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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

3 — Symbolism in New Zealand Poetry

3

Symbolism in New Zealand Poetry

In the first two lectures of this series I have said something of the criticism of poetry and its inspiration. I have tried to speak to some purpose – but after so many words from one mouth I am reminded of a certain Chinese painter’s notion of a poet’s heaven. The beatified poets recline on clouds, each one writing interminable verses on rolls of toilet paper; the toilet paper dangles in the wind; and each poet is very much on his own. One could be certain that the poems they would write would be all bad. Poetry is written by men and women; and if there is no life in them there can be no life in their work. As Dylan Thomas has written:

To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

Living is a difficult task and often a painful occupation; but not a job that one can walk out on – there is nowhere else to go. One can, of course, make one’s art a kind of perpetual retreat from every real problem; but in such apage 180 situation the art itself gradually withers away. The prototype of the active poet is not, to my mind, the magician or dreamer – rather the emu, who digests stones and old boots; or the punchdrunk boxer coming back for more.

Today I will say something of concrete symbolism in New Zealand poetry. There is no real contradiction in speaking of concrete symbolism; for a symbol takes its shape and colour from the experience which it affirms. Furthermore, one can hardly speak of symbolism as a conscious technique like the mechanics of verse construction. It lies at the roots of a poem where art form and suffered reality coalesce, and may be more apparent to the critical reader than to the author himself, as archaeologists unearth city after city from underneath a mound of simple rubble. Therefore it is not wholly fantastic to look for symbolism in the work of New Zealand writers who would themselves have scouted one’s findings. A symbol is often more vigorous when unsuspected by its author; as when a child relives in its play and fantasy the totemism of primitive man, or a civilised adult governs his life by an intricate ritual.

We are inclined to cry down the Victorian Age as unimaginative, and to forget the vigorous fantasy of Carroll, Lear, Kipling, or George MacDonald – the unique symbolism which could only occur in a time when progress seemed not a fanatic’s dream but something in part already realised; when children could grow to manhood and womanhood without the threat of annihilation. My grandfather, John Macmillan Brown, in whose name and memory these lectures were inaugurated, was a product of that age. I remember him as a white-haired elderly man in a black coat who inhabited a vast private library, which one entered by a varnished staircase – a benign figure who patted me on the head when I showed him my Christmas presents. No doubt if he were alive today he would find his grandson uneasy company. As a pioneer in education, whose labour and devotion helped to shape our society, he would find it hard to understand the view of a descendant that the pioneer ideals were constricting and even destructive. Yet he himself wrote a vigorous satire on his contemporary society, Riallaro; and in Limanora constructed a Utopia where people combined technological progress with moral near-perfection. At the end of the Utopian fantasy the hero and his female counterpart, Thyriel, visit the antarctic polar regions, where volcanic activity has broken out threatening the island paradise.

Everywhere we flew were marks of the recent volcanic work; and not merely creative, but destructive . . . . We hurried to the various points of danger and discovered only too clearly that the first storm would send the waters of the ocean breaching into many new volcanic vents . . .

The difficulty came when we passed beyond the Antarctic Ocean, and voyaged high above the heaving trackless desert of water which lies between the region of icebergs and the first ring of islets . . . How were we to find resting-places at night or during the day?

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Eventually the hero is abandoned by his guardian spirit, whose wings have grown tired, and wakes disconsolate in a hut above the bushline of the Southern Alps. The narrative has the familiar contours of an anxiety dream. The Utopia embodies the idealist superstructure of the Victorian era. In our own time we have seen the too ethereal anima of social goodwill, romantic affection, and self-improvement, vanish, leaving us on the cold damp ground; and the volcanic forces within the soul of man blew every imagined Utopia skyhigh in two World Wars. We are still learning the hard lesson that neither happiness nor sanctity can be attained by a simple act of the conscious will. Perhaps that ‘heaving trackless desert of water’ over which the two Utopians fly is the terrifying but regenerative chaos out of which every island and myth rises, and into which it returns. Their island, with its elaborate mechanisms to keep out prohibited immigrants, natural or supernatural, has much in common with Mr Curnow’s isolated New Zealand.

A symbol cannot be explained; rather, it must be regarded as a door opening upon the dark – upon a world of intuitions and associations of which the poet himself is hardly conscious. It is the nature of symbolism to be ambiguous. Yet certain patterns of symbolism can be more or less accurately determined. M.H. Holcroft and Allen Curnow among our critics have shown most awareness of symbolic implications in New Zealand poetry. Curnow acknowledges his considerable debt to Holcroft in an early sonnet, and much of his argument in the Introduction to his Book of New Zealand Verse explores further the themes which Holcroft had already broached; but where Holcroft is discursive and speculative, Curnow works as a literary critic pure and simple, from the texts at hand. Inevitably, his interpretation reflects his own dilemmas. What he writes of D’Arcy Cresswell and R.A.K. Mason could be applied to his own work, both in verse and criticism:

These poets were two who could not falsify their situation, and that is why they made those gestures. To seem real to themselves they had to seem such solitary figures, outpost survivors of a great but dead past.

Curnow works most naturally from an Apollonian position: his omnipresent theme is that of the isolation of the conscious ego, in time and space. Like Yeats he has been impelled to construct a hieratic figure, that of personified Time, to set against the flux of events and be a mouthpiece for oracular statements, but the persona is too abstract and unstable. The oracular statement becomes confused. This is not to deny Curnow’s talent and integrity, and the value of his criticism as a springboard to further analysis. But his Biblical, geological, or entirely personal symbolism seems more immediate and fruitful than the myth of insular isolation:

. . . the harmless sea
Pure, unfractured, many miles,
page 182 Still steel water sheathed between
Once violent hills, volcanic shapes . . .
. . . because the dead,
Father and child, still walk the water’s edge;
A kindness, an inconsequent pastime, froze
In time’s tormented rock, became an age
When tropics shifted, buried rivers rose . . .

In this, probably his finest poem ‘At Dead Low Water’, Curnow uses the relation of father and son symbolically to represent an age of forgotten innocence. The ‘once violent hills’ I take, perhaps arbitrarily, to symbolise the even earlier identification of child and mother (any analysis of the symbolism of New Zealand literature must take into account the great part played by mountains and volcanic activity, and that in more than guidebook terms). The splendid geological symbolism with which the poem ends rests on the antithesis of fire and cold which I have remarked in an earlier lecture as characteristic of Curnow’s poetry: the fire of instinctive vigour and the winter of necessary custom.

The myth of insularity, however, by which New Zealand became an Island in time and in human culture as well as in the visible Pacific, though cogent for the Thirties, has proved something of a stilt-house against the tide of new development. Curnow has felt, perhaps more acutely than any other New Zealand writer, the burden of social stereotypes; and his gesture is often that of a man fanning the fog away from his face. His reluctance to allow another view of New Zealand society and letters than his own intensely felt myth of isolation explains the otherwise unaccountable neglect, in bringing his anthology up to date, of Alistair Campbell, M.K. Joseph, and Louis Johnson – three poets widely differing in mood, of obvious talent and vigour, alike in their unlikeness to his prototype of what the New Zealand poet should be. At the present time our problems may not differ greatly from those of life and literature in England or America: the specifically New Zealand features of our writing are not in any case what appeals to the overseas reader, but the sense of reality suffered, which is much the same in any time or country.

My interpretation of the ‘once violent hills’ as mother symbols in Curnow’s ‘At Dead Low Water’ raises the problem of psychological analysis. How far can a literary critic be permitted to interpret a writer’s symbolism in Jungian or Freudian terms? The obvious answer is – Who is going to stop him? Yet neither a psychology of sexuality nor one of so-called archetypal patterns is concerned with the quality of a work of art: hence their analysis has a purely clinical value. All the same, one cannot dismiss a psychological interpretation as unreal. The critic who has once realised that the enchanted pleasure- ground of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ may be, at one level, a vivid symbolicpage 183 description of the female genitalia can never look at the poem with the same eyes again – I would say, to his definite advantage. In any given poem there are many levels of symbolism; and each level when recognised makes clearer the contours of that reality which the symbol reflects.

We are told that in primitive society the modern distinction between objective and subjective experience did not exist. The gods walked among people; ancestral spirits guarded every burial-ground against the trespasser; the sunrise was as much an inward as an outward event, and might not occur if certain rituals were neglected. This view of the world we may now consider superstitious; but it still governs all our most significant actions, from the planting of trees on Arbor Day to the relation of man and woman. The soldier, as John Manifold observes, goes out to battle with as much ritual observance as any aborigine:

Comfort him, ancients in our several moulds,
Sphinx, Lion, Lamb, Eagles of West and East,
And send him out on what his future holds

Vicariously bold, or safe at least
From tribal censure, while around him folds
The monstrous shadow of his totem beast.

A poet’s task is not to explain rationally the animistic pattern which underlies civilised activity; but to lay it bare, and draw upon its strength without being submerged by it – a difficult and even dangerous procedure.

The first attempts made in New Zealand to draw upon Maori legend and mythology as a source of poetry were uniformly unsuccessful: they were vitiated by a sentimental tradition. The faces that look out of the early sketches of Maori chiefs are softened by the draughtsman’s concept of the Noble Savage. And similarly such works as Domett’s ‘Ranolf and Amohia’ carry a weight of sentimental idealism. No doubt many a settler walking into the fern out of sight of his steading felt a sudden panic descend, as if the bush were more than so much timber; and no doubt many another looking along a rocky coast-line felt for a moment his European cultural mask torn away, and saw it nakedly as a Maori fisherman might have done. But these moments did not find their way into the poetry of the time. Not until Jessie Mackay’s ‘Noosing of the Sun-God’ do we find a nearer approach to a Polynesian mythological basis:

Thou art the Sun-God,
Te Ra of the flaming hair.
Heretofore man is thy moth.
What is the life of man
page 184 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
Of ash to the ashes
Of bottomless Po!

She has achieved some of the vigour of a canoe-chant or saga; and the poem stands out from similar writing like a hawk among chickens. But it lacks the immediate concreteness which the symbols must have had for the Maori: it has a tinge of the over-literary statement. There is no reason, actually, why a New Zealand poet should use Polynesian symbolism rather than the Greek myths of Orpheus and Prometheus, or the medieval legend of Faustus. A correspondence with Polynesian culture should occur naturally; and can only succeed when the symbols are an integral part of the poet’s mental equipment. Keith Sinclair, an Auckland poet, has made perhaps the only successful conscious use of Polynesian myth and symbol. In a remarkable poem, ‘Memorial for a Missionary’, he writes of Thomas Kendall, the first resident missionary in New Zealand, who was converted by those whom he came to convert:

He drank the waters of the underworld
Lying all day in the unconverted flesh,
Entangled in old time, before Christ’s birth . . .

Did he fall through pride of spirit, through arrogance
Or through humility, not scorning the prayers
Of savages and their intricate pantheon? . . .

Drowning off Jervis Bay. O the pain,
For death is a virgin rich in maidenheads
And memories, trees two hundred feet and tall.
The sea is a savage maiden, in her legs
Sharp pangs no missionary drank before,
And the immortality that Maui sought . . .

In the haunting figure of a ruined missionary, Sinclair has embodied the conflict and merging of two cultures; and his symbols throughout the poem are drawn naturally from Polynesian sources. The sea as a symbol of death and chastity is linked to the myth of Maui and the Death-Goddess; yet recalls Hart Crane’s image of the ‘undinal vast belly’. The kauri tree as a phallic symbol is indigenous; yet the ‘waters of the underworld’ flow from the Greek Lethe. Polynesian and European symbolism merge, as they must inevitablypage 185 do in the mind of a New Zealander of European extraction, however close his sympathy may be with the culture of his adopted country. Generally the Polynesian symbol has been awkwardly used by New Zealand poets. The only successful use I can recall, after Sinclair’s ‘Memorial’, occurs in some passages of Curnow’s The Axe, and notably in a poem by Alistair Campbell, ‘The Return’:

Their great eyes glowing, their rain-jewelled, leaf-green
Bodies leaning and talking with the sea behind them,
Plant gods, tree gods, gods of the middle world. Face downward
And in a small creek-mouth all unperceived
The drowned Dionysus, sand in his eyes and mouth,
In the dim tide lolling . . .

The images, like many of Campbell’s have an almost hallucinatory force. The Polynesian gods and demigods have returned from the sea (Jung would say, from the collective unconscious); the falling rain is a symbol of their regeneration; their bodies are ‘leaf-green’, a symbol of the energy of the unconscious mind. But, as Sinclair has done in the ‘Memorial’, Campbell uses Greek mythology also – Dionysus (perhaps in another role Eliot’s drowned Phoenician Sailor) lies submerged; a mysterious figure in this context, unperceived, perhaps the Dionysiac self which must die in order that the gods may return. Campbell’s strongest personal symbols are always of separation and death. In his superb ‘Elegy’, mountain, gorge, tree, and river, become protagonists in the drama of the death of the young mountaineer. In ‘Hut Near Desolated Pines’, perhaps his finest poem, he considers the death of an old recluse: the rats, the spiders, the wind which bursts the door open, are all animistic and hostile. The old man himself is on one level the isolated self, on another the bearer of ancestral wisdom. Campbell’s poetry is static in the sense that in it the action has always just occurred; the subliminal violence is over, but the evidence of the crime remains. The gesture of even his love poems is elegiac; or perhaps it would be true to say that the ‘Elegy’ itself is his strongest love poem.

The South Island landscape, which provides an arena for Campbell’s poetry, has done the same for Brasch, Glover, Curnow and Ursula Bethell: it may seem strange to speak of their nature poetry as symbolist, yet it is precisely that quality in their poems which by natural features assume the significance of a pattern in the mind which distinguish them from the guide- book verse which had come before. I have often felt the same excitement in reading a nature poem by Brasch or Glover as in looking at a painting by Rita Cook or Doris Lusk: the contours of mountain, bush, and seacoast, are richly alive with the animistic force of a ritual dance. Thus in Brasch’s poem, ‘A View of Rangitoto’:

page 186

Harshness of gorse darkens the yellow cliff-ledge,
And scarlet-flowered trees lean out to drop
Their shadows on the bay below, searching

The water for an image always broken
Between the inward and returning swells . . .

Finally, holding all eyes, the long-limbed mountain
Dark on the waves, sunk in a stone composure.
From each far cape an easy flank lifts

In slow unison, purposeful all their rising length
To meet and lock together faultlessly
Clasping the notched worn crater-cone between them.

The trees ‘searching the water’ for a broken image are plainly a narcissist symbol; the mountain, as Brasch describes it in his poem, is one of the clearest symbols of maternal sexuality in New Zealand poetry. If this interpretation raises any doubts one has only to examine his explicit statement in The Land and the People:

The maternal nightly flood
Where all things rest and are renewed
And separateness falls away . . .

The attitude of the child to the mother and the New Zealander to the landscape of his country is identified. The marriage of earth and sea, of the static maternal element and the destructive yet rejuvenating element of flux, is also a constant motif in his poems. The maternal symbol carries the weight of human or even cosmic suffering; it is felt as a burden against which the individual strives unsuccessfully, and to which he must be reconciled in order to find peace.

In the poems of Denis Glover, the same symbols occur with a different emphasis. The sea is omnipresent, as a symbol of death and renewal:

To the north are islands like stars
In the blue water
And south, in that crystal air,
The icefloes grind and mutter,

Sings Harry in the windbreak . . .

But his later verse turns to the land, and to the imagined Eden of childhoodpage 187 experience. He has constructed a persona through whose mouth the symbolic statement can be made – Harry, the casual man, the onlooker at the game of life. The statement itself is frequently nihilistic:

. . . praise St Francis feeding crumbs
Into the empty mouths of guns . . .

Very likely no better compressed statement of the modern social chaos has been made: the whole force of Christian charity and humility given over to the processes of destruction.

In Glover’s most recent work, Harry has been replaced by the figure of Arawata Bill, gold prospector and eccentric. The persona moves through a hostile country, menaced by flooded rivers, avalanche, and tangled bush. The sequence contains some of the best of Glover’s nature symbolism: one is introduced to the powers of earth, air, and water, a Heraclitean cosmos, with the hidden fire of the gold burning at its centre.

The work of Ursula Bethell, another South Island poet, is marked by her use of Christian symbolism, which does not merge easily with natural animism. The tension is often evident; but in several poems is completely resolved:

These hills at dawn are of an austere architecture,
Claustral; like a grave assembly, night-cold numbed,
Of nuns, singing matins and lauds in perpetuity,
While the sluggard multitude without is dumb;
But at sunrise carmined, gilded; as of rare cosmetics
A girl takes, for more beauty now, lest her lover come.

This quotation from ‘Levavi Oculos’ shows a use of symbolism at many levels. The hills are identified with nuns rising before the dawn: they symbolise thus the purity and strength of the natural world when theocentric. The sun comes like a lover; but in this context the sun symbolises Christ, the Master of nature. The hills are ‘gilded’; that is, they take their light from the Face they look upon: they use it as a girl uses ‘cosmetics’ to prepare for her lover. A breath- taking symbol and extraordinarily apt. One may say that the hills themselves symbolise the instinctive human life, which is quickened and changed by the power of the resurrection. Ursula Bethell’s work is remarkable in that she sees the Christian drama of redemption performed in the natural world, in the Southern Alps and the Canterbury foothills. She belonged by age to an earlier generation of poets; but, like Eileen Duggan, had the intellectual fibre to grasp the benefits of a modern tradition.

If, as many critics are inclined to do, one were to take leave of the symbolism of New Zealand poetry at this point, the impression would bepage 188 gained that we had some first-rate landscape poets, and nothing more. But, in fact, a good deal of recent poetry has moved towards a symbolism more immediately related to our personal lives. The social emphasis of the Thirties was by no means all a product of the Depression: it was an effort to break down the barrier which had grown up between poetry and the concrete detail of our lives. The best of the Georgian poets also made this effort; in particular, Alan Mulgan in his ‘Golden Wedding’. In another poem, ‘Success’, he writes about the funeral of a city business man:

Through the cold hall they carry the shining coffin;
Past the icy statuary, the stiff palms and the pictures,
Bloodless this spring afternoon as the body within the rimu;
Down the broad steps on to the concrete pathway,
Bordered by convict-cropped grass and grenadier shrubs at attention.
The dry-eyed dry-stalked daughters watch from the verandah;
Their mourning garments are easy for them who have never known joy . . .

This poem, with a few extracts from ‘Golden Wedding’, could well have been included in the Book of New Zealand Verse in place of the somewhat arid meditations of Arnold Wall. The ‘stiff palms’ and ‘grenadier shrubs’ are effective symbols of the rigidity of a rich suburban household; the ‘grass, cropped’ like a convict’s hair, as if criminal, represent the rejected energy of the natural world. The daughters are ‘dry-stalked’, since a lady must learn to wither becomingly. The ‘body within the rimu’ may have symbolised for Mulgan the death of the instinctive man within a too rigid social order. Mulgan shows a profound grasp of the pressures at work within the family:

. . . and in front are the boys,
Correct, Laodicean, within them release at war with their duty.
I am free, I am free, the soft wheels murmur their surging . . .
They do not know that use is a habit not now to be broken;
Through the coming years they cannot straighten the will that is bent.
The old man is dead, but the old man will live, their master . . .

In the father-son relationship, Mulgan makes concrete the whole tension between the individual and the social mores. The loose running hexameters and the hard, clear metaphors are a sign of the release that occurs within this poem. If Mulgan had been able to keep the vantage-point he achieved in ‘Success’, his work might have been different in character. But writers as able as any today were strangled by a bad tradition. The Georgian dilemma had its roots in the structure of New Zealand society: in the great pressure towards conformity which prevented poets, and novelists also, from exercising a free and critical insight. They were quite literally afraid of what they might findpage 189 themselves writing; and the demand by every newspaper reviewer for an optimistic, sentimental tone prevented them from following up their own best work. Robin Hyde, whose failures are as significant as her successes, was plainly aware of the lack of sensuous directness in her early verse, and tried continually to remedy it. If we compare her ‘Requiem for Singers’, beginning ‘Hang up the bays: let the laurels shine on’ – with R.A.K. Mason’s similar poem ‘The Lesser Stars’ – ‘We are they who are doomed to raise up no monuments to outlast brass’ – we see clearly that the failure is not wholly a matter of tradition or lack of tradition (Mason’s poem is an equally formal and traditional gesture), but stems from a basic timidity, an uncertainty of the reality of her theme. Her symbols are predominantly narcissist, the beleaguered castle, the mirror, the shield; and the focus of her clearest and most direct poetry in Houses by the Sea indicates the source of her conflict:

Close under here, I watched two lovers once,
Which should have been a sin, from what you say . . .
It wasn’t long before they came; a fool
Could see they had to kiss; but your pet dunce
Didn’t quite know men count on more than that . . .
. . . and when they’d gone, I went
Down to the hollow place where they had been,
Trickling bed through fingers. But I never meant
To tell the rest, or you, what I had seen.

She feels that she is dealing with forbidden material; and the gesture is partly one of apology for writing at all. But the poem derives its strength from the direct sexual implications. This particular sequence is called ‘The Beaches’. It seems that the ‘beach’, which symbolises a no-man’s-land between conscious and unconscious, plays a most important role in New Zealand poetry. Sinclair writes of the ‘beach’ which ‘fends off the wild-tongued sea . . . from our bright crumbling enclosure’; almost every New Zealand poet uses the symbol at some time or other. One might infer from the evidence of our poetry that every erotic adventure which finds its way into print has its setting somewhere among the sandhills; a nonsensical conclusion. But the Sea symbolises the fruitful chaos which nourishes the sexual instinct; and the Beach the meeting-place of conscious and unconscious, the Dionysiac ground the haunted playground of children and lovers, scattered with orange-peel but swept clean each day by the tide, the place where we can sleep without bad dreams and wake refreshed. It is not strange that Robin Hyde should turn to this arena; since it is far removed from the closed room where poetry becomes a rather desperate parlour game. We can realise how much of what is shoddy in her writing came from the verse tradition of her time, when we see the clarification and maturity which has come about in the work of her former protégée, Gloria Rawlinson. Manypage 190 Georgians seemed afflicted by a genuine paralysis of the will before the task of writing real poetry; and though they resented deeply a tougher tradition, which seemed to put their poems on the shelf, they have also learnt from it. Good poems are not produced by schools of writing; but happen when individuals sharpen their sense of reality and extend their frame of reference. A poem such as Gloria Rawlinson’s ‘The Islands Where I was Born’ could not have been produced within the Georgian tradition; but only after the door had been laboriously opened upon a world of forbidden knowledge.

One could make a simple, though by no means exhaustive list of the larger nature symbols that occur in New Zealand poetry:

The Sea: as a symbol of death and oblivion; as a symbol of regeneration.
The Mountains: as protective maternal symbols; >as symbols of ideal purity; as menacing and hostile powers.
The Bush: as a symbol of the energy and fruitfulness of the natural world; as a menacing and entangling wilderness.
The Beach: as an arena of historical change, the arrival and departure of races; as a place where revelations may occur; as the no-man’s-land between conscious and unconscious; as an arena for sexual adventure.
The Island: as a symbol of isolation from European tradition, both in place and time.

Each poet has, of course, his own unique emphasis, and his original version of the general ideograph; but the symbols recur so frequently in the work of poets otherwise quite dissimilar in intention that one must conclude that some deep connection exists between these natural features and certain areas of spiritual experience. What the connection is, psychologists may explain; but it lies outside the scope of literary criticism.

The dominant symbol, however, of New Zealand literature has not yet been touched on: Man Alone. I take the name from the title of John Mulgan’s novel. The symbol, no doubt, is characteristic in all modern literature; but in New Zealand prose and verse it has taken on a local colour and a central importance. The ‘Man Alone’, whether young or old, lives on the fringes of society, often eccentric, sometimes criminal, aware of acute isolation from every social aim. He is the central figure in most of Sargeson’s work; and appears regularly in the work of every other prose writer of note. I intend topage 191 discuss the symbol mainly in its occurrence in New Zealand poetry.

As Auden writes, Narcissus is not the archetype of the poet as such, but of the poet who loses his soul for poetry. Yet it does not seem that a man can be an artist without also being narcissist – that is, without creating a fictitious self, more powerful, knowledgeable, and loveable, than, in fact, he is. This self appears in fairy stories as the fortunate Younger Son who kills the dragon and marries the princess; and in the comic strips as Superman. A child, however, soon realises that its fantasies are, in fact, impossible. It will never become a Napoleon or a Nansen; nor will it ever be loved very much or very long. Most people after adolescence reject their own fantasy life and concentrate on what they can actually do. But artists retain the early image of themselves as important – capable of learning the secret of the universe; possessing a magic that rearranges, not, it is true, the laws of nature, but the inner world of symbols. The insane person with delusions of grandeur possesses very much the same image of himself. But for the artist we must add another characteristic, which children have also, along with their egotism: a love of the world, and a wish that it should respond to this love. Every good poem is in a sense a love letter to the world; and, like all love letters, full of endearments, private language, complaints, and swearwords; but worth more to the beloved than a drawerful of statistics.

The composite image of a child, magus, and lover, must of necessity be solitary; for its fantasy can only be made real in and through the poem. When Basil Dowling writes:

Ocean and child became acquainted here
And I learnt all her secrets, save the fear
Of those jade doors through which the countless toll
Of men and ships have passed to burial –

the knowledge he speaks of was never truly possessed by the child, except, as it were in a dream. It is paradisiacal knowledge, which the weakness and humiliation of a child’s life denies at every turn. Similarly, when Louis Johnson writes

When all the wild summer was in her gaze
her love was as lithe as the leaning wind
and waters danced in the words of mind,
love grew through bright unnumbered days –

he records an innocence in the relationship of man and woman not possessed in fact but in what he specifically calls the ‘summer dream’. Yet the vision of a perfect knowledge, of an undivided love, and a sense of dereliction at its unfulfilment, are the constant subject-matter of poetry; and to dismiss thempage 192 as meaningless is to dismiss the strongest aspirations of which people are capable, almost to deny their humanity. If we had no intuition that the Fall had occurred then indeed the Fall would be complete. The personae of child or lover which the poet wears are variants of the central role of magus, the Man Alone who, by the performance of a symbolic ritual attains to forbidden knowledge. William Hart-Smith uses Columbus as a magus-symbol: the man who goes out to find the Earthly Paradise. And Hubert Witheford conceives of the poet’s task as a symbolic ritual:

This is the trysting place, its certain signs –
The congealed sea, the bones of ancient fire
And in the ruined cliffs a shallow cave.
. . . I stare at the few blackened sticks without,
Kindled long since to be my whole world’s ash.
I yield before the silence and I know
Your servants who are waiting at my side.

The poet begins with the desire for wisdom, for a changing of his being, and ends with a poem on his hands which may be no more than a record of the search. Very likely the symbol of Man Alone does not, in fact, reflect a morbid state of isolation from the European cultural tradition, but rather the condition of solitude essential for the performance of a ritual act. The anxiety, however, which accompanies the taking on of this role is a different matter. It seems to derive from the artist’s awareness that his activity is regarded with indifference or even hostility by the society in which he lives. The symbol of Man Alone is thus objectified as the hobo, the social outcast, standing for the outcast energies, both criminal and creative, which the artist tries to reintegrate in his view of the world. The hero of Sargeson’s That Summer, Bruce Mason’s Firpo in Summer’s End, Denis Glover’s Arawata Bill, and many less obvious personae in prose and verse fall into this category. The hobo or eccentric, however, has not chosen his role of isolation: it has been forced upon him by his inability to cope with the pressure to social conformity. Nor has he the compensating power of the artist to make use of his position outside society as a vantage- point from which to see more than those within. Yet, since an artist’s sole justification for his departure from the social stereotype lies in his work, and that work is generally limited in quantity and unpredictable in quality, he must share in some degree the same tensions. An artist also is likely to have discovered early in his career the inadequacy of the social categories of good and bad, since he has disinterred in his own mind the same anti-social motives which many citizens regard as the peculiar property of those who go to jail. The act of sympathy with the Man Alone who has incurred the disapproval of society is a basic element in many works of art; and R.A.K. Mason takes the act to its logical conclusion in his poem, ‘On the Swag’:

page 193

His body doubled
under the pack
that sprawls untidily
on his old back
the cold wet deadbeat
plods up the track . . .

Let the fruit be plucked
and the cake be iced,
the bed be snug
and the wine be spiced
in the old cove’s nightcap:
for this is Christ.

He implies that the rejection of a man is equally a rejection of God. And this attitude is a mainspring not only in much of the social idealism of the Thirties, but also in some of the best New Zealand poetry of the past decade, even where by no means specifically religious. The Second World War which on the face of it has brought them face to face with the suffering of their fellows, perhaps nearer the suffering of the Man on the Cross. M.K. Joseph writes in ‘Simon of Cyrene’:

Heaven broke its back in the dusty road
When we followed the torn man shuffling in bonds
Through the heat of a taxi overturned and burning
Past the students clubbed by police as they demonstrated
Before the corinthian pillars of the city hall
And the windows of multiple stores fanged and broken
And the women wailing in front of the fried-fish shop.

The agony of the Stations of the Cross has for its background the entirely natural picture of a city riot; just as the Italian masters rightly would have painted the same scene in contemporary terms. In Joseph’s work the symbols recur of a culture broken apart in order that truth may emerge: he does not turn a blind eye to the modern chaos. And, as in the poems of Louis MacNeice, his symbolic use of the furniture of civilisation is extraordinarily vivid and natural. His best poems rarely contain an obvious New Zealand image. He is not, it seems, vitally concerned about being a New Zealander. It happens to be the country he lives in. Similarly, Kendrick Smithyman:

Our beautiful inheritance
was built of glass was built of glass
where, in legendary country, love
page 194 stripped power from eagles, gave the dove
tokens and days and in the pass
between the littoral and the chance
waters were singing and pavilions
stood from our heavens to horizons . . .

The symbol of a glass tower for romantic love could come from any fairy story; the dove and the eagle, the bright pavilions, have no locale except that of the poet’s inward experience. Yet the immediacy of Smithyman’s feeling, and his very real sense of tragedy in human affairs, sustains the symbolic structure. His own poetry, and that of M.K. Joseph and Louis Johnson, shows plainly that the myth of the isolated New Zealander is not of universal application. With the ordinary cultural background of an educated man, talent, and a mind alive to the meaning of his experience, a New Zealand poet need be no more isolated than one living in London or Greenwich Village. Even the inevitable isolation of an artist can be over-emphasised; for it exists not between person and person, but between the poet in action and the dead wood of society on which he sharpens his teeth and claws. A society is constituted of individuals; and often their chief insight into their own condition is derived from the work of artists. The adolescent finds that his or her problems are shared by others, the older man or woman renews the power of growth and perhaps a failing courage. The subject-matter of a writer is often precisely those wishes and fears which paralyse the capacity for action, the shames and unsolved problems which are quietly locked away in the social cupboard. The work of a writer is one of liberation – not the persuasion to good or evil, but the liberation of the creative will of both himself and the reader to do either – a work continually renewed and never done with. As an example of what I would call genuine social poetry, I will quote a poem by Louis Johnson, ‘Magpie and Pines’:

That dandy black-and-white gentleman doodling notes
on fragrant pinetops over the breakfast morning
has been known to drop through mists of bacon-fat,
with a gleaming eye, to the road where a child stood, screaming.

And in the dark park – the secretive trees – have boys
harboured their ghosts, built huts, and buried treasure,
and lovers made from metallic kisses alloys
more precious, and driven the dark from pleasure.

A child was told that bird as his guardian angel
reported daily on actions contrived to displease;
stands petrified in the sound of wings, a strangle
of screams knotting his throat beneath the winter leaves.

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Look back and laugh on the lovers whose white mating
made magpie of dark; whose doodling fingers swore
various fidelities and fates. They found the world waiting,
and broke the silence. A raven croaks ‘Nevermore’

to their progenitive midnight. The guardian is aloof
on his roof of the small world, composing against morning
a new, ironic ballad. The lover has found small truth
in the broken silence, in faith, or the fate-bird moaning.

One might have expected that a poem with this title ‘Magpie and Pines’ would turn out to be a metaphysical nature poem – a trifle arch, neatly turned, telling us what we know already, that birds and humans must die. But Johnson’s ‘dandy black-and-white gentleman’ in five words brings before our eyes the actual magpie, inquisitive, sprightly, and menacing. The ‘secretive trees’ symbolise the warm hidden life of instinct and emotion: under their shelter the children play and the lovers spoon. The kind of ‘treasure’ that the boys bury and the lovers find is of the magical variety which retains its value only in the half-light under the trees. But the central and terribly acute symbol of the poem would probably be clearly apparent only to a person who had spent his childhood in the country. Magpies are accustomed to attack children; and, whether or not fairly, are accused of pecking first at the eyes. This blinding, as in the legend of Oedipus, is symbolic castration: so the ‘strangle of screams’ is justified. The magpie at one level may be the bird of Zeus, the avenging eagle that punishes Prometheus; but principally is the ‘guardian angel’ of moral law, the spy for a jealous father-god who does not much like his creation – as such the symbol of a kind of clerical sadism not unknown in this country. Johnson has presented the clash of the libido and moral law in concrete symbols. It may be that the phrase ‘new, ironic ballad’ echoes Glover’s poem, ‘The Magpies’, in which the song of the magpie provides an anvil chorus to social, economic, and personal disaster. Like Glover, Johnson presents a situation in symbolic terms and does not argue about it. What is important for us is that Johnson has made a completely real and personal use of symbols which New Zealand poets have in the past used very differently. The courage and conviction of experience sustains the poem, rather than the scaffolding of an artificial myth.

There is another large symbol which underlies much New Zealand poetry: that of the ‘voyage’ or ‘journey’. Though it is probable that our geographical and historical environment has predisposed New Zealand poets toward the use of this symbol, one need not postulate, as M.H. Holcroft has done, an ancestral memory of early settlement or Polynesian migration. The ‘voyage’ or ‘journey’ recurs in all literature as a symbol of man’s life-span; but, more specifically, as a departure in search of new knowledge. As Curnow writes at the beginning of ‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’:

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Simply by sailing in a new direction
You could enlarge the world . . .

A.R.D. Fairburn, however, has made the most comprehensive and successful use of the symbol. In Dominion he devotes a passage of magnificent rhetoric to the arrival of the ships of the early settlers; and in his recent poem, ‘The Voyage’, describes symbolically the departure from youth:

Through giant seas our ship is thrusting,
her ropes rotting, her keel rusting . . .

The burning days are done,
The heat and light are lost
from our enamelled summer coast,
and that heart-searching whiteness of the breakers
dispersed and gone.

Cold is the wind that blows
and bears us in its hand like a falling rose,
and like a storm-blown rose the deep-sea wave
burst on our bows.

Three sailors dressed in red and blue
play cards on the fo’c’stle deck. The master
stands on the bridge . . .

The peculiar force which Fairburn can give to a very simple statement is a mark of his stature as a poet. He has entertained perhaps more consistently than any other New Zealand writer the vision of the Earthly Paradise; and this poem is in one sense a relinquishment of that dream, but in another its fulfilment, in recognition that the natural world is not our final home. The ‘three sailors’ may be the Jungian faculties of sensation, emotion, and intuition; while the ‘master’ can be identified, though not completely, with human reason. His role is Apollonian; and the sea over which he sails symbolises the Dionysiac flux of experience. But Fairburn makes of the ‘voyage’ more than a personal symbol. The tragedy (in the Aristotelian sense) of social humanism is the live core of the poem; and the sense of a deep love of the world frustrated.

I have necessarily omitted in this lecture to discuss a great deal of New Zealand poetry which could have served equally well to illustrate my theme; but I have probably said enough to indicate that our verse contains more than guide-book references. Other critics better informed or more acute may have a totally different view of the same material.

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In this series of lectures I have spoken on three related topics: criticism, inspiration, and symbolism. None of these matters is susceptible of final definition; but each is related to the central problem of the significance of any given poem. Lewis Mumford has written in Art and Technics:

Western man has sought to live in a non-historic and impersonal world of matter and motion, a world with no values except the values of quantities; a world of casual sequences, not human purposes . . . we must salvage and redeem the Displaced Person; and that means that we must pour once more into the arts some of the vitality and energy now almost wholly drained off by depersonalised technics.

In this country, or any other, such a renewal cannot occur until it is realised that an aesthetic statement is a statement in the context of human purposes. Indeed, we have looked upon art too often as an escape from everything human. The wonder is not that our writers are often isolated people, whistling to keep their courage up, but that we have any literature at all. Yet without literature and other art forms we would be a great deal worse off than we might suppose; for a living work of art can assist the restoration of hope – not only the hope of Heaven, but the hope that our lives, however harsh, may be real, and our thoughts and actions those of human beings rather than of automatons. That paralysis in the mind which is a product not of age but of our submission to the weight of custom is overcome when we share the purpose and understanding of other people. And even the most negative poem rests on the basic affirmation that human experience is worth understanding and that the buried power to enter into relation with person and thing can be renewed – without which the most perfect Utopia would be a Hell on earth. Hope is a secretive virtue. It survives many droughts and tramplings, like the scabweed in Central Otago; but it cannot survive the death of the creative will. As a final symbol to end this talk on symbolism, I will tell again a story that I once heard Frank Sargeson tell.

Christmas had come round again; and with it, the local Chinese green- grocer to the back porch of one of his customers – a lady, a New Zealander and a keen evangelist. He brought with him the gift of a jar of preserved ginger. The lady accepted it; and a one-sided conversation began. Soon the crucial point was raised: ‘John, have you been saved?’

It seems John’s answer was unsatisfactory. In return for the stone ginger he received a Christmas card with a suitable text on it, and also a lecture on the Atonement. But there was a language difficulty; he did not seem to grasp what it was all about. So there on the steps of the back porch the Crucifixion was enacted in pantomime – the lady evangelist meanwhile grasping firmly in one fist the jar of ginger. The moral, for the New Zealand writer, seems to me obvious: Write what you like; but keep a firm hold on that stone ginger!

In these lectures I have attempted to outline some of the larger difficulties of writing and the criticism of writing, with particular application to modernpage 198 poetry in New Zealand. Much of it may be no more than a ‘blind man’s dreams on the sand by dangerous tides’ – but if we are to know more we must venture more. The dead history of our country is already in the schoolbooks. The living history is myth and symbol; and this our poets both create and clarify.

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