Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Early New Zealand Poetry

Early New Zealand Poetry

Introduction

It is convenient to date early New Zealand poetry from the arrival of the early settlers until the Twenties of this century. In the Twenties there was a break in tradition which will be discussed in the later lecture on Modern New Zealand Poetry. The early settlers were influenced in their methods and choice of themes in verse writing by the contemporary Victorian tradition; but the isolation of New Zealanders, during the last half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, from revolutions of literary opinion in England and Europe, was real and debilitating – for example, we have during this time no trace in New Zealand poetry of the influence of such symbolist methods as those used by Rimbaud and Baudelaire, or the realism of Thomas Hardy as exercised in his Wessex poems. One cannot avoid the conclusion that practically all the early New Zealand poetry has little literary merit, and is of interest mainly for the light which it throws on historical or sociological themes; that the writers may have our respect as personalities, but hardly as thinkers or craftsmen. I intend to set forward various possible causes for their poverty of ideas and method.

The Pioneer Poets

Many of the early settlers hoped to make New Zealand the centre of a New World culture. A brother of Matthew Arnold became headmaster of the first secondary school in Nelson. Men such as James Fitzgerald, Alfred Domett, and later William Pember Reeves, found time for versification in the pausespage 92 of their administrative work. The ‘Night-watch Song of the Charlotte Jane’ by Fitzgerald exemplifies some of the feelings of the English emigrants –

’Tis the first watch of the night, brothers,
And the strong wind rides the deep:
And the cold stars shining bright, brothers,
Their mystic courses keep . . .

Whilst yet sad memories move us,
A second cup we’ll drain
To the manly hearts that love us
In our old homes o’er the main . . .

Plainly this is capable ballad-writing, suitable for singing at a reunion gathering. Equally plainly, it lacks the tragic accuracy which makes the labour of a poet comparable to that of a novelist or visual artist. Verse-writing however was to the pioneers never more than a kind of recreation from the real business of breaking in a new country. Their aims were economic or political. For them the function of the arts was primarily one of entertainment or ‘spiritual’ edification: to the word ‘spiritual’ one could add ‘unnecessary’. Our source of insight into the life of the pioneers is derived chiefly from their diaries and letters. It was in many districts a wild enough life: the militia had their drunken brawls; men ‘went native’: missionaries found the conflict between Christian and pagan ethics not easily soluble for Maori or pakeha; the strange and terrible landscape of a new country opened before them – but a genteel habit kept all but faint echoes of this vivid and disturbing prospect out of their verse.

William Pember Reeves in his poem ‘A Colonist in his Garden’ presents in good Tennysonian stanzas the nostalgia of the expatriate Englishman. A friend urges him to return to England from –

Isles nigh as empty as their deep
Where men but talk of gold and sheep
And think of sheep and gold.

He replies that he has made himself a home in New Zealand, a little England of his own. Finally –

The lady of my close,
My daughter, walks in girlhood fair.
Friend, could I rear in England’s air
A sweeter English rose?

page 93

Pember Reeves himself, knowing both countries, could fit the new experience to the categories of English verse idiom. There is, however, an underlying sense of insecurity in this poem – the ‘mad gorge wind’ which once blew his tent into the night may return. In the nineteen-thirties Ursula Bethell, herself possessing a knowledge of both New Zealand and England, paused while digging in a garden on the Cashmere Hills, Christchurch, and saw the mountains clearly as strong, indifferent presences, even as hostile to human habitation. Other poets have seen this country in a similar light. But between them and Pember Reeves is a gulf of over half a century; and a weak and stereotyped tradition which prevented the communication of any insight the poets possessed into their particular condition as individuals or as New Zealanders.

It would be idle to cover in detail the work of each early New Zealand poet; for the verse of this period (that is, of the nineteenth century) is valuable in the main only as historical data. Some, though not all and not the best, is available in the Alexander and Currie anthology of 1906. The verse of Arthur H. Adams was at times of a high standard. In ‘The Dwellings of our Dead’ (1899) he sees New Zealand in a less optimistic and sanguine light than did Pember Reeves – as the graveyard of the pioneers –

Lo, here the greener grasses
Glint like a stain of tears.

But most of his contemporaries wrote in a stilted and self-conscious manner: their verse was weighted, overweighted with moral reflections of a superficial nature. The cause lies in part at the door of the second wave of immigrants, those of the Seventies and Eighties, whose scheme of values and view of aesthetic matters we have inherited. A few were gold-diggers from Australia; a few were black sheep and remittance men; but the majority came from the ranks of farm-labourers and domestic servants. Inevitably they laid emphasis on the virtues of thrift and abstinence, by which men could succeed in a new country. Many belonged to nonconformist religious groups; and regarded the arts with suspicion, to be tolerated only if containing an obvious ‘message’. They expected also from their verse, as from their hymns, the expression of strong feeling rather than any intellectual synthesis. These prejudices have persisted to our own time; and account for the constant popularity of verse such as Thomas Bracken’s ‘Not Understood’ – a rhetorical poem, unquestionably sincere, with the heavy rhythm of a hymn. I do not intend to deprecate all verse which embodies moral truths or even truisms. Such verse can be of a high standard. But I deprecate the view that verse is necessarily good because it contains such material. In fact the poetry of the second half of the last century both here and in England, was singularly barren of lively ideas; and the crushing yoke of public moral censorship must bear most of the blame.

page 94

Discussion

  • (1) Do you feel that the poetry of the last century in New Zealand was in fact abortive, struggling, and out of touch with the life of the settlers?
  • (2) If so, what were the main factors producing this dislocation? The fact that the settlers were occupied in breaking in a new country? Lack of adequate educational facilities? The pressure of moral censorship? Or some other factors?
  • (3) Do you feel that the criticism of Thomas Bracken’s ‘Not Understood’ embodied in this lecture is unfair? Or off the point? Do you think that a few more Thomas Brackens would put this country on the map? Discuss pro and con.
  • (4) Do you think that the function of poetry is to embody moral truths and improve our ethics? Or to describe the poet’s reaction to what is beautiful? Or to clarify his own reflection on any kind of experience, and the reflection of others? Or something else?

Otago Regional Poetry

I have chosen to discuss Otago poetry of the last century because in that part of New Zealand one finds a different verse tradition the Scots one; because some of the verse was of a high quality; because A.E. Currie’s A Centennial Treasury of Otago Verse (published in 1949) provides a reasonably accessible text for discussion. Currie has unaccountably omitted from his Treasury the work of Jessie Mackay, an important figure in early New Zealand poetry. She had a considerable mastery of the ballad style. Much of her work is highly imaginative and romantic. To her, as to many people of Scots ancestry, the Jacobite rising and the legends of the Highlands were part of the fabric of her thought. But her poems on such themes were in the main shrill and unreal. She was, however, the first New Zealand poet to treat a Maori legend in verse with comparative success. In her poem ‘The Noosing of the Sun-God’ the latent vigour of her mind finds concrete expression.

Thou art the Sun-God,
Te Ra of the flaming hair.
Heretofore man is thy moth.
What is the life of man,
Bound to thy rushing wings,
Thou fire-bird of Rangi?
A birth in a burning;
A flash and a war-word;
A failing, a falling
page 95 Of ash to the ashes
Of bottomless Po!

This verse has some of the force of Scandinavian sagas; or of the actual creation myths and canoe chants of the Polynesians. But other New Zealand poets have failed to make any vital use of Maori mythology, probably because it is impossible for English-speaking Christians or rationalists of the Steel Age to enter into the world-view of tribal Stone Age Maoris. The scattering of Maori names and phrases (apart from those which have become current New Zealand diction) through poems written in the English Romantic tradition is quite incongruous. It may happen, however, that a man walking in bush or on the seacoast in the Twentieth Century is possessed by the daemon of the place and experiences the same, dread, exaltation, sense of life in inanimate creation, which a Stone Age man may also have experienced and records this in verse.

Jessie Mackay was a journalist as well as poet, and propagandist for the causes of prohibition and women’s suffrage – which were in her day more immediate issues than they are now. She is the type and forerunner of most later New Zealand women poets, possessing what is at its best a genuine restricted idealism, at its worst a disastrous lack of contact with the main stream of human ideas and experience. The dilemma of the woman writer is a painful one. In our society the status of the married woman is higher than that of the spinster; but a married woman rarely has the leisure and freedom to write. Our two most notable women poets (Ursula Bethell and Eileen Duggan) have been spinsters; and there is evidence in their work of considerable conflict and a sense of isolation. In itself this is perhaps of little account – some kind of conflict has always been the ground of creative processes. But in New Zealand art and letters, until recently, an uneasy gentility has held sway, which has sterilised the crude immediate vigour invaluable as an urge to experiment. By this gentility the revolutionary impulse of poets such as Jessie Mackay has been dissipated and stifled; and, most unfortunately, such writers have been the first to protest against innovation.

Jessie Mackay used ballad form, but apparently was not influenced by the work of Burns. Her verse was published at the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one.

An earlier Otago poet, John Barr, who had a book published in Edinburgh in 1861, followed ably in the steps of Burns. He describes in detail the moneygrubbing propensities of a small Scottish community, sketches the town drunkard, moralises on the vanity of human wishes. His verse is hard, compact and neat, without the virtues or vices of imaginative poetry. Plainly the Scottish idiom was his native tongue. His verse is still eminently readable; but copies of his book are, I believe, only procurable in libraries such as the Turnbull.

page 96

The influence of Burns on Scottish poetry has been immense and on the whole inhibiting. A poet of the first magnitude must tend to overshadow those who follow him, especially when his words are regarded almost as a sacred book by his countrymen. I have heard an old Scotsman express the opinion that Burns was the only true poet who ever lived – ‘Some of the others had a shot at it; but they didn’t get anywhere.’ This idolatry, in New Zealand at least, was a check on any experiment in Scottish dialect verse. Taking Burns as their model, the local bard imitated his vices of sentimentality and heavy formalism rather than his virtues of huge gusto, metaphorical exactitude and satirical wit. The lonely descriptive verse of John Barr and others died out as the life of the Scottish agricultural communities also died before the withering influence of an economy controlled by National Mortgage. But there remains a little wheat among the chaff, some verse genuinely related to the life of agricultural New Zealand.

In all these gullies I’ve made bridges
Of great logs split with mall and wedges;
I’ve mown the fern from off the ridges
To make pigbedding;
And with great care I’ve nurtured hedges
Around my steading.

So writes an early Otago poet, using the Burns stanza anglicised.

It seems that poetry cannot flourish in any country without regional activity. Whatever the advantages of modern technological civilisation, it does not provide natural occasions for popular verse. The local landmarks are lost (the bridge one’s grandfather built; the quarry said to be haunted by a gamekeeper killed in a fight with poachers; regular festivals; the whole deep unconscious continuity of tradition, that makes one’s neighbour a member with oneself of an indefinitely extended family) and no collectively organised group activity can replace them. In particular, the metaphorical richness of dialect, springing from the oneness of sight and subjective response (e.g. ‘I saw the new moon late yestreen / With the old moon in her arms’) is replaced by the stereotyped language of newspaper and radio. Poets are obliged to make their own language. It is significant that modern poets have in many cases turned to regional sources for their methods and material – Yeats to the Irish ballad, and events of the Easter Rising and Civil War (he was fortunate in the fact that Ireland has not yet undergone industrial revolution); Hardy to the life of Wessex agricultural labourers, and in his finest poem, ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, to the local ballad form; Dylan Thomas to his Welsh childhood and Cymric verse structure; Day Lewis increasingly to country matters and the methods of Hardy; MacNeice to Ireland; Eliot, in his Four Quartets, subtly and deeply to the seventeenth century rural Anglican community.

page 97

This essential regionalism we have until lately lacked in New Zealand; and even now there is no healthy undergrowth of spontaneous local composition, as there was in some degree in the Otago Scottish communities. In Australia the case has been different. Lawson, Paterson, Ogilvie, Lindsay Gordon, provided for the man in the street; and their popularity in this country is evidence that a similar kind of verse could have been and even yet might be, acceptable among New Zealanders, from local poets. I doubt, though, if it could compete with the radio. One poet, David McKee Wright, whose verse was published at the turn of the century, exhibits in a few poems complete mastery of the ballad form.

The moon is bright, and the winds are laid, and the river is roaring by; Orion swings, with his belted lights low down in the western sky . . .
Where the broad flood eddies the dredge is moored to the beach of shingle white,
And the straining cable whips the stream in a spray of silver light; The groaning buckets bear their load, and the engine throbs away,
And the wash pours red on the turning screen that knows not night or day;
For there’s many an ounce of gold to save, from the gorge to the shining sea –
And there’s many a league of the bare brown hills between my love and me.

Unfortunately the ballad did not take root in New Zealand as in Australia. When new strength came into New Zealand poetry, it was from the university colleges and not from the ranks of seasonal workers, rabbiters, or men on road construction jobs. The New Zealand public have been content to accept as a substitute for folk poetry the mass-produced American song lyric.

Discussion

  • (1) Is regional poetry necessary before the general public will show interest in more complex and intellectual forms of verse?
  • (2) Can organisations such as the Councils of Adult Education provide a substitute for the regional culture which we no longer possess?
  • (3) Is wide reading essential before a poet can produce first-rate work?
  • (4) Would descriptive, narrative, or topical satirical ballads be widely read and appreciated if they were written in New Zealand at the present day?
  • (5) Do you think modern education destroys the capacity (notable among primitive peoples) of men to make their own songs?
  • (6) Do you think that Maori mythology can be used successfully by New Zealand poets of the present day?
page 98
  • (7) Do you feel that women poets find peculiar difficulty in achieving the balance necessary for the writing of first-rate poetry? Or do you think that the main difficulty is the prejudice of readers against women writers?

The Georgian School in New Zealand Poetry

The name ‘Georgian’ has been given to that school of poetry in England which originated, I believe, chiefly in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge before the First World War. Within its confines developed such well-known poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, Harold Monro, Siegfried Sassoon. No division into ‘schools’ is ever strictly satisfactory; for each poet has his own methods and peculiar insight. But broadly speaking, the Georgians are characterised by their choice of pastoral themes, their adherence to regular metres, and their conception of poetry as a means of escape from a world too harsh and utilitarian.

In speaking of New Zealand verse I use the term ‘Georgian’ not to denote poetry written in a particular decade, but a particular kind of poetry. It is just to consider Georgian verse under the heading of early New Zealand poetry, as Georgian poets have remained comparatively unaffected by the movements of rejuvenation in the English and New Zealand poetic tradition. The anthology Kowhai Gold, published in 1930, is representative of New Zealand Georgian verse. The poems are imprecise, flatulent, unlikely to offend or stimulate. There is no evidence (except in the work of Eileen Duggan and B.E. Baughan – a poet of the older school) that the writers are aware of social change or have any experience to communicate but a fondness for scenery. Plainly the verse is a drug and not a food.

1952 (55)