Selected Poetry.

Evening Star, Issue 3055, 3 December 1872, Page 3

Selected Poetry.

The following is the opening stanza of Mr Domett’s poem, “Ranolf and Amohia, a South Sea Day Dream” : (Morions ! this life of lake And hill-top! toil and tug through tangled brake, Dense fern, and smothering broom ; And then such rests as now I take, In sunflecked soft cathedral gloom Of forests immemorial! Noble sport Boar-hunting ! yet that furious charge, the last Of the dead monster there had cut it short For me, and once for all, belike, Had not his headlong force impaled The savage on my tough wood pike That, propped with planted knee and foot, Its butt against a rata root, From chest to chine right through him passed; And nought his his inch-thick hide availed, Or ring-like tusks uptlmisting through The notches of his foaming lips, By constant whetting planed away To chisel-sharpness of their tips : It weakened him—the knife-dig, too, He caught when first commenced the fray ; When, as in haste I sprang astride The narrowed gully-just a ditch With flowering koromiko rich— Between my feet the villain drove, _ And fierce, with short indignant sniffs, And grunts like muttering thunder, strove To gain his haunts beyond the cliffs, And foil the foes he fled from, yet defied. The poem concludes as follows ; Of Amo’s life and Ranolfs is unrolled : She and her thoughtful thoughtless Wanderer bold, Slight subjects of a lingering theme, Faint visions of a too protracted dream, Sink down—and like the ghosts of every day. The solid real flesh-phantoms—fade away !