WITH OUR OWN POETS

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 118, 21 May 1938, Page 4 (Supplement)

WITH OUR OWN POETS

THE importance of this poem lies in its subject. We. in our time, are a[>t to forget that the land was aot always as it is to-day. with rich farms and fine cities covering its surface. We are inclined to take these

VHE DWELLINGS OF OUR DEAD They lie unwatched, in waste and vacant places. In sombre bush or wind-swept tussock spaces, Where seldom human tread And never human trace The dwellings of our deadl -> 7 things fur granted, forgetting- our debt to the pioneers. Some of them when they rirst came slept under the shelter of upturned boats on tli'e Le.u-h. Others lived in houses of j j cusv. plastered huts of mud and 1 stone, or rough frame-wood cottages. The women cooked the food in camp ovens and wore faded calicoes. They were at rinst dependent on the skips

Specially Written For 'Enzed Junior'

by EILEEN DUGGAN

for supplies and the ships of those days were slow in coining. Many of the labourers saved enough to buy small blocks of binshland. They tied their possessions into- bundles and with these "blueys" or "swags" on their backs, they tramped the miles to the places chosen. Sometimes the wharee that they built for their temporary habitations had windows of calico instead of glass. The housewives made tallow dips and if -J?

They came as lovers came, all else forsaking. The bonds of home and kindred proudly breaking; They lie in splendour lone The nation of their making, Their everlasting throne.

candlesticks were lacking or had been broken they set them between four nails. Many of these men who ; bewail poor ended with line colonial 1 " | houses to their credit. In vearcs to come, architects will re- | vive the type of home that was built No insolence of stone is o'er them builded; By mockery of monuments unshielded. Far on the unfenced plain Forgotten graves have yielded Earth to free earth again. in the first flush of their prosperity. You see these twin-gabled houses with their peaked roofs still dotting the countryside, sometimes in the old salmon pink or dark red colourings affected in those times. There must ~ have been women in New Zealand at that time as well as in Australia who used leathern thumb straps for thimbles and pointed sticks of wood for hair pins. Some of them kept half a scissors in the hope that they might chance upon something that would do instead of the other half. Those who read the reminiscences of Mrs. Tripp and the life of Ebenezer Hay will recapture something of the higli-heartednese of the period. 1 The Poem Itself. A good beginning is half the battle and the first line of this poem arrests the attention. One feels the deep loneliness of the New Zealand bush - —

For tome the common trench where, not all fameless, They fighting fell who thought to tame the tameless. And won their barren crown; Where one grave holds them nameless, Brave white, and braver brown.

where the leaves retain their dark green and are swept by the flames of autumn. The dead lie there alone, he says, or where the wind rushes

VII ARTHUR ADAMS

through the tussocks. Some lie on the plains that seem so great that one cannot see their marges or boundaries, alone, save for the "drifting Hock." The word "drifting" is a happy choice for it describes aptly the slow, aimless movements of the . sheep and the words "irtisty masses" picture well the look of a distant flock; but in the next stanza the words "shouts incoherently" are unfortunate. It* song, even in its mocking moments, has a significance. Above their crypts no air with incense reeling, No chant of choir or sob of organ pealing; But ever over them, The evening breezes kneeling Whisper a requiem.

The nightingale is famed in song and etory, but New Zealand bird lovers would not exchange the tui for any nightingale. Its deep strange notes once heard are never forgotten and come usually in definite calls. (Adams altered the wording of this verse later.) In the next stanza there is the lonely sigh of flax which is well For tome the gully, where in whispers tender, The flax blade* mourn and murmur, and the slender White ranks of toi go, With drooping plumes of splendour, In pageantry of woe. known to those who have passed great swamplands ruffled by wind. When he epeaks of "drooping plumes of splendour, in pageantry of woe," it is because the soft feathery heads -of the toitoi or New Zealand pampas grass bring to his mind the old hearse plumes. The picture in thie stanza is good and the sound in it is musical.

The ending of the next stanza shows little originality, but its first two lines express the courage of the pioneers. In the case of the poorer emigrants, who, through the poverty that gave them no chance of education, were unable to write, the break with home ami was often final. Some of them sent money back for the support of aged parents, but when these died the connection ended for they were either too busy or too shy to confess that they could not handle a pen. We should be grateful to Arthur Adams for recording our obligations to the pioneers. Arthur Adams, with Jessie Mackay and. Dora Wilcox, belongs to what may be called the period of transition. The first writers thought of countries overseas as Home and wrote as travellers rather than as sons. Domett showed Interest in <_ For some the margeless plain where no one passes, Save when at morning far in misty masses, The drifting flock appears, Lo, here the greener grasses. Glint like a stain of tears 1 For some the quiet bush, shadestrewn and saddened, Whereo er the herald tui, morn* ing-gladdened, Lone on his chosen tree, With his new rapture maddened, Shouts incoherently.

and Bracken love for an adopted country, but a man has to be born to the eod to feel for it like a son. In the middle period there were three poets who had the ear of the people —Jessie Mackay, Arthur Adams and Dora Wilcox. The two latter travel- _ led, but their best poetry belongs to tlie time of their residence here. Adams became well known as a journalist on the Australian side of the Tasman. His "Maoriland and Other Verses" was published in 1889 and "The Xazarene" in 1902. He was born in Lawrence, New Zealand, but his work as a journalist took him to London, Sydney and China, where he > was a war correspondent during the Boxer rising.