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.

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........

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