Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture
There was no Need for Metrical Aids in the Old — Poetry, which was never divorced from Music, — and seldom from dance
There was no Need for Metrical Aids in the Old
Poetry, which was never divorced from Music,
and seldom from dance
(18) And in their poetry the Maoris have a far keener sense of the beauty of the nature around them, the mountains and the forests, the sea and the stars, than any poets of the West, except those since the Renaissance. This is especially apparent in their laments and their songs of pathetic regret, and most in those that belong to more recent centuries. page 228There seems to have been a distinct development of their poetry in this direction. Even in their fiercer masculine poetry, the poetry of the passion for battle, and the sea-passion, there is recognition of the wilder and more violent aspects of nature. But the early voyagers saw them chiefly at play, or unstirred by their dominant passion; and they report the universal tendency to plaintive melody and song. And it is their laments that approach nearest to our modern idea of poetry. They never developed in the direction of the drama, as their kinsfolk in Eastern Polynesia did; nor in the direction of epic, as the Tongans did. Their narrative poetry was more like our old ballads, short, energetic pictures of a famous battle or deed.
(19) For it must never be forgotten with regard to their literature that it was never divorced, like ours, from music, and only the lament and the love song were ever divorced from dancing or gesture-action. This is the reason why rhythm, in our sense of the word as a regular syllabic or accentual foot or line, was never attained in Polynesia, whilst rhyme, that wholly modern embellishment of poetry, and open alliteration, its old Teutonic embellishment, are unknown. Even the Vedic poets, and probably the old Aryan peoples, when they came, had a fair idea of metre. The Maori poetry has nothing syllabic or accentual in the form, though the Hawaiian poetry tried to get accent on the last word of every line. It appeals wholly to the higher sense of music, like Walt Whitman's and Henley's it has no fetters even in the length of the line; its chief beauty of form lies in a subtle alliteration or harmony of repeated sound, just as on its spiritual side it appeals to emotion and the emotional imagination. Never without music as its guiding spirit, and seldom without the aid of dance or gesture, it does not feel the need of those external attractions for the ear and eye, regular metre and rhyme.