Modern New Zealand Poetry

Introduction

In the growth of any literature two factors are always present: tradition and revolution against tradition. A poet at the time of composition is unlikely to consider what tradition he is writing in; but the unconscious influence of all he has read, the techniques he has acquired, perhaps laboriously, determine the direction of his thought and the internal structure of the poem. A tradition slavishly followed is a strait-jacket; and the poem which ‘writes itself ’ is likely to be a bad poem, for in fact it embodies the confused memories of what others have written. Since individual experience is unique, each poem should be a unique event. Yet equally, art is communication. A poet has magnitude according to his capacity to express through vivid and accurate metaphor his private experience of reality. Plainly this means that each poet not only usespage 99 the tradition of his time, but extends its boundaries. He must be permitted to use at will the method of Elizabethan, Jacobean, or any other era; and use it at his own discretion.

The English and New Zealand Georgian schools of poetry had narrowed their concept of tradition to exclude pre-Romantic poetry. One might admire Shakespeare, Donne, Dryden or the Scots ballads, but these sources could not exert a living influence on one’s work. When A.R.D. Fairburn in his poem ‘Dominion’, written in irregular and muscular blank verse, quoted a Roman poet (Ovid, I believe) – ‘They change the sky but not their hearts who cross the seas’ – he was more traditional than the so-called traditional Georgians; or when Denis Glover used the ballad refrain in his satirical poem ‘The Magpies’. Similarly in the choice of themes – the limitation of poetry to ‘polite’ themes has no precedent in the writing of the great Jacobean poets, of Burns, Byron or Blake. The modern New Zealand poets have simply widened their field of reference, socially and intellectually; and in so doing have rejuvenated a moribund tradition and restored poetry to its natural place as the pre-occupation of adult minds.

The Poetry of R.A.K. Mason

The position of R.A.K. Mason as the patriarch of modern New Zealand poetry can probably not easily be challenged. Nevertheless Curnow, in the Introduction to his anthology, has tended to over-rate the part played by Mason in inaugurating new development. Even without Mason, the Depression years would have borne fruit. His output has been small; his vision, though intense, restricted; his rhetoric, though forceful, naïve. Possibly his convention of printing lines of verse without the customary large initial letters may cover a suspicion that, differently set, his poems would appear less revolutionary. But these are minor matters, when one considers the lucidity of his verse and the fact that each poem has a living core.

Though he would no doubt repudiate the idea, I feel that the mainspring of Mason’s poetry is religious conflict. His poems ‘Ecce Homunculus’, ‘On the Swag’, ‘Judas Iscariot’ and ‘Footnote to John II.4’ embody a view of Christ as a man betrayed and suffering – betrayed not only by men but by God as well, a worse betrayal:

. . . that inscrutable darkness gave no sign
indifferent or malignant: while he was passed
by even the worst of men at least sour wine.

Mason’s uneasy agnosticism is neither consistent nor jovial. His world- view coincides with that of Housman and Hardy, who doubted the existence of God, but laid the charge of responsibility for human evil and misery atpage 100 His door. In his poem ‘On the Swag’ he identifies Christ with the outcast and downtrodden swagger. And it is probable that the force of his Leftist opinions derives from this source. His love poems are Romantic in the tradition of troubadour poetry and the legend of Tristan and Isolde. Human love is heightened by the knowledge of its inevitable dissolution at the death of the body, and the sexual act derives its meaning neither from pleasure nor tenderness, but from a wish for oblivion

And here you in vain
clothe many coming sails with gold
if you bring not again
those breasts where I found death of old.

The major influences on Mason’s techniques are probably Housman, Beddoes, and Latin verse interpreted in the light of English poetry of the Nineties. But he cannot be regarded as an imitative poet. His poetry proceeds from a genuinely tragic view of the world and human destiny; and though his development has inevitably been conditioned by the demands and constrictions of New Zealand society no one of his poems, except perhaps the ‘Sonnet of Brotherhood’, can be described as local. It is a misfortune that of late he has stopped writing – possibly because purely tragic themes exhaust themselves and the poet; possibly for a reason he himself has given, in a different context – ‘. . . youth having smouldered in senseless drudgery I can scarcely expect age to supply the necessary fire’. Economic necessity has undoubtedly limited the productivity of many of our poets, not so much by their poverty as by driving them to the barren and exhausting labour of journalism.

Discussion

• (1) Consider Mason’s ‘Sonnet of Brotherhood’. Do you think it refers to the situation of New Zealanders, or to a universal human predicament?
• (2) Do you think Mason handles the sonnet form well or badly? Why?
• (3) Consider this definition of ‘Romantic’ poetry, with particular reference to Mason’s ‘Be Swift O Sun’: ‘That kind of poetry can suitably be termed Romantic which depends for its impetus upon mood rather than intellectual content; which readily conjoins themes of love and death; and which emphasises the dignity of individual man in isolation from social or supernatural order, frequently in situations of grief or longing.’ (JKB). Do you agree or disagree? And why?
• (4) Since poets, and indeed any writers, cannot hope to support themselves in this country by their pen, what occupations would you consider to be most suitable for a man whose interest was his poetry to take up?page 101 Broadcasting? Scrubcutting? Babyminding? Serving behind a bar? Or something else? Defend your choice.

The Leftist Movement of the Thirties

Very little New Zealand poetry of the last two decades has been specifically political in intention. But our best poets have leaned to the Left in their politics. Apart from the possibility that the position most tenable by men of acute mind and humanitarian sympathies may be a Leftist one, the new literary movement of the Thirties in England was closely linked with a Leftist political movement; and New Zealand poets were influenced at the same time by new ideas and new techniques. The Christchurch journal Tomorrow, published in 1934 and Leftist in its political programme, contained poems and short stories by writers of the new school. But certainly the most important factor promoting Leftism was economic rather than political. In the Depression years men’s faith in social stability was shaken as it had not been by the First World War; for the latter affected mainly those soldiers who saw the Front, and having no terms to express their sense of shock and calamity, they hid it away and spoke only to those who had shared it; but the Depression was a thing which shook every home. New Zealand poets felt the necessity to speak of other matters than bellbird and pohutukawa; or if they spoke of these, it was the speech of men who observe and reflect without preconceptions, with a sense of tragedy rising from the impermanence of human endeavour.

There sat old Miss Wilson
With her pictures on the wall,
The baronet uncle, mother’s side,
And the one she called The Hall;
Taking tea from a silver pot
For fear the house might fall.

This quotation from Allen Curnow’s poem ‘House and Land’ could easily be paralleled by passages from Sargeson’s short stories. ‘Miss Wilson’ typifies the older generation of New Zealanders, who do not realise that the old structure of society is changing and disintegrating. The cowman and the rabbiter in the same poem are of the nomad class of casual labourers, without knowledge of tradition, whose habits and spiritual dilemma Sargeson has analysed brilliantly in his short novel That Summer.

The influence of Auden, Spender, and other poets of the English Leftist school shows itself in New Zealand poetry in the use of speech-rhythm words drawn from the vocabulary of popular or technical language, assonance and half-rhymes, and the influence of Eliot in the use, by Fairburn in particular, of a verse-form halfway between blank verse and the metres of Biblical prose.

page 102

These islands
the remnant peaks of a lost continent,
roof of an old world, molten droppings
from earth’s bowels, gone cold;
ribbed with rock, resisting the sea’s corrosion
for an age, and an age to come. Of three races
the home: two passing in conquest
or sitting under the leaves, or on shady doorsteps
with quiet hands, in old age, childless.
And we, the latest: their blood on our hand: actions
of men who sealed ambition’s
tottering slopes, whose desires
encompassed earth and heaven: we have prospered greatly,
we, the destined race, rulers of conquered isles,
sprouting like bulbs in warm darkness, putting out
white shoots under the wet sack of Empire.

Fairburn’s verse in his first book He Shall Not Rise is very lush. A poem of this period is included in the anthology Kowhai Gold. But in verse such as the passage from Dominion quoted above, he has progressed to a spare controlled rhetoric, while retaining the warmth and vigour latent in his earlier work. Though Dominion contains much keen social criticism, of the kind beloved to E.H. McCormick, Fairburn’s view of society is very different from that of Marxists. He is anarchist rather than socialist, advocating a return to simpler and more pleasurable social behaviour than the modern State can afford to its citizens. His love poetry, unlike Mason’s, explores the man-woman relationship in terms of tenderness and, at times, of mutual responsibility. In ‘The Cave’, probably his finest poem in free verse, he presents the sexual act as a means by which man is reconciled to the natural world, outside social boundaries –

. . . whether it be
silent in swansdown and darkness, or in grass moon-shadow-mottled
or in a murmuring cave of the sea.

This theme recurs frequently in the work of New Zealand poets. It represents a break with the genteel tradition of the Georgian school, and will be considered further in the work of Louis Johnson.

The Effect of Printing and Publishing

The foundation in the early Thirties of the Caxton Press in Christchurch and the Unicorn Press in Auckland was a factor which stimulated enormously the production of verse and prose. For the first time in New Zealand first-page 103rate printing and typography were possible; and poets could see work in print which would otherwise have circulated only in manuscript among a small group. The growth of these printing and publishing concerns depended entirely on the labour, enthusiasm and foresight of one or two men. Denis Glover, himself an excellent poet, began with a handpress housed at Canterbury College, and there produced various pamphlets and a periodical Oriflamme. On account of the inflammable nature of this periodical he was censured by the College Council and obliged to shift to other premises. So the Caxton Press was born, which has printed work for the Oxford University Press, and has maintained as high a standard of typography as any press in the world. The status of its founder has changed. As Glover writes –

Some time in 1933
The College Council sat on me;
And now (the nearest rhyme is groundsel)
I’m sitting on the College Council.

Inevitably the poets of the Thirties in New Zealand (as indeed in England) tended to gather in cliques, and address their verse to one another rather than to a wider audience – especially when the wider audience numbered at most two hundred in a country of two million inhabitants. Glover has been under- rated as a serious poet because his verse has almost invariably an ironic twist and because of his habit of self-depreciation:

These songs will not stand –
The wind and the sand will smother. Not I but another
Will write songs worth the bother: The rimu or kauri he,
I’m but the cabbage tree –
Sings Harry to an old guitar.

In fact he controls admirably the ballad form, most difficult of all forms to write naturally in. And his serious poetry, in particular, the Sings Harry lyrics, is the result of prolonged and intense processes of composition.

With the decay of Leftist enthusiasm, the poets of the Thirties were thrown back on their private resources; and turned to myth-making or the exploration of personal relationships. The cause for the disintegration of the Leftist political world-view as expressed in literature is outside the scope of this Lecture; but to understand the recent development of New Zealand poetry one must realise that this disintegration occurred; that the perennial dream of a just society has in the meantime faded; and that poets have endeavouredpage 104 to find other grounds of belief, and other ways of imposing a meaningful pattern on the flux of inner experience.

Discussion

• (1) Consider Denis Glover’s poem ‘The Magpies’. Would you say that it embodies social criticism? Or a more universal sense of tragedy? What is the value of the refrain in this poem?
• (2) Do you think that the use of consonantal or half-rhyme (e.g. ‘house’, ‘hearse’; ‘harbour’, ‘labour’) is legitimate? Give your reasons for or against.
• (3) Can good poetry be propaganda – for any belief, political or religious?
• (4) Do you think it preferable (or essential) that poetry should be well printed? When is a poem complete? – in this poet’s mind; in manuscript; when printed; or when read by a sensitive reader?
• (5) Consider Fairburn’s poem ‘The Cave’. Is the theme a suitable one for treatment in verse? Does the free verse convey effects which could not be conveyed by an orthodox stanza form? If you were teaching, would you allow an upper form to read this poem?

Symbol and Myth in Modern New Zealand Poetry

Metaphor, symbol and myth – these lie at the heart of poetic composition, and one must understand these to understand poetry. It is essential to realise that metaphor is not a writer’s game or even, despite the schoolbooks, a ‘figure of speech’. One can very seldom, if ever, describe any non-sensory event without the use of metaphor. In common language the metaphors are weak, hidden and disguised. To quote at random from the New Zealand Listener: ‘And let us most emphatically impress upon them their duty to society – we must not let them impress their personality or exert their individuality upon buildings, and indirectly us, in the slightest degree – they can be no better than their predecessors.’

In this passage the words ‘impress’ and ‘exert’ are plainly drawn from the sphere (again metaphor) of physical action; ‘indirectly’ applies non- metaphorically to movement in space . . . and so on. If I were a scholar of Latin, I could analyse this or any other passage of melancholy journalese, to find its roots in verbs or nouns describing physical events. In poetry the metaphor comes out in the open, and, far from being imprecise, by the range and strength of metaphor poetic language is usually more exact than prose. A poet can be judged primarily on his power to forge new metaphors as the occasion demands.

Metaphor, then, is the (unavoidable) description of non-sensory events on sensory terms. Symbol is an extension of the same process. To quote from Glover’s poem ‘Holiday Piece’ –

page 105

Lastly, that snowfield, visible from Wanaka,
Compound their patience – suns only brighten
And no rains darken, a whiteness nothing could whiten.

The concrete thing mentioned, the snowfield, stands for qualities of everlastingness and purity. The suns and rains, very likely (for in a good poem there are invariably depths within depths) symbolise the alternating periods of joy and desolation in the mind of men. Symbol, then, in poetry, is that use of words by which a more superficial statement (usually the mention of a natural object) represents a deeper spiritual fact.

Though other meanings are valid, myth as used in modern poetry may be interpreted as an intuitively perceived pattern in history; this pattern is indicated by verbal means. Myth coalesces with symbol, as most poems concern themselves with place as well as with events in time. For example, in his poem ‘Captain Sinclair’ Glover creates a myth: the disaster which befalls the enterprising captain mirrors the greater disaster which continually befalls man when he pits his strength against the forces of death and change. The sea, however, symbolises these forces. The most important characteristic of a myth is that it concerns man rather than the individual whom the poem is on the face of it written about: it universalises a particular situation.

Brasch, Curnow and Glover

In the poetry of Charles Brasch, the New Zealand mountains and the sea continually recur as symbols. To him the mountains seem maternal presences sheltering man; the sea appears alternatively as the element which brings destruction and oblivion, and as a power of regeneration:

Channel and swelling cave divide
The massive patience of the land,
Empty cancers in its side
That thrive upon destruction and
Bring all to shiftless drifting sand.

And heaven that is the sea’s ally
Would have earth yielding to its breast,
Smooth-skinned, not to strain and cry
Lawless from the level dust,
To sleep and never to resist –

Sleep in the dark of waves, the grey
Huddling sandscarf, and forget
Mountain-face and hawk’s cry,
page 106 Human shape and budding shoot,
The sun, and its own fiery heart.

This quotation from Brasch’s poem ‘The Iconoclasts’ will serve to illustrate his use of symbolism. The sea here is a passive principle of gnawing oblivion, as in the phrase ‘empty cancers in its side’; the sky also is passive, or imposes passivity on the reluctant earth. The mountain, and the mountain hawk, symbols of aspiration, are forgotten; also the volcanic fire within the mountain (a favourable symbol of Brasch’s). Thus, like the savage, the poet has by animistic projection endowed the landscape with those states and qualities which belong to his own soul.

Whether the poet was aware that he was writing symbolically is hardly the question. The peculiar power of good landscape resides in these symbols, which may not be realised consciously by either poet or reader. Curnow’s brilliant formulation, in the Introduction to his anthology, of symbolic patterns in the work of New Zealand poets, may not hold water for every New Zealander or every New Zealand poet. But the fact remains that certain symbols recur in the work of poets of widely different ideas and method. Curnow speaks of ‘. . . the treacherous beaches, none / So bloodily furrowed that the secret tides / Could not make the evening and the morning one.’

Brasch very plainly in his poem ‘Great Sea’ regards the sea as a primal healing power. Glover (a naval officer) speaks of the ‘antiseptic, salt-tongued, smothering sea’. One could pursue this kind of analysis indefinitely. But

M.H. Holcroft in his essays has done so more thoroughly than I can hope to do. I suggest, however, that the following symbols can be elucidated from the work of New Zealand poets:

The Sea:	as a destructive force, bringing oblivion; as a healing force reconciling man to spiritual Truth.
The Mountains:	as symbols of everlasting purity; as protective maternal presences; as menacing and destructive powers.
The Bush:	as a symbol of natural energy, and the dual processes of growth and decay; as a haunted and entangling wilderness.
The Island:	as a symbol of isolation from European tradition, both in place and time.
The Beach:	as a place of arrival and departure; as a place where revelations occur; as a place where conscious and unconscious meet, frequently associated with sexual escapades.

page 107

The precise accuracy of these symbols need not concern us greatly – when one consciously pins a symbol down, half of its power evaporates. But symbols of the kind listed above, and no doubt others which have escaped my notice, do recur in the work of our poets.

Curnow has consciously sought for a myth to express the situation of New Zealanders. In his earlier work he has personified Time as an active principle, directing human affairs, mainly to their detriment –

After all re-ordering of old elements
Time trips up all but the humblest of heart . . .

A less synthetic myth is that developed in his verse play The Axe where the native Christian missionary Davida, representative of civilised order, converts the dominant tribe on a Pacific island. The outcast pagan tribe rise in revolt but are vanquished. Tereavai, the blind pagan priest, represents the impotent but very real force of those impulses which Christian order subdues in the soul of man – in particular, animistic nature-worship and sexuality. Curnow gives the best lines in the play to the pagans, and plainly laments the departure of what was rich and unified in primitive Polynesian society.

Glover, in his Sings Harry sequence, has created the figure of Harry, onlooker and outsider, Fool and oracle, whose comment is destructive upon the automatism of modern life. Here there is a close parallel with Sargeson’s heroes and with John Mulgan’s Man Alone. Glover’s Everyman turns to the wilderness for refreshment:

While all about us ancient ills
Devour like blackberry the hills,
On every product of the time
Let fall a poisoned rain of rhyme,
Sings Harry,
But praise St Francis feeding crumbs
Into the empty mouth of guns.

What shall I sing? sings Harry,
Praise all things sweet or harsh upon
These islands in the Pacific sun,
The mountains whitened endlessly
And the white horses of the winter sea.

The preceding remarks may serve as pointers for further analysis. In this context one could study the work of Cresswell, a writer with a keen sense of the force and strangeness of New Zealand landscape; J.R. Hervey, who haspage 108 frequently used the mountains and bush as symbols of spiritual dilemma; or the later work of Robin Hyde.

Discussion

• (1) Do you agree that metaphor is essential for the description of non- sensory (or psychological or spiritual) events?
• (2) What significance has Glover’s mention of St Francis in the quotation given above?
• (3) Discuss the use of symbolism in the following poem by Glover. [‘Dunedin Revisited’.]

Further Developments in New Zealand Poetry

Since the Thirties many new poets have appeared – in the Caxton Poets series, W. Hart-Smith, my own work, and Charles Spear. In the recent Pegasus Poets series, from Pegasus Press, Christchurch, Alistair Campbell (second cheaper edition), Louis Johnson (his second book), Pat Wilson, and Hubert Witheford (his second book). Anton Vogt, a lively poet, has written some new verse of a high standard and serious import – a new book of his is due from Caxton Press. Kendrick Smithyman and Ruth Gilbert have had books of verse published. W.H. Oliver, Ruth Dallas, and Keith Sinclair, and many others have had verse printed in the New Zealand quarterly Landfall. Landfall (edited by Charles Brasch) has undoubtedly done much to stimulate the writing of verse and prose of a high standard. It is not possible to consider every poet in detail. Their books are available. In general the trend of much of the new work has been away from specifically New Zealand themes toward those relationships which are valid in any setting. It is possible that the time has come when poets in this country need no longer be conscious that they are New Zealanders and there is now enough of a good tradition for considerable cross-fertilisation.

I intend to discuss the work of Alistair Campbell, Basil Dowling, Louis Johnson, Ursula Bethell, and M.K. Joseph, as presenting a wide enough variety in technique and choices of theme to give by implication an overall picture of New Zealand poetry lately written. I begin with Ursula Bethell. Though her first book of poems was published in 1929 (A Garden in the Antipodes) she has influenced mainly the modern group of poets; and she had the power, like Yeats, to be a contemporary of each generation. Her seventy years were divided almost equally between England and New Zealand but her childhood was spent here, and her affection for New Zealand landscape is evident. She has a wider vocabulary than any other New Zealand poet; indeed, her verse at times is over-weighted with Latinisms. She experimented in verse forms, in particular by her use of assonance:

page 109

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.

But at mid-day, the bare hills have a remote wilderness,
Like a young colt or filly, unrestrained
And running lithely, never having known bit or bridle,
Or lying down quiet, knowing nor spur nor rein . . .
How often, on dusty plain pent, have I lifted up mine eyes there,
And found freedom, and found mind-liberty again!

The prominent features of her verse are apparent in this extract – the Latinisms; the skilful use of assonance, not only at the line-endings but also internally

(e.g. ‘dawn’, ‘austere’, ‘claustral’); the tension between formal structure and rich, sensuous images; the intellectual freshness; and the occasional amazing symbol, as when the hills are described in terms of a girl putting on cosmetics for her lover – the lover in this case being Christ, Master of the natural world. For Ursula Bethell’s work is of a rare kind where religious impulse mingles without undue strain with the other faculties of composition. Her work will undoubtedly endure; for she has combined strong intellect, strong feeling and strong faith with great technical resource.

Alistair Campbell is an outstanding Wellington poet. His direct, sometimes extravagant rhetoric shows to its best advantage in the ‘Elegy’ first printed in the Landfall of December, 1949. He has used the Central Otago landscape for symbols of pride and grief.

Now sleeps the gorge, the pale moon’s steaming disk
Desolate and glimmering through the gusty mist;
The storm that through the wind-cropt tussock
Screams, and screams where the great hawks rest

Upon comfortless stone their arrogant hearts;
Now sleeps the mist whose tumbling woods unroll
Upon gullied hills, and with the dawn depart;
The streaming woods, the pigeon-moaning knoll,

And swarming under cliffs like smoking swords
The rock-torn Clutha. O this bare place
Embalms such glory, beast nor bird of day
Walks or flies but in its living grace.

page 110

Campbell’s peculiar power comes chiefly from the animism of his poetry. All natural objects come to life in his verse, as the toys in the old story do when the child goes out of the room; but Campbell is in the room. His technical ability is considerable; but his themes are not highly valued. The sensuous qualities of his poetry, however, render him one of the best of the younger New Zealand poets.

Basil Dowling, a Canterbury poet, has published three books of verse. The neat, traditional and unassuming nature of his poetry has led to his being under-rated. But his poems are never purely descriptive; invariably they have a metaphysical core. To quote from his poem ‘New Brighton’ –

. . . The prodigal beach
Gave us rough rubber balls, abundant leather
For straps and belts, slices of honeycomb
And small balloons to pop; and what delight
To run along the gusty shuddering pier
And look between the planks at cradled foam!
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.

What was in his earlier verse a wooden exactitude of phrasing, has become freer flowing in Dowling’s last book, without forfeiting precision and clarity. His themes frequently concern the mystery of childhood innocence; or bush scenery – the themes of Georgian poetry, in fact. But Dowling, who began in the Georgian school, has purged himself of sentimentality. He has been influenced in particular by the work of the English poets Siegfried Sassoon and Andrew Young (the latter being perhaps the best English nature poet of this century).

Louis Johnson, editor of Poetry Yearbook, has published two books of verse from Pegasus Press, The Sun Among the Ruins and Roughshod Among the Lilies. Johnson’s poetry is uneven in quality but he could claim to be the most original of present New Zealand poets. He has never to my knowledge written any landscape poetry – an unusual omission in New Zealand. He is primarily concerned with human relationships, in particular those between men and women. His verse, sometimes flamboyant, inevitably breaks rules of decorum, for he deals with sexual relationships as they frequently are and not as one might wish them to be:

For you know, you know the graves that cover
the myriad crimes of vows, and the raven
page 111 that croaks at the doors of the myriad lovers
who came and went out like comets lost in a vast heaven.

In ‘Poems for a Possible Eden’ he explores the breakdown of Romantic love with the compassion which is rarely absent from his poetry. It seems that he has begun writing from a standpoint of maturity which few poets achieve. A revolutionary disrespect for accepted forms is central in his poetry; as indeed it has been in all writing which has inaugurated new development. Johnson’s writing is valuable in New Zealand poetry of the present day, as a check to the myth of isolation developed by Curnow and others. One of his most successful poems is the ‘Canto at Twenty-seven’ published recently in Landfall:

It is always the same. What I love will vanish
and never reveal its name. The syllables may be found
somewhere between my lines. I seek, but never furnish
the answer, will echo (rending delight) that the ground
I tread on is holy and there is no god in my sky
to lend the footsteps reverence, answer my age-old Why?

What years surrender is cunning. These mounting summers climb
slowly over my body with an incriminating stain.
And I learn to conceal the burning. My mission is not divine
but the pursuit of death; no soul’s eternal gain
stems for man to inherit from my colossal pattern
moving into the darkness away from the torch of Eden.

Johnson’s power rests notably in his understanding of suffering; and in this respect his poems have often, though in a negative sense, a religious bias.

Excluding Glover and Fairburn, we have lacked satirists in this country. M.K. Joseph, whose book of verse Imaginary Islands has been published by Whitcombe’s, stands almost alone in this respect. His hard, clear and mannered verse, usually in regular stanzas, lends itself aptly to social satire. The philosophy he expresses is essentially that of a sanely balanced observer. In his poem ‘Secular Litany’ he has written the best New Zealand satire of our time. I feel justified in quoting it in its entirety. [‘Secular Litany’ follows.]

Discussion

• (1) Do you think recent poetry has swung away from New Zealand themes? If so, why?page 112
• (2) What do you think of Ursula Bethell’s use of metaphor and verse structure in the piece quoted? Do you think that religious belief has given her poetry stability?
• (3) Is Alistair Campbell’s poem an accurate representation of Central Otago landscape? What symbols are there in the poem?
• (4) Compare the extract from Dowling with the second extract from Johnson. In what way do they differ? Technically and in ideas.
• (5) Do you consider Joseph’s ‘Secular Litany’ a fair and truthful criticism of New Zealand society? Why? Or why not?
• (6) What value has this lecture on modern New Zealand poetry had? Why?

Appendix – The Poetry of James Baxter

As James K. Baxter wrote this lecture, there has been no treatment of his own poetry in it. He is one of our most important poets, and so we have appended a short note on his work.

James Baxter’s first volume Beyond the Palisade, was published in 1944 when he was only eighteen. Yet the poetry in this volume was mature, controlled, and showed an unusual mastery of poetic form. In it, too, he seemed to have achieved easily and without conscious striving a poetry which was unmistakably the work of a New Zealander, but which did not seem as if he were trying to write specifically New Zealand poetry. His poetry was neither dominated by English models nor consciously reacting from them. Similarly he did not seem to be influenced unduly by the literary fads of the time. His work did not echo Auden or Eliot – or, for that matter, anyone. He acknowledges the influences of certain poets, but they seem – and seemed even in his first volume – to be completely assimilated.

He is mainly a lyrical poet, but there has been a growing didactic element in his verse, and this, together with his self-discipline and his respect for the form and architecture of his verse, has served to strengthen his work. In his poetry he has endeavoured to embrace as much as possible of sensuous and other experience and to impose a pattern and form on it. Sensuous awareness, insight, passion, a sense of delight, and a love and appreciation of the form of poetry have from the first distinguished his work.

He acknowledges the influence of Bunyan, Byron, Burns and Blake. Bunyan, Blake and Burns were early influences. From Bunyan and Blake comes his idealism and didactic element. The influence of Hardy has become more marked lately in his attempt to include what are normally regarded as prose subjects and in the attempt to harden his verse. Byron’s rhetoric and his verse, especially his use of the stanza form, have had some effect, too, on his writing.

He believes that poetry should be lucid and should reach the largest possible public. He believes that poetry should be recognised as a major artpage 113 and one which is important for the ordinary man. His own work has the lucidity he considers so important. It is easy to understand, but it is by no means superficial. His later work still has the strong lyrical impulse of his earlier poems, but is wider in scope and deeper in its implications. [Signed ‘W.J.M’ and followed by ‘The Homecoming’, CP 121.]

1952 (56)