New Zealand Writers

MACKAY, Jessie

The first poet of any importance to be born in New Zealand.

Reference number: PAColl-6260-2
Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, must be obtained before any re-use of this image.

• From The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature
• Updated Information
• Links

Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors

MACKAY, Jessie (1864–1938), was born in the Rakaia Gorge of Scottish parentage and educated in Christchurch. She has been described (by MacD.P. Jackson in *OHNZLE) as ‘the first poet of any importance to be born in New Zealand’.

In the introduction to her first collection, The Spirit of the Rangatira and Other Ballads (1889) she expressed the hope that at least a few of the poems ‘might have a flavour of the colonial soil’ from which they had sprung. The title poem of The Sitter on the Rail and Other Poems (1891) is a Kiplingesque satire on those who decline to involve themselves in the political concerns of the day and reflects Mackay’s lifelong commitment to prohibition, universal suffrage, Irish and Scottish Home Rule and liberal causes generally. She wrote on these as ‘Lady Editor’ of the Canterbury Times and was an active member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the National Council of Women. Her subsequent collections are From the Maori Sea (1908), Land of the Morning (1909), The Bride of the Rivers and Other Verses (1926) and Vigil (1935), the title poem, ‘Vigil: The Eve of April 10, 1919’ referring to the first Prohibition Poll. Despite her reliance on reworkings of Longfellow, Tennyson, Swinburne and the Burnsian tradition of Scottish dialect ballad and song, Mackay achieved what Jackson calls ‘greater metrical and verbal facility than any of her [New Zealand] predecessors’ and a verse that at times ‘taps unconscious yearnings that a Freudian analysis might explore’. She can also be seen as in some senses a nationalist poet, especially in her use of Maori mythology and subject matter and her treatment of contemporary social issues. ‘We plowed a lonely furrow,’ she wrote of the early New Zealand poets. Her puzzled reaction to *Kowhai Gold in 1930, ‘No New Zealand’, shows an awareness of what a national literature might consist of. Allen *Curnow recognised this in his approving reference to her in his *Book of New Zealand Verse (1945), while Eileen *Duggan wrote ‘You have united an old tradition with a new loyalty, and blended without loss the heritage of one land with the ideals and aspirations of another.’ This is a more balanced judgment than some recent ones.

A Voice on the Wind: The Story of Jessie Mackay by Nellie F.H. Macleod (1955) provides a selection of poems, as more briefly does The New Place, ed. Harvey *McQueen (1993).

JS