A PEDLER’S BUNDLE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 31, 29 April 1927, Page 10

A PEDLER’S BUNDLE

(Written for THE SUN.) TYTHEN we were qhildren in the country, it was a red-letter day when the pedlar found our road. Usually it was the same one that came sweating down the laneway. Peter was his name, the most trusted of all names, but there was less of the rock than the dagger about him. Pie was slim and boding, with a dark shine. Assyria gleamed in his eyes and curved in his nose. A man to fear, and not to fear. It’s doubtful if we thought of him much. To us he was the bringer of the bundle. To this day I can smell the pungency of the Eastern scents that lurked within the black oilcloth that he unwound as carefully as- if it were one of the cloths Aedh wished for in Yeats’s song. Within was? another cloth, and yet another, and then frocks and laces, aprons and ribands, and gaudy glass brooches that shone like Drake’s treasure in the sun. We know now that they were poor .tinsel, but were they, after all? Did not our wonders make them gold and pearl? Peter has faded now, and his bundle with him, but to this day that subtle Eastern scent brings back his magic, for it was nothing else. Since then we have passed from colour to sound, and if a bundle could stir us at all it would be a bundle of rhymes. Sometimes of an evening we make a bundle of them round the fire, and I, at least, am back on my heels by Peter’s box, waiting for the next magic. This was the bundle we made one night. We made it at random from books old and new. There was a strange half-Greek thing of Margaret Widdemer’s, “Not unto the forest, o my lover.” She will love him by the light, she tells him, by the sound of dancers and of temple drums. “But here in the forest I am dumb, remembering; a forgotten, useless thing, and my eyelids are locked down for fear of tears, and I fear the forest.” Excuse piled on excuse in breathless whispers of denial, and then the sombre truth at last: “There is memory in the forest.” It is a lovely thing. True gold, true r>earl. And then there was Flecker’s linnet. Who can forget it? A linnet that had lost her way Sang on a blackened bough in hell; And all the ghosts remembered well The sun, the wind, the golden day. And then they knew that they had died, When they heard music in that land, And many a one stretched forth a hand To draw a brother to his side. Poor Flecker, his little sick ship went down so soon! And the thought

of him brought a memory of another, a blackbird, a golden throat, whom a stone of war stopped singing. The poor servant boy of Meath, Ledwidge, could write like this: He will not come, and still I wait; He whistles at another gate, Where angels listen. The moon leans on one silver horn, Above the silhouette of morn; And from their nest-sills finches whistle, Or, leaning, pluck the downy thistle. How is the morn so fine and fair, Without his whistling in the air? He will not come, but if I go, How shall I know he did not pass Barefooted through the shining grass? It’s not the one they usually print in anthologies, but it’s the one the mind creeps tack to in its coloured hours. His innocence has the simplicity of Housman’s bitterness, and yet has England one to show better and nobler than the Shropshire lad? There’s a little song of his that’s woldbee’s honey: The half-moon westers low, my love, The vftnd brings up the rain; And, far apart lie we, my love, With seas between us twain. I know not if It rains, my love, In the field where you do lie; And oh! so sound you sleep, my love, You know no more than I. It is so lovely that it presses the heart. There’s no drunkenness on earth like the drunkenness of rhyme, for music is all ears, painting is all eyes, but poetry is colour, sight, and sound. Crossing the border into Scotland we find that mediaeval thing of Rachel Annand Taylor that shines among so much shabby poetry in one anthology, that it has a look of indecent richness, like a passion flower on a slum wall. In a book of hundreds of poems it leaps to the eye: For youth, for youth who rides to war, With winds of April blowing Through his unvisored golden hair. With reckless golden head all bare, And all his banners flowing. For youth, for youth, who rides afar, In silver armour fair to see, With joints of gold at arm and knee, Rose-broidered prince of chivalry. Arrogant, wistful, beautiful, Youth, the pure fool. We who are old, hard, winter-bitten, grey, Yet went crusading once upon a day— We pray Thee, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, O let him win the battle that we lost. The second stanza on the rout of youth is equally beautiful. No pedlar of rhymes could leave it out of a modern pack. De La Mare slips into the pack, of course. There’s a little thing of his, “What Lovely Things Thy Hand Hath Made,” that is a whispered Te Deum: If I were to sit by a tarn in Thy hills, Using its ink as the spirit wills, To sing of earth’s wonders, its livewilled things, Flit would the ages on soundless wings. Ere unto Z my pen drew nigh. Leviathan told, and the honey fly, And still would remain my wit to try. Every smallest detail is scrolled in as if he sat with gold-leaf before him in a carrel. Then there is Masefield’s cry on old age. He never came nearer to his quest than when he “remembers the beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.” And there is Aline Kilmer’s cry to the poet she lost amid the slings of conflict: This should atone for hours when I forget you; Take then my offering, clean and sharp and sweet— An agony brighter than years of dull remembrance, I lay it at your feet. One could go on packing that bundle till no shoulders could carry it. Each pack your own! —EILEEN DUGGAN. Wellinctnn.