POEMS OF PITY.

Otago Witness, Issue 3611, 29 May 1923, Page 62

POEMS OF PITY.

By

Jessie Mackay.

It is, perhaps, one of the strongest arguments against the pessimist who sees all human progress as the recurrence of an unending, unarrivmg spiral that the twentieth century is massing a literature of pity for the dumb creation that never was before. True, every movement in a true sequence of progress has been pioneered before in some half-heard almost mioomprebended fashion. The Gospel of Pity took shape in clause after clause of the old Mosaic code 15 centuries before the listeners of Galilee learned that the sparrow, unregarded of man, was dear to God. Between those out-givings of Rinai and the heights of Nazareth there came the vast interspacing of the Buddhist revelation, with a grafting of such gentleness upon the; blood-dripping stem of Tfinclurim, rank with animal sacrifice, that its impre s has remained to this day. The very extravagance of' that revolt -against the sanguinary rites of the later Vedia times is conveyed in that legend which makes the Buddha give his body to be food for the starving mother tigress, and come back to life with tissues divinely renewed. The beautiful legends of St. Francis of Assissi and bis “little brothers” fell on stony ground; nowhere in civilised Europe, perhaps, has cruelty to animals passed with less rebuke than Italy. Certainly, though Wordsworth preached a oneness with Nature that embraced all creation in an adoring charity, the first English poet to sound the slogan of pity militant was William Blake. The sharp, minatory periods of “Auguries of Innocence’’ form a sermon which it is hard to break from the first breathing of the prelude : To sea a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, to the terrible climax which has lost nothing of its application in the intervening century : The harlot's cry from street to street Shall accave Old England's winding sheet; The winner’s shout, the loser’s curse, Shall dunce before dead. England’s hearse. Between, there lies a close-packed, electrical sermon that is being translated into a hundred new versions by Blake’s successors to-day : A robin red breast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage. A dog starved at his master's gate Predicts the ruin of the State; A game-cock clipped and armed for fight Doth the rising sun affright; A horse misused upon the road Calls to heaven for human blood. Each outcry of the hunted hare, A fibre from the brain doth tear; A skylark wounded on the wing Doth make a cherub cease to sing; He who shall hurt the little wren -Shull never be beloved by men; He who l he ox to wrath has moved Shall never be by woman laved. He who shall train the horse to war Shall never pass the Polar Bar. The wanton boy that kills the fly Shall feel the spider’s enmity; He who torments the chafer’s sprite Weaves a, bower in endless night. Kill not the moth and butterfly For the last judgment drawct.h nigh; The beggar's dog and widow’s cat, Feed them and thou shalt grow fat. Every tear from every eye Becomes a babe in eternity; The bleat, the bark, bellow and roar, Are waves that beat on heaven’s shore. 11l direct succession to Blake as the warning prophet of pity speaks a poet of

to-day, Ralph Hodgson, in this characteristic and claimed versiele : 1 would ring the bells of heaven The wildest p.-ui tor years, It i'trsjn iosi £us senses Anti people came to theirs, And fie and they together Kueit down with angry prayers Tor tarxi.a unci slKibcy tigers, Ana tlnnc.ng nogs and bears, And wretched, uliiiu pit ponies, -Una iittie UUiitea myoe. The fact that a Performing Animals Bill has been recently beiore tne British rariiameut, with wuat success, we snow not yet, snows that a sentiment is growing behind tuis literature tnat has even a point to make lor tne “shabby tiger” m loathed captivity. It is the apes and cuiinpu uzees, strange to say, venose natures so revolt from stage tutelage as to make their training one long cruelty. It is to be hoped that compromise, tnat unmoral emollient so fatally seductive to English legislation, will not be too evident m the finished measure, if indeed it becomes law. The Plumage Bill was iought by every source of reaction in the country, but got through the other year, championed valiantly by journalists like li. J. Massing ham and poets like Gerald uoutd, who scourge alike the commercial turpitude that stalks its tropical prey with cockney’ avidity, scowimg at the beauteous opulence. “VVastefthiy ’’opping about in the woods,’’ and the cultured barbarism at home. "I hat hunts little beasts and shoots little birds.” James Stephens, the familiar of the Irish De Damians and the Greek company of Pan, is hot with a wrath half subtle, half child-like against the red hand that desolates the woods. The world is black because of a rabbit in a snare : But I cannot tell from where lie is calling out for aid, Cryxng on the frightened air, Making everything afraid. Making- everything afraid, Wrinkling up his little face, As he cues again for aid, And I cannot find the place! And I cannot find the inlaceWhere his paw is in the snare, Little one! Oh, little one, 1 am searching everywhere. And it is James Stephens, again, whe prays the prayer of penitent Christendom —alas-! how long forecasted ! - Little things that ran and quail And die in silence and desnare. Little things that fight and fail, And fall on earth and . air; Ali trapped and frightened lithe things, Th e mouse, the coney, hear our prayer As we forgive those done to us, The lamb, the linnet, and the hare, Forgive us all our trespasses, Little creatures everywhere. G. K. Chesterton weaves into one compact an-d exquisite fragment that age-long tragedy of the donkey : When fishes flew and forests walked And Iris grvvV upon tnorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely 1 was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody Of all four-footed things. The tattered outlaw of the earth. Of ancient crooked will; Starve, scourge, avoids me; I am dumb, I keep my secret still. Fools! For I also had my hour, One far, fierce hour and sweet. There was a shout about my ears, And palms before my feet. There may be some among us whose memories go back a generation and more to the Queensland poet, Brunton Stephens’ “Angel of the Doves,” that simple yet unforgettable legend of the dowered but suffering guardian of The sacred and lovely lives that wear The mystic shape of the Holy Ghost. She comes t-o heaven broken-winged from shielding her doves in the jeering shooting grounds of earth, counting their easy spoils in the unmanliest sport on earth —the thing that England has put out of bounds but we of New Zealand still tolerate to our shame. The Spirit wept and trailed the broken pinion that she could not lift to veil her beautiful face : Angel was she, and woman and dove, Dove and angel all womanly blent. Her plaint for the mangled innocents is' answered without a sound in a heavenly Aurora of doom : Slowly the rainbow rose, parting in twain, And lo! in the midst of the throne of love There stoc-d a Lamb as it had been slain, And over the throne there brooded a Dove.