Ostensibly, ‘Incompleteness’ is a poem about making poetry. Specifically, it is a poem about making poetry in the colony of Tasmania. It begins:

Fair were the classic lands, where Song had birth,
And chorused plaudits greeted bards sublime,
As crowned with garlands, led in triumph forth,
They basked in glory—heroes for all time.

With these lines, Meredith invokes the classical world as the lofty pinnacle of poetry, a kind of golden age immortalised by the past tense and the harmonious reverence of ‘chorused plaudits’ (line 2). It is the world of Ovid and Virgil et al; the latter lauded by Tennyson as the ‘lord of language’. ¹ In this romanticised world strewn with ‘garlands’ and ‘glory’ renowned poets get to be ‘heroes for all time’ (line 4). There is a possible tension here, between the speaker’s appeal to eternity and the full stop that decisively terminates the stanza. On the one hand, the full stop marks a rupture in time by transforming the seemingly infinite flow of words into syntactic units. On the other hand, the full stop could be read as merely implying that the speaker’s conservative view (i.e. the revered poets of the past should be the revered poets of the future) is incontrovertible. Despite the association of poetry with the eternal, the inspired images appear distant because of the string of past participles – ‘greeted’, ‘crowned’, ‘basked’ – that thread the stanza together. The upshot of this first stanza is that the origin of poetry is far removed from Tasmania both geographically and historically, however, this view is not without ambivalence as the speaker weaves distance and proximity. Continuing in a quasi-mythical vein, Meredith’s poem continues:

And doubtless well content were they, who wove
	The fragrant Bay-leaves for the victor’s brow,
Unconscious that in any earthly grove
	Aught fairer, or more fitting, bloomed below.

They wot not of an undiscovered isle,
	Far—far remote in Austral Orient sea,
Where many a river gorge and dim defile
	Bore worthier guerdon for high minstrelsy.

The second stanza continues to develop the idyllic imagery of the first stanza as the speaker speculates that the inhabitants of the classical world were ‘doubtless well content’ (line 5) with their halcyon existence. However, as the speaker turns to the topic of ‘the fragrant Bay-leaves’ that crown ‘the victor’s brow’ (lines 5 and 6) the golden age of poetry is shown to be lacking. The speaker’s shift to using comparative adjectives that deem another plant (later designated the Tasmanian laurel) ‘fairer’ and ‘more fitting’ (line 8) registers this shift in tone.

In the third stanza, the speaker’s gaze hones in on the antipodes as the source of this discontent. While the ‘earthly grove’ (line 7) of Tasmania might be ‘far remote’ (line 10) from the Olympian heights of the classical world, the speaker declares that it possesses a ‘worthier guerdon’ (line 12) for poetic prowess. Here Meredith echoes a line by William Cowper, one of the poets she cites elsewhere in epigraph form, which similarly muses: ‘Verse, like the laurel its immortal meed, / Should be the guerdon of a noble deed’ (lines 292-293). With this heroic couplet, Cowper elaborates on the language of flowers to equate laurels and poems with reputation and reward. Meredith’s speaker complicates this equation by introducing a new species of laurel which the inhabitants of the classical world ‘wot not’ (line 9). The theme of incompleteness thus manifests in Meredith’s poem as a lack knowledge regarding Tasmanian plants and a sense of disorientation as the idyllic imagery is overtaken by an antipodean point of view.

By referring to Tasmania as ‘an undiscovered isle’ Meredith plays into the myth of terra nullius. Unlike the plural ‘lands’ of the first stanza, the contours of ‘river gorge and dim defile’ (line 11) perpetuate the colonial conception of the country as an unexplored wilderness; a wilderness that Meredith’s speaker suggests could yield a home-grown colonial poetics if collected and curated in the ‘right’ manner. The fourth stanza of Meredith’s poem thus continues:

Had dream or charm revealed to them a sight
	Of our Tasmanian Laurel’s pearly bells,
What urgent prayers had clomb Olympus’ height,
	That God-sent gatherers might invade these dells!

Here, Meredith’s speaker conjures a scenario in which classical poets were aware of the Tasmanian laurel. The tone of the stanza is speculative and covetous; the scattering of ethereal nouns ‘dream’, ‘charm’, ‘bells’, ‘prayers’ creating an oneiric sequence in which the Tasmanian laurel appears as a vaunted treasure. Using the auxiliary verb ‘had’ to segue into the conditional mood, Meredith represents invasion as a hypothetical scenario rather than an actual fact. Simultaneously, the speaker contrives the ‘urgent prayers’ (line 15) for ‘God-sent gatherer’s’ (line 16) as a mandate to botanise and colonise Tasmania. The speaker’s use of the possessive pronoun ‘our’ to refer to the laurel instates the nominalising, possessive project of the colonial botanist. And yet the realisation of a ‘home-grown’ poetics remains incomplete. As the speaker concludes:

‘Tis ever so. In life’s unfinished course,
	Perfect completeness is a thing unknown:
They lacked our Laurel for the Poet’s verse.
	And we, possessing it, lack Bards to crown!

Paradoxically, the formal completion of Meredith’s poem coincides with the speaker’s realisation that ‘perfect completeness’ (line 18) is impossible. Or, as the speaker poses the dilemma: the colonists ‘possess’ a laurel but no poet laureates, while the classical world had acclaimed poets but a less befitting laurel. Closing with the assertion that Tasmania ‘lack[s] Bards to crown’ (line 20) can be read as somewhat disingenuous on Meredith’s part. By invoking the vagaries of ‘life’s unfinished course’ (line 17), Meredith hints at the possibility that she herself could assume the title of Tasmanian laureate. Incidentally, an article on Meredith’s career published in the Argus (a year after Bush Friends) appears under the title ‘The Laureate of Tasmania’ (1892). However, at the time of writing ‘Incompleteness’ the future of Tasmanian poetry was, on Meredith’s view, in the balance.

Paul Carter’s reflection on the work of Joseph Banks offers insight into Meredith’s own project of anthologising Tasmanian flora, botanically and poetically, and why it remains incomplete. In The Road to Botany Bay, Carter writes:

By a curious irony, even though he [Banks] sets out to botanise on the supposition his botanical knowledge is incomplete, his knowledge is always complete: each object, found, translated into a scientific fact and detached from its historical and geographical surroundings, becomes a complete world in itself (22).

As Carter notes, botany presumes a complete system of knowledge. Poetry, on the other hand, is never complete as it hinges on a kind of open-endedness and the possibility of form unravelling (to loop back to the metaphor of weaving).² between sound and sense’ (109). In other words, poetry is the discourse in which enjambment is possible; a form of writing that is averse to endings, completion and closure.] Meredith’s chapter on the Tasmanian laurel reflects the tension between these two ways of knowing the world. In the anthologising process of repackaging a dry, dislocated specimen in a tin box into stanza form, Meredith’s poem demonstrates how the translation of ‘scientific fact’ into poetic parlance supposes an ‘[in]complete world’. By incorporating the Tasmanian laurel into her anthology of plants and poems, Meredith attempts to establish the possibility of a home-grown colonial poetics rooted in native flora. Throughout ‘Incompleteness’ Meredith presents a limited and problematic view of what Tasmanian poetry could/should be. However, by a ‘curious irony’ the very incompleteness that Meredith’s poem attempts to contain (through her suggestive figuration of the Tasmanian laurel) remains open.