A Love-Book Of Zealandia

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 525, 30 November 1928, Page 14

A Love-Book Of Zealandia

I Written for The Sun.] ArLIMPID, loving book is this by a wandering daughter of the far south, known to Invercargill and Christchurch as Wilhelmina Sherriff Bain, and to Auckland, later, as Mrs Wilhelmina Sherriff Elliot. Under each name lies the soul of a great lover. New Zealand has been her passion from girlhood to age, as the reader discerns by the beautiful views of lake and fell that intersperse the tender rhymes within the delicately tinted covers—a tribute of pleasantness and peace amid the alien clangours of the dying iron age. Greatly she inclines towards the majestic memories of Maori legend, and it is no small tribute that her poem on Pomare’s desolate daughter, forsaken by the pakeha husband for whom wild perils were dared, was deposited amid precious manuscripts in the Auckland Public Library by Sir George Grey himself. Nor will readers of “Old New Zealand” miss the savour of primal mysticism in the wholly Maori tragedy of “Rerenga Wairua.” But humanity is still her greater love. She is torn by the cruelties of man past the sylvan healing of Nature, however adored; her healing is not in forgetfulness but in vision of the oceanic fulness of a restoration wrought by Love Divine, blossoming into a vast triumph of Love Terrestrial, where all now crooked shall be made straight. In two allied pastels of allegory she strikes a note of clear, prophetic imagination, bringing home the prophet’s higher lesson that indifference, not passion, destroys the soul, and blights the earth, threatening all advance to-day. Mother love is the motive power of the first, where the soul aloof is broken at last when the arch-criminal of some vast judgment hall wears the face of a loved daughter. In a Gethsemane of atoning grief the very bonds of being between mother and daughter dissolve in one and redemption comes: Silence profound! No multitude, No court, no prisoner; But in her own right mind SHE stood. Enrobed in white, ahear. Child of thy heart, dreaming child; Love thou the human race; So shall thou never be isled From God’s all-loving grace. In the second, the crime of “calm disdain” of others’ anguish is avenged in an inferno of self pressing in upon that proud ego in an awfulness of solitude, a solitude of silent mirrors pitilessly reflecting its own tortured face: Ah, then, I knew my doom! I was in the voiceless land And knew I could not die. Yet, knowing this too well, My soul sent forth the cry: O God 1 O God 1 Let me die ! Mrs Elliot is, of course, a lover of heroes, heroes more of the aftertime than now, such as E. D. Morel, the knight errant, and Kamenhof, who lived but to undo the mischief of Babel, We could do with much more of the balladry used in “Sir Patrick Spens,” couched as it is in the pure Doric Mrs Elliot employs with a dexterous art. It is remarkable that her balance swings level from the flowing ballad form to the sonnet’s “measured plot of ground.” One would linger over that “quiet harvest” of a traveller’s eye here displayed, but time forbids. All too little space is allowed for the very human salt of humour in these pages: her friends were good advisers as to the inclusion of "Ythan Street A matter of pronunciation.” The Sassenach flits bewildered amid the transmutations of “Yithin,” "Youthan,” and “Yethan,” but lands clear on the dulcet exactitude of the final verse: Me luckless! evil fate has come! Betwisted more than any python, I would I never had been torn From these dear, bluebell braes of Ythan. A sweet, unpretentious and prettily garbed book, redolent of fragrant places, and bright with the discerned lights of an Eden restored. JESSIE MACKAY, Cashmere. “From Zealandia.” Wilhelmina Sherriff Elliot. John Watkins, London,