Mr Terry O’Neill,
National Centre for Australian Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts

Boyd, Martin, 1893-1972.

There is a strange symmetry and irony in the fact that Martin Boyd’s first and last books were self published and are exceedingly rare, while the work which was published roughly half way between the two sold over a million copies worldwide. The three books are Verses [1918], Why They Walk Out [1970?] and Lucinda Brayford (1946).  Intending his first book, Verses, to be privately distributed to family members and friends, Boyd identified himself only by his initials: M[artin] à B[eckett] B[oyd].  It was published probably late in 1918, some months before he left London to return to Australia on the troopship Prinz Hubertus. There are only two known copies of Verses. One is in private hands, while the other was given to Rare Books at Monash University by the late Dr Guy Springthorpe, a school friend of Boyd from the early years of Trinity Grammar School, Kew.

Verses consists of just nine poems, some of which may well have been written before the First World War. However, at least two of the poems, “Cassel 1918” and “Requiem” reflect Boyd’s war experiences. He had left Australia in 1915, joined the British Army and served in France. In 1917 he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and there he had time to read the war poets, especially Rupert Brooke, and to reflect on the deaths of friends at the Western Front. In “Cassel 1918” his grief finds expression:

The friendly feet, that once upon these stones
Wandered beside me, are no longer here,
Where winter sunlight floods the empty square,
Chill sorrow floods my soul. Cold bleached bones
Lie twenty miles distant, where the moans
Of wounded men strike pain into the air.
Oh limbs that once knew movement, swiftly fair,
For all your joyous sins, now this atones!

Here and also in the poem ‘Requiem’ is the first indication given by Boyd of a hardening in his attitude to war, which would ultimately find a much more pronounced pacifist expression in his first autobiography A Single Flame (1939), and in the novels Lucinda Brayford (1946), Outbreak of Love (1957)  and When Blackbirds Sing (1962).

Some of the poems in Verses, including “Cassel 1918” were republished, slightly revised, in Retrospect (Melbourne, 1920), his first commercially published work and his last book of poetry. He later described his own poems as “derivative and sentimental … false in their assumptions” ** .This self- judgement may well be too harsh, and yet the fact is that Boyd hardly wrote another poem during the rest of his life.

** Quoted from Brenda Niall Martin Boyd: a life (p. 85).

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