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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Breaking through the Fences

Breaking through the Fences

It would be very pleasant to be able simply to present Douglas Stewart with an antipodean poet’s garland made perhaps from wattle and pohutukawa (though chiefly from the former, since he has been chiefly an Australian poet) and leave it at that. Tenacious, lyrical and prolific, Mr Stewart is known to be a capable poet. This is no small thing in itself. Yet I find that out of nearly two hundred and fifty poems here collected, though very few show evidence of incapability, perhaps no more than fifteen are free of whimsy, truism, a stressing of the obvious, vague rhetorical gestures, or – what must trouble even the most sympathetic reader – a curious falseness of tone, as if the poet were not quite sure that he actually meant what he said. Thus, in the selection made from poems written between 1962 and 1967, one finds an extraordinary comment on the function of poetry:

It was a shy poetic person
Wandering zigzag through his garden
Who saw how just by flying crooked,
page 493 Rather from habit than from fear,
The butterfly defeats the wicked;
The peewee marked it in the air
But when it dived down sharp and fierce
The butterfly was somewhere else.
And laughed to think that even now
When critics perch on every bough
To pounce, to murder and dissect,
They may not catch what they expect
And poetry still may flutter free From
Dr Peewee, Ph.D. . . .

Mr Stewart’s comment is adapted from a minor poem of Robert Graves, who incidentally did it more briefly and better – but the tone (unlike that in Graves’s original) is fatally close to the self-protective naïveté, the disclaimer of serious intention, the view of the poetic vision as something belonging to sensitive eccentrics, which has vitiated the work of a multitude of talented women poets of our own and earlier generations. A mature writer in his fifties should know better than to write like this; or at least he should have known better than to publish it.

Again, in Mr Stewart’s technically capable ‘Glencoe’ sequence, a cycle of sixteen poems derived from a meditation on that ancient and horrible massacre, what demon possessed the poet to permit the Highland chiefs in conclave to speak in a broad Lowland dialect?

Keppoch said to Glengarry,
Touching his claymore’s hilt,
‘I wadna mind the money
If the Campbell’s blood was spilt . . .’

It means that the decrepit ghost of Harry Lauder has invaded and falsified what could have been a moving and dignified commentary. Mr Stewart is himself of Highland descent and should know better. The Highland dialect of English is totally different from broad Scots, in which one is likely to find more of the jingling of the till than the roaring of the mountain stream. One can only suppose that Mr Stewart assumed his readers would not know the difference.

At the risk of being branded as a dissecting and murdering critic, I have mentioned the worst that Mr Stewart has done to himself and the language; and I suspect that he has done it most when the desire to write was strong and the certainty of a real theme very weak. It may be that Mr Stewart has suffered from an historical migraine not of his own making; for his first verse was published in C.A. Marris’s mandarin collections, and he may not have page 494 been able to climb entirely out of his beginning. But the ‘Worsley Enchanted’ sequence, written around the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914, is twenty times better than ‘Glencoe’: here Mr Stewart moves much nearer to his own deepest themes of solitude and endurance:

Oh grey-green abysses of water
Oh mountains that fall on the deck,
Deep in the trough of a comber
Then high, sang Crean, in the sky
Matting I saw and timber;
Somebody’s dead in a wreck,
Alive in the storm am I . . .

This is still in degree a literary language; but no more so than the theme warrants; and it has the true ballad quality that Mr Stewart has laboured vainly elsewhere to construct.

Again, there is the magnificent simplicity of the twenty-seven poems of ‘The Birdsville Track’, where Mr Stewart seems to penetrate beyond verbalisms to the barren and blazing heart of the Australian central desert. This time also it is an intuition of solitude and last-ditch endurance which turns rhetoric into poetry and commands the assent of the reader. If my criticism of Mr Stewart’s work has been otherwise negative, it is because I value greatly the poems in which he breaks through the fences of his own making.

1968 (488)