NEW ZEALAND POETRY.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19610, 4 May 1929, Page 13

NEW ZEALAND POETRY.

IS THE DAWN IN SIGHT ? (BPBCIAI.LT WBITTBST 808 THb' PBBSS.) [By J. B. Nanson.] "Has New Zealand had any great poets, and if not, why not? Will she soon have them!" The questions are provoking, and lead to such greater questions still as what are the conditions favourable to the production of great poetry in a nation, and even demand an answer to the question: What is great poetry? Most of us reeognise what is great when we see it, even as we recognise the light of the sun or the moon; yet we are as incapable of defining greatness as of breaking the white ray of sunlight up intc its kaleidoscopic components, red and green and orange, without the aid of a spectroscope. Poetry being a vital thing resists the spectroscopic analysis of language as completely as Bergeon tells us the real course c f existence or "l'elan vital," evades description in language which is essentially mathematical and cinematographic, while life is dynamic. The questions are suggested by a reported statement of Archbishop Averill, who was speaking at the Anzac Day service in Auckland: "Is there not in New Zealand a poet and a composer who, in combination, would give to us a really great national anthem of thanksgiving, which would be appropriate for use, and would embody the thoughts and sentiments of the heart, and would be a means of expressing the thoughts and feelings which well up in the heari of every loyal New Zealander, and crave for expression on occasions like this!"

Before asking whether New Zealand will have this great poet one is inclined to consider whether any popular patriotic verse of the Kind indicated by the Archbishop is valuable as poetry. Too often there is the suspicion that its emotional value, is adventitious, and lies not in the beauty or power of the poetry itself, but in the feelings of the crowd which sings it or hears it recited. The National Anthem one can say without icurring the wrath of D.O.R.A. is execrable as poetry. Even all the gusto of powerful lungs cannot blind us to the fact that "Rule Britannia" is rank jingoism and owes its position to patriotism rather than to merit, Kipling's "Recessional" is worthy to be rated higher; it has reverence and restraint; but the rest of his patriotic verse is to poetry as the black man's tom-tom to a sonata of Beethoven. Lawrence Binyon's "For the Fallen" holds a position almost of splendid isolation in its combination of popular appeal, and the breath and finer spirit of true poetry. Even Rupert Brooke's war sonnets. "Blow out you Bugles over the Rieh Dead" and "If I Should Die Think only this of Me," though it be heresy to say it, ring with an unreal note for those who experienced the awful earnestness of war.

But to ask why New Zealand has not her Lawrence Binyon and her Rupert Brooke is to ask the wind whither it bloweth and why it ligteth. We behold the light of poetry and whence it flows, but to do more is beyond our power. One can, of course, like the street philosophers, plumb the unknown and the incommemorable with a yard measure, without provoking a protest; one can 9ay that New Zealand has had no poet and will not have a poet for eepturies; but one can never be quite that the carefullest calculations may not be upset, and a poet appear inconveniently and quite unpredicted.

Perhaps we are too young to have our poets, who are usually the flower of an old and rich civilisation, not the callow songsters of a nation still without a voice of her own and a minor among the peoples of the world. Greece, when Homer wrote the "Iliad," was, contrary to the usual impression, already old in the arts of life, and Homer's poetry was by no means the spontaneous outpouring of a singer singing untaught and unbidden in the morning of the world. It was the product of years of study of artistic form and acquaintance with the National Treasury of lays. The early national poetry of England and Northern Germany represented by its monolithic relic "Beowulf" and other minor fragments was not the rude work of barbarous scopes; but a form of art elaborated and matured by the national genius through centuries of„growth and experiment. It has its conventions and poetie diction as much as the sophisticated verse of the followers of Pope. The groat poetry of the world has been the product of great and ripe civilisation. In it the flower of their achievement remains crystallised for the length of time. Virgil's "Aeneid," Dante's "Inferno," Milton's "Paradise Lost," or Shakespeare's plays were produced by nations not in the lusty heyday of youth, but in the reflective calm of ripe manhood, able to draw on the culture and the history of the past. Young nations, like young children, do not become fully conscious of themselves till they have lived some time in the world. Character and personality develop with experience of life till the ego finally emerges in its individual robustness. A country so young as New Zealand has hardly had time to take stock of her position. All her energies are devoted to material interests, and the establishment of her place in the sun. Her life is dynamic and energetic rather than reflective and intellectual. She accepts a culture belonging properly to the Old World and adapts it to her uses without making it really her own. We adopt the material signs of civilisation with a rapidity even greater than that of the Old World itself, but the spirit and culture of old civilisations refuse to be transplanted so easily into foreign soil. They are fugitive and evade alike the wealthy American who buys up castles for California and the New Zealander who hopes to reproduce at once in his own country the urbane, serene attitude ot life which is the fruit of years of history. Poetry and art and philosophy cannot be forced. In their own time they come to maturity when a people reaches years of wisdom and ha« time to cease a little from striving and to reason why it has striven. New Zealand should not be impatient that it has not had a great poet as quiekly as it has had hydro-electricity or the Sl Art and letters and philosophy—these things will be added unto us m the fullness of time, when we reach our intellectual manhood.