Robin Hyde's Poems

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 118, 21 May 1938, Page 12 (Supplement)

Robin Hyde's Poems

WITH "Persephone in Winter" (Hurst and Blackett), Robin Hyde brings her tally of books published in London to five— three in prose and two in verse. Poetry is so unpopular with publishers that the smaller achievement in conquest may be said to be the greater. Now Robin Hyde is in London herself, or on the \v a y there, aiul it will lie very interesting to see how she fare*. Her reputation has risen quickly. SJie is very definitely New Zealand, but she takes the world for her province. She has shining gifts of imagination and song. She is a proletarian poet, who can imagine Christ as a tram conductor, but she is also in the romantic tradition. Problems of the heart and mind attract her as much ae beauties of landscape. In this new collection she paints a New Zealand scene: — This would I Jflv« thee to-night Ere thine eyes seek sleep— Down from snow-grass to tussock The reil wing's sweep; Kea's wing, shnrp nnd stubborn, I!tinging the valley, Where tlie plumed heads of the toitol Uleet nt riverheads' rally - v Teaks of a thousand snows White In their waiting; Loose in the beds of torrents High boulders grating; Ts'o scent sweeter or tiner Than the dark smell of earth; No cry cleaner or kinder Than ewe crying on blrtb; Xn hue less sullen Than the burning gorse-petal—• Sky, wing and sheepfold Sculptured in inctaL.

A few pages away she gives us this epigram under the title of "The Wild Flower." One decade sees (lie end of us In fame, though we wen* clever— This gulden weed, anonymous, Laughs on for ever. Robin Hyde's'wit is sharp, and, like her sense of beauty, rather wild. She writes as if she really felt, every hour of her life, that the world was so full of a number of things, she should bias happy, or unhappy, as kings. She seems to take the wonder and beauty and sadness of the world, not with both hands, but in armfuls. This, indeed, is where her weakness lies. She is, so it seems, too fond of life; she plunges rather too easily into its ecstasies. She gives the impression of turning on the tap of her reactions to people and things a little too easily; sometimes the pictures change before our eyes too quickly. More restraint in approach and hard work in modelling would improve her art. Her qualities, however, are bright and rare. Look at "In a Silent House," with its contrast between the rain outside and the memories within—the house which in all its j*irls is a mirror that reflects nnd retains the emotions of those who have lived in it. This is a beautiful piece of imagination, finely wrought. Or take the poem about the Italian poet who goes to fight in Abyssinia. It has the vividness of flame on a night sky. Robin Hyde fee!s intensely, and now and then the feeling is fused by her art into a sharp and shining sword.