NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 37, 30 September 1925, Page 34

NOTES

By Eileen Duggan

Corkery Again I Arrived the other day an Australian publication, the Dual Fcinne, with a review of Corkery’s book, The Hidden Ireland, by his Grace Archbishop Sheehan, CCoadjuto r Archbishop of Sydney, perhaps the greatest ilinguist beneath the Southern Cross. His knowledge of the Gaelic is as classical as the works of Kuno Meyer, and as colloquial as the words of an apple-woman. There us no one better fitted to tell the South the beauty and the truth of this book of Corkery’s. There is no need to tell the theme of the book here. It has already been reviewed in these columns. It is with the review rather than the book that one deals. It commences with a comparison of the Hebrew and the Gael, of the agony- of Israel and the agony of Ireland. He quotes the words of the Psalmist, the terrible cry of the Psalmist; “They who led us away captive, they who snatched us away, asked for some songs. 1 Sing us some song of Sion ! they said, How could we sing a song of God in the land of the stranger? If I for- . get the Jerusalem, be my right hand forgotten. . .” Yet the Hebrews though they called down His blackness for the wicked, never doubted the justice of His word. That is what that dark wailing, cursing chant of Kol Nidre, that cry of the Jewish women in their agony, that sombre murmur of a great submission means to Jewry in its alleys to-day. So with Ireland, the suffering, the acknowledgment of God’s justice went hand in hand blindly, for all faith, all sorrow is blind when deepest. Tveating, says his Grace, echoes for Ireland the cry of the Psalmist. Krasinski echoed it for Poland. In resurrecting the poetry of The Hidden Ireland, ' Corkery has played the fairy god-father to Cinderella, reduced to rags and middens by a veritable Squeers. 1 “He failed to extinguish the light of her mind and thrust her ' down to idiocy and—the despised natives produced a body of lyrical poetry, graceful, refined, and containing much that will be recognised as’pure gold, even in the English translation, in which of necessity, the overtones of. language disappear, and the * precise aristocratic grade of' epithet is lost;” .;<■> There is a regret expressed that Corkery failed to deal with the poetry of Tadhg Gaedhealach, the saintly spalpeen or wander*' * ing laborer whose poem on the Sacred Heart is singled out by his Grace for especial V praise. There are many Hidden Irelands. | An American Poem Association of ideas is a strange thing. While writing of Kol Nidre, the Jewish &lament, more awful, more desolate than a Maori Taii£i or an Irish Keen,'l remembered ■ a strange poem, by an American; Florence

Kiper Frank. Driven by the whip of a great drama this age like other ages thinks instantly, when a Jew is mentioned, of a merchant called Shylock. Literature does as much hurt to justice as it does good. Christ forgave his countrymen from the cross, yet we spend centuries in undoing that forgiveness. No nation, no people can survive if God means it to perish. The Jews, scattered, flung, derided, have endured. That is God's way with hunted peoples. He takes from them their country, but He gives them the earth. The Jews and the Irish are found everywhere, like dust in the air, and like dust, common, driven dust, wherever they go, they give the air ts color its richness. The dust is transmuted by aerial alchemy into purple and gold. No silver dawn, no yellow sunset, without that wandering dust! The mind of a Jew! Who shall fathom it!-' Let us take this poem and see the mind .. of a Jewish woman! Would they consider her an outcast one wonders? “0 Man of ray own people, 1 alone Among these alien ones can know thy face, 1 who have felt the kinship of our race Burn in me as I sit where they intone Thy praises—those who striving to make known A God for sacrifice, have missed the grace Of thy sweet human meaning in its place. Thou who art of our blood bond and our own. “Are we nut sharers of thy passion? Yea, In spirit-anguish closely by thy side We have drained the bitter cup and tortured felt With thee the bruising of each bitter welt In every land is our Gethsemane. A thousand times have we been crucified.” Anna Hempstead Branch Just above it is another poem by one as sorrowful as the Jewess, more sorrowful. The Jewess feels that she has at least a blood-bond. She is the country-woman of Christ. The other is the sheep that hears the sheep-bells of the fold, but is caught in the briars without it. Her poem is called “An Unbeliever,” but to us, who take our gift of faith so surely, so lightly, as if it ' were our due, this poem is a greater lesson than many songs of feeble faith. “All these on whom the sacred seal was set. . They could forsake Thee while Thine eyes / were wet, ; ' Brother, not once have I believed in Thee, Yet having seen. I cannot once forget. “One broke Thee with a kiss at eventide And he that loved Thee well has thrice denied. Brother, I have no faith in Thee at all, Yet must I seek Thy hands, Thy, feet, Thy side.

-- ■ - - “Even he that loves Thee most, “Lord, ’ Lord,” he saith, So will I ‘call ,on Thee with my last breath,/. Brother, not once have I believed 1 in Thee/*/ Yet I am wounded for Thee unto death.” A New Zealand Bird ' /' It is Springtime now in the three islands, and the kowhai is swinging its little' yellow keels in the sun. Over in Nelson the kowhais were all out a week ago. There is a little grove of them in the Wainiea and they stood together goldly, like a sunset fallen down upon earth’s floor. Is there any gold like the kowhai’s? Well, perhaps there is. Anyone who has walked up Orangikaupapa. 1 or out Karori in the broom-time will remember that the hills are hung in cloth of gold. But the lighter gold is the tui’s choice, and in Nelson, about the reservoir the tuis were dipping from tree to tree, from fuchsia to kowhai. Along the Para Road in Marlborough they had found the best kowhais, old trees, big trees, that never cheat the Spring. One of the earlier ornithologists wrote once that the tui had a note that was pleasant, but not as musical as that of the birds he was used to. As well compare a minuet with a Hungarian dance, a kowhai with an orchid! His ears were usqd to little cool trills of song. Once the tui speaks, one hears no other. He drowns the lesser songs. His note is so deep, so strange that the ear listens on, and listens on hoping for its return. And when it sounds again every other bird is forgotten. Perhaps the Sun will permit the reproduction of these

•Suppose, sweet-eyes, you went into a distant country

Where these young islands are nothing but a name, Suppose you never came again by Terawhiti, Would you remember, and be faithful all the same ? “And when, they boasted there of thrushes,

larks, and linnets,

Would you hold up a, stubborn little hand. And say, "Not so! I know a sweeter singer Than any bird that cries across your land.’ “Would you remembering tell them of the tui ? Wild, wild, and blinding is his lightest * note; They, they never heard him, swinging on a flaxflower, Mad with the honey and the noon in his throat. “They say that in the old days stately ranga..tiras ~ i . Slit his tongue and made, him speak instead : of sing,

We. would rather see him, shining and gold.dusted, .... it.-,-. -. ; .•

From a morning kowhai flinging wide the Spring... .... :/,.. ... , /,>..,

"So, my little sweeteyes, if you go asailing Out beyond Pencarrow and come not again.

Be faithful to the southlands' in the pure ; • ,■. October - r ; r: *| //- When the tui's sweetness ripples throug^Jf the rain." ~'■■" ': •• -v.f'^V

He is the singer, the playboy of the southern bush. Up the tui! * ; ' ' ..'"■'