Hyde’s Bitter Strength

Robin Hyde’s “remarkable tribute, in tough and rugged language, to a Chinese peasant”, the poem “Ku Li” is the Guardian’s “Poem of the Week”. “Ku Li” was begun in China during the second Sino-Japanese War and is among the last poems by Hyde, completed not long before she committed suicide in London, aged 33, in 1939. It’s a remarkable poem to have emerged from a relatively short and certainly perilous period of travel that included a trip to the frontline. “Ku Li” is a representative figure rather than an individual. The two words, as the poem explains, mean “bitter strength” and the Coolie’s eternal plight is to be exploited by his masters, and used, virtually, as slave labour. The strong, hard rhymes, sometimes driven across stanzas (“dosed”/ “bossed”) and the flexible rhythms give this poem’s iambic pentameter a muscular quality, full of action and movement and variation. Born Iris Guiver Wilkinson in Cape Town in 196, Hyde was taken to Wellington as a baby. Hyde is especially noted for the novels Nor the Years Condemn and The Godwits Fly, both published in 1938.