A POSY FROM THE SEVEN SEAS,*

Otago Witness, Issue 3672, 29 July 1924, Page 68

A POSY FROM THE SEVEN SEAS,*

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Jessie Mackay.

(For the Witness.) A trim, soft, grey little book, neat and negotiable in its modest paper covers, lies open on my table, and defies me to define in a phrase its character as one of those thin threads of kinship that Britain is drawing closer and ever closer as the troubled years go by. The “thin thread” itself has developed an echo artistically inauspicious after long and tough usage; and “crimson thread” is frankly banal now. We are such powerful advertisers, we moderns, that we look for the thorn utilitarian under the rose of art —the rose, in other days an emblem of free, nncensored talk among friends at feast. When wc go to a masque now, it is not to give fancy the rein amid the Muses, the Graces, and the dear, dead ladies of yester year. It is to appraise the gallant who can become the most effective poster for somebody’s disc harrow, or somebody’s brand of rolled oats, or to admire the maiden who charms all beholders as a walking edition of the “Muclbury Gazette.” So when we hear that such and such a book is the bantling of the Empire Poetry League, we pause to wonder whether the Imperial poets have also got a poster and paste brush up their Olympian sleeves. But no, the Empire Poetry League lives but to promote poetry written within the Empire, and not militant enough to promote itself. The League works through local branches and reading circles by sending its own little magazine, “Poetry,” to these subscribing members, near and overseas, and, last, by issuing an annual book of selected verse on a profit-sharing basis. This 1024 bantling is the first anthology of Dominion or overseas verse. The foreword gives a taste of the editor's quality, he being also tlie president and creator of the League, Mr S. Fowler Wright. I-Ie is not afraid to break a lance with liis peers in the tourney of modern letters :—- “Reading the latest volume of ‘Georgian Poetry,’ ” he says, “the query came to my mind very forcibly, ‘Can these dry bones live,’ but a moment’s thought showed there was no apposite ness in the quotation. A bone, however dead, has lived once, and may conceivably live again. The exercises in verse of which that volume consists will never die, being lifeless. There may or thene may not be tragedy in the existence of a. ‘mute inglorious Milton; ’ but- there is certainly tragedy when the desire and the ability to write is given to a man of plebeian mind. The most hostile critio of Mr Osbert Sitwell must admit he would be able to i rite good poetry if he were eo fortunate as to have any poetry to write, just as the most contemptuous critic of Mr John Oxenlram must admit that there is good poetry in him, though he may not lie so fortunate as to be able to write it.” If the Imperial poets have an abiding city in their own land, its name is not Philadelphia. The art of compiling Imperial anthologies is so modern that there is a certain freshness in the present editor’s stated method of selection. It will be a new point of view, though logically sound, for most selectors of verse from overseas to make it their first care to secure matter “most truly representative of the art practised in the locality which has produced it.” It follows as a matter of course that essentially poetic appeal and technique succeed respectively this main objective. The result is claimed, on these grounds, to be “a hook of authentic and vital poetry,” and the questing reader will not quarrel with the stress laid on the novelty of the tolerably large proportion of Indian verse. ♦“From Overseas.” An Anthology of Dominion and Colonial verse. Edited by S. Fowler Wright, The Merton Press Company, Abbey House, Westminster.

Thirteen countries (more properly twelve, as “Canada” covers Ontario and \ ancon ver) are represented here. America has somehow been smuggled into the Empire in the persons of two writers, one possessing the weighty excuse, over and above bis fine metres, of being an office-holder in the Empire Poetry League, a body under distinguished auspices, but, .strangely, auspices redolent of fiction rather than ot poetry. Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, the President, is a novelist first, and a poet after, while, of twenty-eight vice-presidents, including five novelists of prime popularity, only three, the “tramp poet,” W. 11. Davies, Dr Habberton Fulham, and Sir Owen Seaman, are known to fame as poets only. Perhaps that is why the League has taken so long in being visualised by the overseas centres. A e must, therefore, accord to this volume the indulgent grace due to a debutante in any pages that lack verve or distinction, over and above the natural welcome of the world for the shy rosebud come lip from the garden of girls. And indeed, when decadence spells distinction in so many a modern salon, the sweetness of these pages is an initial tribute to tlie editor. Also, though the ghost of the paste brush is exercised, there is quite enough echo of Rupert Brooke's “England, my England,” to send one a waft of the old, cocksure Kipling we knew, singing troubadour of Empire, and to commandeer a phrase in keeping for it, this “posy from the Seven Seas.” But, for the most, we may take as read the homing rapture, of the Rhodesian, M. E. Holland, on beholding;— Those cliffs of green and white! Ah; peaceful little England, Our cool and faithful England, Our magic Mother England Shall shelter us to-nig nt; take as read, too, the sonorously-opening “Child of the North,” by tlie South African, Anna Howarth ; Long years ago, in the Mists of the North, and the fogs that enveloped the sea, The Great-World-Mother a child brought forth, first-seed of a strong race to be, — and pass again A. MacGregor James’s Jamaican welcome from “The Queen of the Caribbean” to her soldier rrince. All this can be got at home. We want the art of these young singing-lands, the idiosyncrasies of poetry welling up in lonely fountains, and falling, half afraid, over grottoes unknown and silent heretofore. Do we find it in this reminiscent “Spring Song” of the Vancouver poet, Jean Kilby Rorison? — When Spring came in the Middle Ages, Then folk went forth on pilgrimages, All in the blue and golden weather, Rich and poor, they rode together, A merry, motley, jostling line. In a wayside Inn when the shadows fell, Many a wonderful tale they would tell. K’ol de rol lolly, Oh! Life is jolly, Now Throw away care And Melancholy. None so new, this, nor yet tlie tinkling, tender pansy-song of the Canadian, Arthur Nyren, “Pensees de Picardic.” Winsome little faces, they—'Three beneath a hood.” “Kiss me at the gate,” they say, Winsome little faces, they! Who, indeed, could say them nay? None that understood. Winsome little faces, they—- “ Three beneath a hood.” But here Charles Ould, of South Africa, paints us the picture of a still and lovely land wc have not seen:— Cold are tlie kisses of the moon. Cold beauty dwells where none has dwelt, And looks, as ages come and go, With quiet eves across the veld Where the pale flowers of silence grow. To her the smoke blown to and fro Across an empty sky has spelt Man’s fate, and as his voices cease, Eternal silence folds the wings of peace. This is poetry. So, too, is this defiance flung out from a brave, broken heart, as translated by Margaret Muir, of Canada: —- Little do I care, And less do I say About the golden leaves and The perfect autumn day. Time was when we Loved each leaf that fell. In the amber hours. Time was, —Ah, well! Why should I care, And why should I greet An ancient hag called winter Lurching down the street. Is there anything new- a poet can say about sleep? If so, Evelyn Eaton, of Canada, knows how- to say it:— Suddenly with a fling. She drew her warm grey wing Over my aching head, And, “I am here,” she said, Grey wing, grey eyes, Here one lies <■ Warm and happy in the deep Warm white arms and breast of sleep. The turn of a literary epoch is marked in the entrance of Indian poets through the Capitol door that Shakespeare and Milton guard. Would that we had here the assured and golden voice of Saragini Naidu! But she is lost from the Britannia choir, and the pulsing flame that was the heart of Lawrence Hope is cold for ever. These new- singers from India and Ceylon are sweet but nebulous, yearning but unsure. Only one strikes the harp w-itli firm, human fingers, N. V. Thadani, of Delhi, who tells again for belated listeners of the West the aneient tale of Radha and Krishna—the love of Radha for her godlike prince:— My love is like the lotus of the morn; My life is like the lotus of the eve. “Alone, my love doth come to me, alone; Alone, alone, my life, my light, my own; Alone, my love doth come to me, alone.” Thus sang a milkmaid as I came away, Sitting beside the pathway, on a stone. She ceased, and looked at me, and then I saw

What wondrous glory on her forehead ehone, “Thy heart is heavy, sister; sit and draw Thine arm in mine,” she said, “this is the maidens’ law.” Australia is curiously absent from the choir. Will Ogilvie, indeed, lias a swinging drover song, redolent of V'onga grass and red Northern ranges. And Margery Ruth Betts sings her clear, appealing little songs in a voice that Fame will not let die : I talked of mousies where I played with you, And eltinmen and stars and candle-light. And then I talked of mothers, how they knew Right ways of .licking babies in at night, I did not know why when I said that name, Xou bent yofir head—poor little velloiv head, — Keeping an instant’s stillness in your game, For none had told me, lass, that she was dead. Nor is New Zealand numerously represented. Marieda Batten of Wellington sends, inter alia, a good sonnet of a dark land of sleep into ivhich one sinks, but out of w-hich two arise. Alan E. Mulgan sings a brave song of grey grief and white triumph amid the Polar snows: immortal, single tragedy of our ow n Far South : Grief turns away, Grey-liooded gliding grief, That, like an apparition at a feast, Came to our side and plucked away our hope. Grief turns away, And beckons to us Pride, Star-crested Pride, bright with immortal youth. His armour ringing on the steps of Time. You, far away, Robed in white honour, whiter far than all your continent of drifting shroud, Stir not at cry of Death's dim ghost ; He reigns no more, slain by your shining end. These are lines that will live. And, last, comes Dora Wilcox with a song of New Zealand and her dying soldier son, dreaming of musters over and gone “beneath the blue of* hot Decembers,” and another song of a mother bereaved by worse than death, and comforted by death, and, last of all, that strange thing, “The Yellow Room,” sprung into lasting light of fame : O, sometimes when the wind is high, Anc! spirits are about, And through tho night old voices cry, Then my own soul slips out. And goes a-vardering do.vn tha lane, And by the grey stone wall That skirts the Commons washed with rain, Where fitful moonbeams fall. The silver maples by a gate Shiver to feel me come: And whisper: “Friend, returning late, Thou hast been long from Home!’’ An errant Soul, through midnight sped, I cannot enter in; O surely, surely I am dead, Nut they that are within! For there, safe in the Yellow Room, They change not nor decay, Subject no more to Death and Doom As is my house of Clay. The book ends with that, and fitly ends; what could follow?