POETS OF EARLY OTAGO.

Otago Witness, Issue 2650, 28 December 1904, Page 54

POETS OF EARLY OTAGO.

At a recent meeting of the Dunedin Burns Club the Rev. J. Chisholm read the following paper on "The Poets of Early Otago" : — Since the time of Robert Burns every Scotchman, under the impulse of love or patriotism, has attempted to write poetry. Burns sprang upwards, at first, like a lark from the dewy bocl, and mad© the whole welkin ring with his rich pnd varied song — now tremulous and wooing as from the very heart of love; then piercing and defiant as the reveille of war, the clang of arms, and the battle cry of freedom. The whole air seemed to vibrato wUh liis notes. Echoes came from eottago and ball, and every heart ! thrilled with new-born loves and hates. i Thenceforth tears and laughter became a • richsr heritage to Scotchmen in every land. j It would have been strange, therefore, if I all this had not somehow manifested it-self iin early Otago. The first settlers earned the best traditions of their native land to these shores. The names of their leaders — Cargill and Burns — kept fresh in their lives the moral grit of the Covenanters and the poetic genius of thy bard. And so the sdlence of the fern-clad slop© and the wooded gully was broken, not only ly the dull stroke of the grvib-ho© an-d the sharp ring of the axe, but also, in the brief intervals snatched from strenuous toil, by the inspiring etraias of "Scots wha ha'e" or "A man's a man for a' that." I have no doubt a great many of the first settlers wrestled hard to fit apt words to simmering emotions and give permanent form in verse to thoughts and aepirai tione suggested by their new surroundings in !a, strange land. How novel their outlook ] i must have been — on the long-bladed flax, j j with its honey-laden cormdioe; on the tutu, ! with its drooping clusters of purple berries; on the kowhai, with its golden tassels; and the great pines, wic-h their mottled trunks ! How varied the sounds that fell upon their ears: the screaming of the kakas, the chattering of the paroquets, the crooning of the | pigeons, the full swell of the tuis' rich i music, aend the bell-3ike note of the mokis! ! And within sight and hearing of all this new and titirring life therd was the little wharo, with its roomy fireplace and its scant furniture, and all the primitive devices j for bed and board : the whole to be replaced some day by a spacious mansion possessing the comforts and convenisness of the foremost civilisation! Many must have tried ! to embody their fe&lhxgs in -words steeped ! in the rich colouring oi their varied experi- '; enoes. Only a few, however, were venturesome enough to publish their poetical . effusions in book form. The first two are j John Barr and John Blair. After them, j and perhaps hardly within the lines of early • Otago, come Thomas Bracken and Dugald i Ferguson. (There lie also outside the scope ;of the present paper: "Sonnets," by Dr Stenhouse, and " Station Ballads," eto., by D. M'Ke-e Wright.) The four are far from, being equal in merit. Bracken easily takes the lead so far as poetical insight and j literary expression are concerned. Barr, j however, has a 'pawky keenness of vision and a fluency of utterance regarding the common wcys- of life that raise his best efforts" to a worthy level. In referring to them or quoting, from them J shall confine myself to what is local and distinctive of early Otago. In the preface to his " Poems and Songs," Barr says : " The author of the following poems, a native of Paisley, emigrated to the thriving colony of Otago in the year 1852. For some years previously he had been at the head of one of the first engineering establishment in Scotland. Misfortunes, however, overtook him, as they have done many a better man. . . . On his arrival in Otago he found it no easy matter to hew^oufc a new home for his wife and children ; but still he persevered, determined hot to be beat, and ultimately succeeded in establishing himself in a comfortable and independent position, with Bread and cheese at his door cheeks, And pancakes ihe rigging o't." As might be expected, he had longings for the Old Land, with its historical associations, its closely knit friendships, its places of birth and burial, md its many social advantages. This is clearly mirrored in the song beginning- — Now summer comes wi' skies sac clear, The hills are clothed wi' verdant green, And wild flowers bloom wi' sweet perfume, JTo other's eyes a love'y scene: But yet I canna think it's hame, To me it brings nae joy ava, For memory turns to windin' burns And heathery hills sac far awa. The bard, ceaseless work of the pioneer also reflects itself in the poem " Grub Away, Tug Away." Take the first verse as a, specimen of the rest — Thfl' birds gang to rest when tir'd wi' their warblin', But rest I get nane frae the mornin' sac early ; j For either I'm mowin', or threshin', or savin', j Or grubbin' the hills wr* the ferns covered I fairly. I Grub away, tug away, toil till you're weary, j Haul out the toot roots and everything near I ye ; j Grub avay, tug away, toil till you're weary, Then take a. bit dram, it will help for to cheer ye. One can sympathise with the toil and appreciate the poetry without giving heed to the prescription or having any faith at all in its ultimate helpfulness. A braver and more wholesome mood- appears in the verses entitled "When to Otago First I Came." After speaking in somewhat doleful terms of i his first experience he says — At last I plucket up my heart, And tackled to the wark; I rose up wi' the mornin' sun, And knocket aff at dark. Wi' toiling at the grubbin" hoe, I got a pickle wheat; I'll ne'er forget as lang's I live How sweet the bread did eat. The assurance that Otago. with its freedom from abject poverty on the one hand, and from " purse-proud, upstart, mushroom lords" on the other, was better than the older lands finds spirited expression in the words— There's nae place like Otago yet, There's nae wee beggar weans, Or auld xaen shivering at our doors, To beg for scraps or banes. We never see puir working folk 1 Wi' ba\ichles on their feet, Like perfect icicles ■wl' caiild, Gaun starving through the street. His best instincts cling to his own home, and he sings of its pleasures in simple and natural strains in " There's Nae Place Like Ane's Am Fireside." But some people, however well off, are never satisfied. They are always grumbling and venting Iheir pee\i?h and discontented apir.it on whatever

oomes -within the reach of their arm or the j rasp of their tongue Why he should have incarnated this spirit in a wife and made j her husband rail at her from his Olympian \ height Ido not know ; but so it is. Here is a sample of his on-going — We hae beef in the barrel, and sheep on the hill, And ye micht be as snug as a mouse in si miil ; But ye're never contented, and never will be, For yell girn at the world till the day that ye dee. Love and courtship occupy a large place in his collection. These products of the soul, however, are perennial. They do not pass away like the fauna and flora of a new land or like the primitive ways of first settlers. We need not', therefore, in the meantime, linger over them. Some of his satires on the miserly wretch who sets covetous eyes on a young woman and is fain to marry her in order that he may have a permanent slavey without paying high wages, are spirited and to the point. One such, when asking from a mother the hand of her daughter, thus appraises some of her desirable accomplishments— Now Jenny's a gude hand at delvin', Can shear sheep, or thrash wi' the flail ; And I ken she's weel up to milkin', Or breakin' in kye to the bale. The reply he got from the prudent mother turned him aside from his quest, and sent him away to his unpitied loneliness. The story is told with a fine relish by the maiden herself — Weel Bab, quo' my inither, you'll get her, Sac there is a shake o' my han' ; , But first yell mak ower to our Jenny The naif o' your siller ad lan'. Rab sprang frae the stool in a hurry, liike ane that had gotten a fricht, I'll bid ye gude-nicht, honest woman, For I maun gang home while its licht. John Biair tells us in the preface to hie little book, '• Lays of the Old Identities," that " many of the pieces are incidents from real life." He was animated by a very j laudable ambition in publishing his "Lays." He was " anxious to place his small stone on the cairn in memory of the 'Old Identities.' " "Do not laugh," he exclaims. Do nob laugh at their simple manners, Do not laugh at their frugal ways, They were made of the stuff of heroes, There were giants in those days. They had no wish to borrow : They -were man who paid their way : They rose in the early- jnorn, They toiled till the close of day ; They looked to the distant future For their children's children planned; Look at the institutions That grace Otago' s strand. He tells of the heroic plunge of James Blackie, the first schoolmaster, to rescue from drowning the nine-year-old child who fell from thb dock of the Philip Laing immediately after her arrival at Port Chalmers. He waxes merry over the story of an eager maiden. She came to the door of the Council Chamber, and, after vain attempts to catch the eye of her father, a tailor of the olden time, who was engaged in the more honourable, though perhaps less necessary, work of making laws, called out, in the hearing of all the councillors : "The man hae come for his breeks." He celebrates the mild rule of Monson the gaoler : But in the olden times ] Our prisoners were but feiv, And chiefly of that kind - Who imbibe the mountain dew. The jail was built of wood, The cells were rather small: The way they kept the prisoners Was by being 'kind to all. • He describes- in a most rueful fashion the drudgery of working the steel mill. It had to be turned with a handle, and it was always a very much easier process to eat the flour than to grind the wheat! It was wonderful, however, what feats could be accomplished with the aid of the steel mill. An old bachelor, who owned one o? theee primitive machines, and had a nice j patch of wheat just ready for the sickle growing- close to his hut on the edge of the bush, proved equal to a trying occasion : — One day st, friend called — he had nought to eat, — "He kindly told him to take * seat. He out with his sickle and cut the wheat ; He ground it, and baked it, and cooked it complete. la a spirited poem he pictures the attractions of the bushman's life: O for a, forest life ! O for th"e_ noble strife ! Making my tempered axe ring on the stem ; Felling the lordly pines, drawing the great chalk linos. Sawing them up for the dwellings of men. His picture of the rural congregation gathered together from far and near in order to worship God under the old black pine at Green Island is worth lemembering: There the man of God without gown or band, But with powerful voice and outstretched hand, Proclaimeth the word of love divine 'Neath the fragrant shade of the Old Black Pine. While the birds rejoice on the leafy sprays, ! And carol a hymn to their Maker's praise, And the echoing low of the humble kine 3reaks soft on the ear by the Old Black Pine. Dugald Ferguson has attain-ed some measure of success in other fields of literature besides poesy. He 's at present in the Homeland trying to find a publisher for what he regards as his magnum opus — an historical romance of the clays of Wallace and Bruce. Let us hope that it will satisfy tho critics and stimulate the none too vigorous infancy of literary life in Otago. His poem on Dunedin may well fill with envy those who have to pass their days amid less lovely surroundings: Upon her hill, Dunedin, how beautifully she stands ! The ocean wafting to her feet the wealth of other lands. ' Hound promontories bending far as the eye ' can reach, On every side extending, her lising suburbs stretch. , Opposing and closing on every side the scene, Are hills on hills reposing with fertile veies between. In the poem " Otago and Scotland " he shows that, while as yet no legends of bloody frays encircle the mountains of Otago, and hor rivers', though grand as STarrow, Twsod, and C'yde, arc at;li unsimg, Yet in her lap, though rude she stands, Is hid the wealth of golden sands, And ready homes for toiling hands Her plains afford, Unchequered by the cruel bands "" Brought by the sword. There is no denying that we enter a loftier realm both of sentiment and art

when we open the pages of Thomaa Bracken. I ask you to stand for a. moment on the threshold and listen to tfee cadence of such strains as those that celebrate the lifework of James Macandrew : " ' " Why should our songs be sad 7 He needed rest ; He was afield among the pioneers -" "Who watched at daybreak on the moimtain crest The golden dawning of a nation's years. The fertile plains and valleys were asleep, — No ploughshare yet had stirred- the quiet sod ; Each hugg'd her secret treasures hidden deep ; The noonday rays had kiss'd no kindling clod. "When came the pilgrims to the promised land, With hearts prepared to dare and hands to do, They needed but a ruler to command, And found in him a leader staunch, and true. Why should our songs be sad? Tears are for those Who live in vain and die with lauds tmtill'd", And not for him who sows and reaps, and goes To peaceful sleep with all his tasks fulfilled. We can trace here and there in Bracken, and all through the other three poets of early Otago, the far-reaching influence of Burns. He has not only by his intense love of freedom, strengthened the. patriotism. of Scotland, but by riveting the hearts of colonists to what is best in the land of their sires and inspiring them with a respect for genuine manhood, apart from rank, or title, or riches, he has helped to sow broadcast in new continents and islands the seed of nations yet to be. May your Burns Club by keeping prominent every good quality of hie poetry and life he/lp to foster 1 the spirit of true humanity, and speed the time -when. Sense and worth, o'er a' the earth May bear the gree, and a' that. With this golden age in view you do well to extend to others " The Immigrant's Welcome " of Bracken : n We greet you, stranger, to this land Where slaws have never trod: The breeze which sweeps our mountains Is the breath of Freedom's god. If you've a hand to help us In the work we've got to do (The building of a nation grand), Then, friend, we welcome you. But, stranger, if you come to spurn The gifts which God has sent, To pags your days in. indolence, Or brood in discontent, With soul and body chained in vice, Unfit for honest gear, Then let us tell you plainly, friend, We do not want you here.