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SONGS OF A CONTINENT.

AUSTRALIA'S POETS.

TWO THOUSAND VOLUMES.

CONTEMPORARY WRITERS

REVIEWED

The purely colonial period of Aust Tali.'n life having closed well before 1900, whatever h;w been written since belongs •r> our present era. New as Anatralia .•i, tlie unwieldly number of Australian ;nnl New Zealand books of verse can be -athered from the fact that Mr. Percival Nerle, in his competent "Bibliography of Australasian Verse," has had to list somet'ling like two thousand volumes. After needing out, the remaining books of value amount to perhaps a couple of hundred. Mr. Serle marked these with asterisks for the guidance of those wishing to make a representative collection. His Bibliography can be seen in many public &nd academic libraries. The only real way, though, in which I'octs can be approached is by their ;i Hual work, not by extracts from it, or • •pinions expressed about it. All one can liope to do is to open a few doors, while ctating that there are many others. If the representation of Australian poetry -were limited to one book, that book, so far, might well be Bernard O'Dowd's l>'ioru with the comprehensive and symbolical name The Bush. Meantime, here ■re names of certain significant poets . f Australia and New Zealand: Chris I iron nan, Shaw Neilson, Furnley Maurice, Jessie Mackay, Hugh McCrae, William Baylebridge and Mary Gilmore. Chria Brennan is not the poet whom v a expect to see rising automatically in a. young democracy. Master of classics mnd of several modern languages, he is a poet of affinities with foreign literary movements, especially that of the i'rendi symbolists, Verlaine, Mallarme ;uid their surviving contemporary, Paul Valery. Brennan'a poems move through a, landscape existing only :n the mind, but existing there vith almost metallic ■ ■learness; it has harsh rocks in it, and a marching, relentless wind, with moments «>f rare beauty and peace.

O white wind, numbling the wold To a mask of suffering hate; And thy goblin pipes have skirled All night at my shaken gate.

Sometimes Brennan happens on a 1 heme that is tender and human and, no to speak, attrairtive to the reader, but lie never plans this. What he finds in his world of poetry, that he writes down. Hw best remembered lyric contains the irecurriDg lines:—

I am Bhut out of my own heart Because my love is far from me.

Shaw Neilson, who has been writing slowly for the la&t thirty years, has collected three volumes of frail and exquisite poems. His latest, a small book of "Now Poems " appeared last year, and is representative of the rest. Neilson usee symbols all his own, sometimes obscure, but usually flooded with meaning. The flooding,is done by the cheer music of his rhythms and words. He has been compared, for his interpretation of Nature, to the Welsh poet W. H. Da vies, ■whom he meets sometimes on the plane of simplicity. But, no; Neilson is less varied and realistic in his observations, more preoccupie" with the glamorous ?nagic of his vis Ton—

The leaves have listened to all the birds so long, TCvery blossom has ridden out of a song; Only low with the young love the olden hates are healed; Let the tired eyes go to the green field.

In another poem, The Gentle Water Bird, he has been able to put his philosophy, his life history, into a meditation higher than any argument—

Creeds the discoloured awed my opening mind, Perils, perplexities, what could I find? All the old terror waiting on mankind. There was a lake I loved in gentle rain; One clay there fell a bird, a courtly crane, Wisely lie walked, as one wlio knows of pain. Gracious he was, and lofty as a king: Silent be was, and yet lie seemed to sing Always of little children and 1-e spring. God? Did he know him? It was far he flew, God was not terrible and thunder-blue: -r-lt was a gentle water-bird I knew.

But the poem needs to be read in its « uole length and rare grace. Shaw Neilson is not always as clear and shining as in thai, poem, but ho la never without strange charm. Some of his lyrics liavo been set to music by an Englisih composer, and one of these contains the memorable quatrain —

Let your song be delicate, The bees are home. All their days' love is sunken Safe In the comb.

The name of Hugh McCrae is chiefly associated with his earliest book, which boro tho challenging title "Satyrs and Sunlight." For once "a title was appropriate; through the poems moved satyrs ■with their companions, nymphs, fauns, dryads, unicorns and the vest, within a world of flinty hillsides and lemon groves, steeped in sunlight. An exotic company for an Australian poet to evoke? Perhaps; yet not so strange as they would be to an English poet, looking out on his misty landscapes. The Sicilian slopes known to Theocritus are not unlike some of tho drier coast.">nds of Australia, and a nun brooding Upon these might well surrender to the pneient dreams, as Hugh -McCrao did. His poems are in all moods —grotesque yWith Silenus, tender with a deluded Ap6llo, mournful with a virgin who has lost her marvellous unicorn, untamed but by herself—

M.v unicorn, my unicorn Is dead, lie with the smooth, long flanks and kingly

hi'nd. j . . "h, never will I hear him call to nie, Nor spy his horn come travelling o'er the sea Swift as n kestrel on Its tented wings Hftwe#'ii the conches of the tritou kings. My unicorn, my unicorn is dead.

In a later book, "Colombine,'- Hugh McCrao delivered himself over for the moat part to another of his dreams, that of what can roughly be called the Kigliteenth Century. Published in 1020, such poems were unconsciously keeping step with the widespread modern movement towards the eighteenth century and ti»av from the nineteenth. Hugh McCrae has never, indeed, been a Wordsworthian, an interpreter of Nature as he sees her. His strength lies in a certain artificial grace and dignity; his beauty is that of wrought iron, not that of a tree. Sometimes he remembers that although his family lias been in Australia for neirly a century he comes of Scottish forbears. Hn has written many richly decorative Scottish ballads.

In J urnley Maurice we find a poet who i* definitely and consciously Anstralian. Hi- landscapes, seen with passionate delight, are our own; so are his images; .»o hip the turns of his phrases, running off into the casual, the colloquial, as if repenting a moment's grandiloquence.

Here is part of an ode where he names aspects of the beauty he sees "violent or velvet-footed everywhere":—

Languid upon their Blopes of silvery death Dead giants sway to the noon breeze's breath; How these things torture the soul. Moonlight that lingers on a mossy bole, Sunglow that makes a pillow of a stone; The drifts of forest light; Trees in a stormy night; Bush echoes; ocean's unresolving tone, Or groups of falling chords, melting to one; The softness of a kookaburra's crown

The -wind puts softly up and softly down; His eyes of love that almost humanly speak, Peering in softness o'er that murderous beak.

If the soul is tortured, it is by the fear of letting such beauty pass unnoticed, unloved, unrecorded. Furnley Maurice takes upon himself the task of finding words for the strange beauty in a hillside of tall gum trees, ringbarked into their "silvery death"; beauty in the lights floating over and through Australia's virgin forests, and in our symbolic birds and quaint, harmless beasts. It is, after all, not possible here to do more than name William Baylebridge as impressive sonneteer and writer of philosophical lyrics. Mary Gilmore, too, has to bo taken for granted, her wide knowledge of life and character in the pioneering Australia of an earlier day making her one of the most human writers we have. Enough has been said, perhaps, to show that Australia has not been found wanting by her poets, both as a place from which to write of other worlds, inward or outward, and as a world of poignant beauty in itself.

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/AS19280929.2.154.48

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 231, 29 September 1928, Page 11 (Supplement)

Word count
Tapeke kupu
1,364

SONGS OF A CONTINENT. Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 231, 29 September 1928, Page 11 (Supplement)

SONGS OF A CONTINENT. Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 231, 29 September 1928, Page 11 (Supplement)

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