JOHANNES ANDERSEN: AN APPRECIATION.

Otago Witness, Issue 2572, 1 July 1903, Page 74

JOHANNES ANDERSEN: AN APPRECIATION.

By Netta.

We New Zealanders are a booky people. So much we may fairly say of ourselves ; and it needs but a few more, volumes like this dainty one now in my hand to constrain others to say, moreover, that we are a literary people, breathing anew into that much-abused word the subtle iris of charm that it bears in the serene ancient groves of art overseas. For in this little book, ''Songs Unsung," Johannes Andersen has given us not pnly grace, but purpose ; not only form, but colour ; not only Life, surging, seeking, ebbing, but Love, victorious, illumined, heaven-pointing.

It is not a little gratifying to hail this, perhaps the first full promise of that New Zealand literature we hope to see selfcentred and firmly rooted" on its native soil. For Johannes Andersen,^ a Dane by birth, but reared in Canterbury* has not gone afield to find a publisher, but has brought out this book through a Christchurch firm. A colonial in all but birth, he has found his inspiration in the quiet streets of Christchurch, least romantic of New Zealand towns ; and in the uneventful life of a clerk in the civil service he has discovered what rich possibilities, potent though unseen, are even now present with your antipodean poets. Colonial poets are, so to speak, born with an apology in their months. Consciously or unconsciously, they work out this lifelong defence of their raison d'etre in the^ form of an aggressive colonialism, an apotheosis of the sordid shifts and cutthroat struggles that form the inevitable offset to the romance of pioneering — a romance that, alas ! must ever gather moss before it acquires literary value. Mr Andersen has studied the gentle craft of letters too well even to wish to do this violence to the cosmopolitan soul of art ; he dwells in serener regions, though in no selfish Palace of Art, as we may see. Yet he feels the helplessness of transition from old ideals to new that all colonial poets as yet must feel. This is the dominant idea in the opening piece, "Home Echoes," which concludes thus : The new and old we now see aide by side; And whilst we can discern The new is beautiful, cannot withhold Our sad interpretation thro' the old. How long before our voices will outgive In song 'those beauties in whose midst we live? The quaint sweet-throated birds; the men Whose songs and legends wa.il from hill and glen. How long before our hearts will see and heaT The charms themselves, not those that youth makes dear? How long? Alas! we wean ourselves with pain From that which, while desired, we know comes

not again. The same idea is present in " Art and Labour " : The tree is in flower ; but the flower Came not without stem, without root: Thus Beauty and Art: there's a power Toiling on before these, unseen, mute; No flower can exist if no root grope in eaith: A race drags through labour — and A-rt is the birth. The never-aging, ever-changing spirit of Nature's loveliness and man's gladness in it is asserted in the bold refrain of a ballade :

Beauty has been and was never sc well. Though far from the nai rowed perspective or the aggressive limitation of the average type of pioneer poet, his />erceptions reveal naturally and truthfully the inwardness of that loveliness as it exists in the land of his adoption. See how he has caught the very essence of New Zealand's fairest flower, the wild clematis : M>ek clematis ; tree-dwelkr, child of dew, Nursing of light and air! Slow-trailing stare, or showers of misty suns, — Whence is the hand thou readiest wistfully, Feeling, on earth, for something not of earth? Lo, is this Bethel, and the gate of Heaven? Art thou the golden ladder, whereon pass God's angels up and down continually? Ev'n now (God's thoughts are angels) one descends— A pure gold petal flutters to my feet.

Here is a fresh touch on a theme as old as carth — indeed, the fiisb theme of poets on earth, as many are fain to asseit: The tired sun-god, pausing in the west, The last few remnants of the day betakes, And presses from them gold and amethyst, Drenching the cloud 9, making the hills T un fire; Then downward plunges*

Out in the dimness s«e the church spire hfts Its jewelled finger, bidding'— "Hush, this hour Of peace and rest it is wherein your God Stands near to guard and bless."

He can see how poets of the future will glory in the large lone majesty of the titree flower, a sight no more than coarse and homely to the multitudes as yet; he can sing of - The great white bloom, Drooping, heavily berried, In the midst, iridescent and glowing, Full-breaated, bead-eyed, Bright aa the Argus showing, Not knowing its pride — (JiOW and gentle the call, Cooing- and cooing: Wood pigeons; that is all, Cooing and wooing!)

Two points of wids divergence from colonial poetry in general are evident at a glance in this collection. One is the remarkable facility of \erse form, denoting a study of technique rare in antipodean writers, few of whom know a rondeau from a villanelle, or either from a rondel. One need not note the set name of "cangonette" to see that our author in this has a leaning towards the curious intricate grace that marked the work of the Troubadours in old Provence. The other point in question is his command of classic myth (clothed, moreover, in classic metre). This, too, is an essential of a poet's Parnassian outfit in which colonial writers us a rule are glaringly, wilfully deficient. In " Spring-tini' and Echo," a floating eurnmer

cloud of a Greek idyll, we find some lovely lines :

The moody wind-flower stood alone (The Love-Queen by it knelt!) A youth as fair as the carven stone (As cold to the queen he felt!)

By a poo] where naiads swim (Hovered Echo's voice!) Leaned a youth, and a spell held him] (To a wayward choice!) And he gazed in the waters dim, (Heard not Echo's voice!)

These lines and many like them recall in some manner the haunting Gr«-ek poems of Kendall — word-music, as shown in "Syrinx," "Merope," and other liquid melodies of the great Australian.

It is no surprise, therefore, to find that Mr Andersen is a gifted translator. His leanings towards Provencal nicpty and exactitude of form in original composition do not hinder him, in translation, from turning most readily to the giant simplicity and large-thinking charity of Schiller. Three excellent poems of Schiller are here met together in no mean garments according to our English fashion. In his "Philosophy" the pithy epigram of the keen Teuton is well rendered : Happiest infant! your CTadle to you is an

infinite space. Grow, and the endless world will cramp and confine you as man. "The Sharing of the -Earth" is another fine poem — partly pathetic, more than half triumphant, as it tells of the answer of Zeus to the landless, homeless poet : "What's to be done?" said Zeus: "the world is given, The harvest, hunt, the fields are mine no more; If you will dwell with me up here In heaven, Oft as you come you'll find an open door. Of the three, perhaps the vivid simplicity and stately reasoning of Schiller's "Dance" will find most admirers, though the ancient theory of sphere-music,- propounded in Hellas more than two thousand years ago, is scarcely so familiar to the modern reader of poetry as it was in Schiller's day: Melody, mighty and Godlike. It as a Nemesis curfc» with the golden bridle of rhythm Pleasure's impetuous joy, subduing intractable mirth. Mr Andersen is, however, not lost to the present and its crying needs in a classic isolation ; his sympathy is instant and discerning. Women will not soon forget the indignant knightliness that rings out in the "Cry of the Dishonoured," nor fail to understand that our author is of old Spenser's ' mind regarding broken vows : For unto knight there is no greater shame Than lightness and inconstancy in love.

The very cream of the book, indeed, are those poems which speak of domestic love, mother-love, which so enchained the great muse of Wordsworth, and the greater of Tennyson, in the loyal Suxon spirit that never held woman the jewelled doll she became in southern thought. Of these the crooning "Cradle Song" will Hold its own wherever Australasian poetry is named: Son of my heart, where wilt thou go? Empty mine arms when thou leavest me so; Where wilt thou speed, daughter of mine? Look in my face as I looked upon thine. Earth is a wilderness open and wide, Shun ye its evil and God be your guide! Children of ni'me, go on your wayThink ye of mother when aging and grey? Goest so soon, idol of love? Goest so soon to the Father above 9 Thou in mine arms cradled shalt be ; Goest so soon from thy cradle and me? Earth is too wide for thy weak little feet? Life is too weary? — and Heaven so sweet? Idol of love ; soul of my heart, Heaven is thine who of Heaven was part. Strangely beautiful, too, is "We Three," a husband-lover's poem, touched with quick magic. Here is another dainty song, "Love's Perjury" : Does the child know how its life began? Not any more than the wise 'old man! Does the dew know why it falls from above? " And ICau I know why I love? "Why art thou crying. Pretty-eyed one? Time is for sighing" When joys are done! Art thou so jealous of all the rest 0 How if I say that I love thee best-* That I^am the Sun, And thou Art the wonderful East and "West?

"Oft the Snore" is a tender and novel thought, that muses on the treasures of death cast up by the sea, so lovely we forget that they, the shells, theld once things that were alive: Life has a sea with a sounding shore, We are a3 shells in the deep ; We hear its music of Evermore, We live, and we laugh, and weep,— * May we to a God of eternal breath, Be as fair as we lie in death.

That our author, despite his love of olden inspirations, surveys life from an essentially modern standpoint, and sees no bond of severance between scientinc thought and the true romance, is evident from the austere and remarkable "What and Whence art 'Thou'?" of Any Lover to his Love. Daringly, also, does he, in a fine imitation of the splendid original, question, the nebulous conclusions of Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality, ' contending for Christian theories of the evolution of the race familiar to us now in the writing of Henry Drummond, and dwelling again en the glory of parental love. Space forbids quotation from the two more lengthy and ambitious poems that end the book. The dramatic fragment, "In the Forest," is a spirited Norse piece, in which the hissing sea-foam, lashed by the north wind, and the crashing of pines, snow-laden, carry us> back to the demigods of Saga time. "Pdtito," the one Maori piece in the book, chows an even greater command of a stately unfamiliar theme, and is the best Maori poem yet written, with the exception of Arthur Adams's splendid "Coming of Te Rauparaha."

That greater things throi these may be expected from tliis young writer Is a foregone conclusion. In an^r ccaste t "Songs Ua-

sung" entitles him to a worthy place in Australasian literature, and greatly enriches the dawning poetry of New Zealand.