The Spike: or, Victoria University College Review, June 1923
A Professor on Pegasus
A Professor on Pegasus.
"London Lost and Other Poems," by Arnold Wall. (Whitcombe and Tombs, Ltd.,1922.)
The stars will not stir in their courses at the publication of Arnold Wall's book. Nor will his name occupy a niche in the yet unpublished History of New Zealand Literature. The first thing that strikes one is a wonder why it should have been issued at all. Professor Wall has not the poetical mind. The relations between the seen and the unseen cannot penetrate the armour of his education. He outrages your sense of rhythm at every turn, and he has not even that command over language which allows of fluent, if uninspired, verse being written. His lines bump like a motor on a rocky road; he will rhyme "advice" and "fierce" cheerfully, and his verses, usually in stanza form, are in a metre which saves a man front the trouble of much thinking.
The volume falls into three parts, worthless war scribblings, humorous or semi-humorous verse, and attempts at "real poetry." The first may be dismissed, the second are worthy of more comment. Imperfectly as he has committed it to paper, I should say that the Professor possesses a genuine humorous vein. Such verses as "The Public Man and "The Song of Brer Rabbit" contain an echo, dim and distant, of the cleverness of "Bulletin" humorists. But to what depths this Professor's determination to succeed will lead him may be judged from his "Explosion" against the privileges enjoyed by the older poets:—
Lucky old dogs!
Lucky old bargees!
We limp in clogs,
They move at ease.
That's what makes me hot.
Makes me lose my wool;
Chaucer and his lot
Had the blooming pull.
There is enough and to spare of this kind of versifying in the volume. Undoubtedly, it amused Professor Wall to write it, but why let it see the light of day? Yet occasionally we chance upon good lines, like diamonds in a dustbin, as in the opening of the address to the battleship "New Zealand ":—
Whatever ocean surge your forefoot break.
The metrical difficulty mastered, you may turn out sonnets of little worth with the regularity of a machine, and the Professor has his share of them. But the only two poems of any merit in the book are in this form. One of them hears the print of that religious thought which marks a great number of the verses in "London Lost." And as there is no reason why anyone should have to buy the book to read them, we reprint them here:—
If you would see our city at her best,
Go when the winter twilight, grey and cold,
Laps her in soft fog-draperies, fold on fold,
And there dwells yet a sallow sheen in the west;
Then like a princess for a ball she's drest,
Robed in rich purples, gorgeous to behold,
Starred with ten thousand points of winking gold,
And a meat jewel brazing on her breast.
So should have shone the angels' watch-fires bright
Through the pale dusk of that tremendous even.
When Michael's millions kept their watch and ward,
Bating a breathing space in the grand fight,
Upon the steep confines of utmost heaven,
Waiting the time and coming of the Lord.
The Reformers.
Thick throng the bristling spears, slender and tall,
Bravely the wind-tossed pennons flame and float,
The sun leaps back from gilded helm and coat,
While the great host moves forward to the wall,
Fierce, yet obedient to the bugle call;
But these rush on, fanatic and devote,
And singly fling themselves across the moat,
And run upon the stones, and break, and fall.
Lives spilt and madly waste and nothing done!
No! The defenders quail and drop their boast,
Knowing that not by axe and arms alone.
But such hot spirit as these few have shown,
Glowing and throbbing hard throughout the host,
Their walls shall yet be breached, their city won.
I should like Professor MacKenzie's opinion on that word" devote."