OBITUARY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 7 February 1928, Page 2

OBITUARY

DAVID McKEE WRIGHT AN APPRECIATION (Contributed) Many Nelsonians will have read with regret, the news that David McKee Wright, who for many years lived in this city, has passed away, in Sydney. Not. only was he a journalist who worked for nearly twenty years on the staff of "The Bulletin," but he was a poet of no mean order. His beautiful collection pf poems, to which he gave the title of ''An Irish Heart"—he was a native of the north of Ireland—proves this conclusively. We wish we had space to quote copiously from that book. But possibly what our readers will most appreciate will be what he wrote of Nelson. In December, 1906, he wrote, when he was Jiving here, "Tin's is a wonderful city of ours where the. grass and the trees are nearly always green, and the winds are nearly always asleep, and day by day the sun is shining in a blue sky. We go in and out and forget the glory of it all, until in some far country under grey, weeping, wind-swept skies we look back and remember our own City of the Sun." No doubt he often thought of Nelson, very much in such sort, after he went to Australia. In a pretty little booklet of poems, entitled "New Zealand Chimes," written before he left this country, this is what he wrote of Nelson:—

Blue foamy sea, high circling hills With dreaming garden squares between, And old-world fragrance breathing soft Amid the waving green.

Here trade's loud wheels but slowly turn, Here men may pause and joy to live, And take the seasons as they change With all they have to give.

Hero there is room to breathe and think, Here there is space for souls to grow, And life may run as pleasantly As Maitai's waters flow.

There is no doubt that he loved Nelson. His steps Jpd him to further fields, where his talents and his gentle soul found an environmeit where they could expand with greater satisfaction to himself, and with better prospect of appreciation But while he lived here he .exhibited a positive interest in this community and a whole-hearted desire to interpret Nelson to the rest of the Dominion. His sincerity was absolutely real.. He loved his fellow men with a devotion which was complete. Undeterred by obstacles, be never failed to battle courageously for the liberties which he conceived were the rightful heritage of the individual, 'wiieth.er humble or exalted. A just and noble spirit was that of David McKee Wright, and with his passing to the Elysian Fields, Australia and New Zealand have lost an ideal and poetic soul.