A Poet Looks At A Cow

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 23, 28 January 1939, Page 3 (Supplement)

A Poet Looks At A Cow

TO the average man——if there is such a person—a cow is not a thing a poet should bother to look at. A flower, yes, or a girl, or a sunset, or a battle, or a river, or a mountain, but not a cow. We get milk and butter from a cow; besides, it chews a cud, and how could anyone write poetry about an animal that chews a cud? 1 suspect that the nearer one gets to th« farm the less disposition there is to see poetry in cows, and if a town visitor geta sloppy about Daisy ae she catches the evening light standing in the long gram, Dad or Bill invites her sarcastically to get up at four on a wet, cold morning and squelch through the mud to milk the same Daisy. Friink Bullon used to tell how when he first went to sea he spoke of the beauty of moonlight on the water, and an old seaman was quite concerned. "Wliat'n the matter with the boy? Ain't 'e well?" I fancy that if young Jim, perhaps partly under the influence of thoughts of Ethel on the farm over the hill, remarks to the family that the cows look beautiful as they wind their way from the shed, he may evoke a similar comment. But if it has never occured to you that cows can be beautiful, look at Arneaby Brown's picture of a string

By Cyrano

of cowe walking in the sun. That is one aspect of their beauty, the impersonal. A New Zealand poet, Mr. Arnold Cork, looks at a cow called Domino, and considers her with new eyes.* In writing you can, roughly speaking, do one of four things: You can say new things in a new way, or old things in a new way, or new things in an old way, or old things in an old way. The first three way® are the ways of success, at least artistic success, and the fourth (which is the most common) is the way of failure. Mr. Cork looks at a cow in a new way as something alive, with a destiny, and he presents that cow in a new design. He shows Domino against the checker board of the farm's green and brown, Domino in black and white, who Cares for neither bee nor bird Or silver trwii In moonlight stirred With wild aeoilan orchentrns Cures for grass and only grass Or a mangold or a drink. (The punctuation, or the lack of it, is Mr. Cork's). And Domino chews a cud, and in chewing overwhelms him "with the dignity of life sans rule and sophistry." He bitea* upon a pipe and tries With unlmagined bravery To see the wasp-like hours fly To Time's unhoneyed apiary And each one stings In flying by.

while for the ruminating Domino the hours are "been that pass witli honey." But life has a stinjj for Domino. She bears a calf and they take him away in a cart, and the poet thinks he sees in her eyes That wondering look that whole surprise That conies into the final eyes of men Death-doomed without Amen. And Domino stares down the long road after him, and moos, like a. bugle blown "across a grave for every grave unknown." Did it ever strike you that a cow wa« like that when it had lost its calf? At any rate it is something to have put the bobby-calf trade into poetry. And Domino goes back to her chewing, and Cares for neither cone nor go Of Summer's weal or Winter's woe Or Blister Morn or Michaelmas Cares for grass nnd only Brass Or a mangold or a drink Though dreaming all the while I think, Of cocksfoot ryegrass timothy and clover Grass with the green blades straight or folded over Where life goes to death in a meadow past our knowing Of sunshine and rainshine and grasses growing growing. Perhaps you have not thought that such flowing music could be made out of pasture. Mr. Cork has done something else. He has made a poem of similar length about a timber mill. There are many timber mills in New Zealand, but I don't

think there have been many poems about them, and I should be surprised if there is one as good as Mr. Cork's. Thin is largely because a timber mill hum not been considered a suitable subject. However, Mr. Cork makes it suitable. He described the dawn in the

hush, with its "overtones of singing birds, violins in high content"; the cowbells and the 6ounds of cattlegathering; the thud of axe on trees; the noises of the mill machinery; the getting of logs out of the forest; the hum and shriek o c the saws; ;lie last noise of the day, the five o'clock whistle; and the close of night: Undertones of sleepy birds, Violins In low lament: Overtones of weary words. Tubas sombre, deep, content.

Thero.it is, a fine poem like tlie one about the cow, a poem made out of the stuff of our New Zealand life. It won't be as popular as "Not Understood,"

partly because its form is not so regu

lar, but it is a much better poem. Bv tlie way, next time anyone tells you Bracken is our greatest poet, ask him what Bracken wrote, and when he replies "Not Understood," ask liim what else. It's about' hundred to one he won't be able to name another poem by Bracken..

The primary function of poetry, a« of all the arts, says a distinguished English poet of to-day, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. Thus, after reading "Domino," you should be more aware of cows. The poet claims that with this a« his aim, no subject is foreign to him. Kipling wrote a fine poem about a ship's engines and their keeper, and poets of the present day take the whole of industry for their province. Their revolt against the older poetry i«

partly a revolt against what they consider to be its undue restrictions of subject and form. Much bettor it is, they hold, that a man should write about a steam shovel than about his mistress' eyebrow. It may lie replied that he ought to do both. If Heaven may be in a grain of sand and infinity in a flower, so may the joy and sorrow of the world be in an eyebrow. It is not the subject that counts so much as the spirit in which it is approached. At any rate these cow. and timber mill poems are signs and portents. The poet is abroad, bidding us oj>en our eyes fully to beauty that lies c'.ope to us and is so familiar that we don't see it.

•"Green Wood—White Wood," by Arnold Cork (A. H. and A. W. Reed, Dunedin and Wellington).