Australian poetry classics: Les Murray’s The Broad Bean Sermon is inexhaustible food for contemplation

In his lifetime, Les Murray (1938–2019) was often associated with contradiction and tension. He was seen as both Australia’s national poet and a reactionary who was out of step with modern Australian life. He was internationally fêted, often seen as a potential Nobel laureate, but he had a complicated local reputation. He was a university-educated “subhuman redneck”, to evoke the title of his 1996 collection Subhuman Redneck Poems.

Unlike some poets, Murray was not celebrated for one or two “big” poems (like Kenneth Slessor and his Five Bells). Murray’s Collected Poems contains dozens of poems that could be discussed here. I have chosen The Broad Bean Sermon, partly because it illustrates his extraordinary skill and ability to produce delight, and partly because it reminds us that, to a large degree, he kept his ideological pugilism outside the pages of his poetry collections.

In other words, whatever cultural anxieties Murray might elicit (or might have elicited), they tend to fall away when you actually read his poems.

The Broad Bean Sermon was published in Murray’s fourth collection, Lunch and Counter Lunch (1974). The joke of the book’s title might be opaque to those who did not grow up in the 1970s and ‘80s, but the mixing of dialectics (the system of arguing that resolves contradictory ideas) with the Australian pub meal known as the counter lunch is classic Murray.

The mix of erudition and vernacular culture illustrates how Murray was not accidentally associated with contradiction. He habitually brought together apparently contradictory things: high and low cultural registers, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, urban sophistication and rural wisdom, capacious broad-mindedness and cramped belligerence.

The Broad Bean Sermon, while not necessarily Murray’s “best” or even best-known poem, shows why for many years Murray was considered, and is still considered by some, to be Australia’s preeminent poet.

Why a 'sermon’?

The title of the poem is ambiguous. Is the poem a sermon about broad beans or by broad beans? Even if the voice is apparently objective (that is, talking about the beans), this doubleness never wholly leaves this sermon.

And why a “sermon”? By the 1970s, sermons were not especially cool, associated as they were with lecturing and moralising. Murray’s use of the word suggests a long tradition of preaching that brought together the written and the spoken word, the prepared and the extemporised text.

Describing the poem as a sermon, of course, adds a religious note at the beginning of a piece ostensibly about a humble legume. This religious note is also present in the poem’s form. Made up of nine tercets (three-line stanzas), the poem is a trinity of trinities.

While the Christian resonance of this structure is not directly commented upon in the poem, it is impossible not to see Christian symbolism in a poem by a poet who routinely dedicated his books “To the Glory of God”. Murray converted to Roman Catholicism in 1962.

The poem’s opening stanza immediately shows that this religiosity is not to be confused with ponderous moralising. The first lines offer a kind of establishing shot of beanstalks, which humorously confuses religious and military language:

Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade
without belief, saying trespass against us in unison,
recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.

The awkward, energetic syntax is typical of Murray, as is the technical detail of the beanstalks being compared to Air Force recruits dressed in green dacron, the brand name of a type of polyester.

That the church parade is “slack” and “without belief”, and the recruits “unbuttoned”, suggests an endearing sense of casualness about the beans, which are calling to be picked via the language of the Lord’s Prayer (“trespass against us”), another religious note.

The poem goes on to describe the beans as both static (“square in stem-section”) and amusingly dynamic:

they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,
kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.

The punning here of “grow/go to great lengths” leads the reader to energetic verb and preposition combinations: “keel over”, “kink down”, “grow up”.

The reference to “greenstuff”, meanwhile, might be an allusion to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855), another energetic poem of praise that makes the everyday extraordinary, in which the poet sees grass (another green plant) as “the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven”.

In the third stanza of The Broad Bean Sermon, the poet calls attention to snails that “hang rapt in their food” (another pun), while spiders “tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage”.

The flags there again might echo Whitman (“the flag of my disposition”), while the reference to “cordage” again strikes a technical note. The term refers to ropes and lines, especially with regard to the rigging of a vessel.

The references to the snails and spiders, however lightly rendered, gives the setting a sense of life-and-death reality, rather than an idealised pastoral version of the natural world. This is also seen in the reference to the “cat-and-mouse floor” (presumably a metaphor for the dynamic to-and-fro of light through the plants).

A poem of bounty

In the next stanza, the poet appears to address himself:

Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find
plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later
you find shirtfuls more.

This is a poem now of bounty. The poet is like Adam in the garden of Eden, wanting for nothing and supplied by nature’s boundless largess. Barely working, he takes beans by the shirtful (another moment of casualness, and suggestive of lived experience).

From there, the poem goes on to engage in an audacious display of poetic invention. A single, complicated sentence snakes through twelve and a half lines in a catalogue of bean diversity.

                                                At every hour of daylight

appear more that you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, fleshy-sided,
thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,
beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,

beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers
in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice
that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover

till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or
do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality
like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,

like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string
and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,
the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers …

These extraordinary lines demonstrate how even in a poem as apparently light and humble as a broad bean sermon, Murray’s technical prowess can make the quotidian and unremarkable extraordinary and endlessly multifarious.

The cataloguing of the beans’ diversity is made up of a host of compound neologisms: “thin-straight”, “thin-crescent”, and so on. Once again, the poet takes on an Adamic quality, moving through the literal garden, naming things like the first man.

What is most notable about the list is the way it represents plenitude by celebrating difference and imperfection. Consistent with the relaxed opening, this world, while implicitly divine, does not require any religious belief (the beans, after all, are “a slack church parade / without belief”). Rather, it requires attention, engagement and appreciation, things central to any poetic act.

In evoking the natural creativity of beans, Murray matches that creative plenty with an outpouring of newly minted images. What John Kinsella in Beyond Ambiguity calls the poem’s “overwhelming optimism” is not just the beans’ literal fruiting, but also “the bounty available to all people”. The beans, in their generous generation, also require the speaker’s action. As the final stanza puts it,

Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness
– it is your health – you vow to pick them all
even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.

The vow here again sounds a religious note: a vow is a solemn promise, often made in religious contexts, such as marriage and taking religious orders. But the moral seriousness of vowing sits easily with the poet’s state of happiness, which is also “your health”.

The poem ends with a look to the future, when the last of the season’s beans will appear, ordinary and semi-comic in appearance: “misshapen as toes”.

A poem of praise

The Broad Bean Sermon fuses the material and spiritual worlds, physical and ethical forms of health, the religious and the secular, the ordinary and the transcendent.

As a poem of praise (another form associated with religious discourse), it traffics in an emotion not often found in contemporary poetry: happiness.

The sense of happiness comes through the metaphorical and syntactical energy of the poem. This energy amounts to a joyful acceptance of natural and human diversity, with the description of the beans (“portly”, “stiff”, and so on) acting as an implicit comparison with human beings. This is a poem that is the opposite of heroic or epic, delighting in the diverse morphology of things.

Ultimately, The Broad Bean Sermon brings together ancient and modern (poetic) traditions, a productive tension that plays out throughout Murray’s long career. For Murray, it was the poetic image itself that could resolve such tensions. In his essay The Trade in Images (1988), he writes of poetic images in a way that is interestingly coincident with the language of The Broad Bean Sermon:

Images are at their least disruptive in art, where they are at their most mysterious and many sided and inexhaustible, food for contemplation rather than precipitate action. In art, imagery and conflict alike are raised beyond embodiment in action to a more perpetual embodiment where their life needs nothing further from the world to feed itself. Art […] has arrived, without having to find its way there through tyrannies, at the true ambiguity of things, and can let all things, even opposites, be true at once.

This is no doubt a utopian view of things, but Murray’s appeal to the benign efficacy of poetic images as a way to resolve conflict and contradiction should not be ignored or forgotten. In poems such as The Broad Bean Sermon, Murray gifts us poetry that is nothing less than a dynamic encounter with being, which is mysterious and inexhaustible.