This year, 2025, was the centenary of the birth of the Australian poet Francis Webb (1925-1973). Webb is one of Australia’s most significant religious poets. His life has tragic aspects, but the poetry he wrote helped him to transform his own suffering and continues to help others in this way. The renowned Australian poet Judith Wright had this to say about him: ‘He’s done so much suffering for me and I’ve read him so much and I think that’s what poetry is for… Francis is for me always like his own goal. “The gull in a green storm clear as the maker’s name.” 1 (Images in Winter) CP*, 21’ Frank Webb, was brought up with his three sisters, by his paternal grandparents in North Sydney. His mother died of pneumonia when Frank was two years and two months old. This loss and the difficulties of bringing up three children caused depression in Frank’s  father from which he never fully recovered. 

Australia

Frank Webb grew up in and around North Sydney and went to Catholic Schools in Chatswood and later in Lewisham. He was a gifted student who began writing poetry at the age of seven. By his late teens his poetry was being accepted and celebrated by Douglas Stewart in the literary pages of The Bulletin. At 19 years of age, during the last years of the Second World War, Frank had to go to war service in Winnipeg, Canada to train as a tail gunner for Lancaster bombers. He never saw action.

Webb returned to Australia via England in 1949 and it was here that he experienced the first event that led to his hospitalization, in England and Australia. He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and he became the first Australian poet to openly write about mental illness.

Norwich

While in Hellesdon Hospital in Norwich in his early twenties, Frank Webb was befriended by a Doctor Napier, who had heard that Frank was a poet of some repute in his home country but that he had written little during his time in Hellesdon. Doctor Napier had the insight that some catalyst was needed. His wife had recently given birth to a child (now 5 days old) and the doctor invited young Frank to his home where the baby was placed in his arms. It was nearing Christmas. Within the next few days Frank produced the following poem:

 

Five Days Old

By Francis Webb

 

Christmas is in the air.

You are given into my hands

Out of quietest, loneliest lands.

My trembling is all my prayer.

To blown straw was given

All the fullness of Heaven.

 

The tiny, not the immense,

Will teach our groping eyes.

So the absorbed skies

Bleed stars of innocence.

So cloud-voice in war and trouble

Is at last Christ in the stable.

 

Now wonderingly engrossed

In your fearless delicacies,

I am launched upon sacred seas,

Humbly and utterly lost

In the mystery of creation,

Bells, bells of ocean.

 

Too pure for my tongue to praise,

That sober, exquisite yawn

Or the gradual, generous dawn

At an eyelid, maker of days:

To shrive my thoughts for perfection

I must breathe old tempests of action

 

For the snowflake and face of love,

Windfall and word of truth, Honour close to death.

O eternal truthfulness, Dove,

Tell me what I hold-

Myrrh? Frankincense? Gold?

 

If this is man, then the danger

And fear are as lights of the inn,

Faint and remote as sin

Out here by the manger.

In the sleeping, weeping weather

We shall all kneel down together. CP 225.

 

This poem became the stimulus  for a new book of poems that Frank produced over the next few years. The poem expresses his wonder and amazement at the life of a young baby. It also acts as a powerful transformative event in which he experiences the way the birth of a child can contain all the forces for renewal for oneself and potentially for the whole world:

 

If this is man, then the danger

And fear are as lights of the inn,

Faint and remote as sin

Out here by the manger.

 

Christmas

The poem repays careful pondering. The many mysterious, almost mystical images, reveal a depth of spiritual understanding that can reach us all. It reveals how far we, as adults, are from the life-giving purity of this innocent child, which is also identified as the Christ child. The ‘blown straw’ is inevitably a metaphor for Frank Webb himself, experiencing life as a mental hospital inmate, but ‘blown straw’ is also a metonymy (part for the whole) for Christ in a manger. So in this poem, and throughout Webb’s work it is the marginalized and outcast in the world, like Christ, like Frank’s fellow inmates, like Frank himself who can be  nearer to the Truth, than those of us caught up in all the materialism and extravaganza of what Christmas has become.

*CP = see next item

For further reading see Toby Davidson, Collected Poems Francis Webb (CP), 2011 UWA Publishing

Michael Griffith, God’s Fool The Life and Poetry of Francis Webb, 1991 Angus & Robertson, 2^nd Edition, 2012: Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com.au/Gods-Fool-Life-Poetry-Francis-ebook.

Footnote 1: Francis Webb, Commemorative Seminar Sydney University, May 1974.

Images below: Frank Webb as a young man with his pet parrot and Frank in old age.