DE PROFUNDIS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 131, 26 December 1941, Page 16

DE PROFUNDIS

"THIS DARK WILL LIGHTEN."

Selected poems by

R. A. K.

Mason

Published by the Caxton Press,

Christchurch.

OR some reason I, and I believe others, had been expecting a collection of R. A. K. Mason’s verse rather than the selection that This Dark Will Lighten is. While his collected poems would be well worth while, it is impossible not to commend the rigid selection,-with its implication of keen self-criticism, which has culled from the work of nearly 20 years just 37 poems. It is an object lesson to writers who imagine ‘that quantity of material is in itself sufficient justification for publishing. There is no doubt that this small book is an event, and even if it is a day or two late for Christmas presents, I am going to urge everyone with the least appreciation or care for verse to buy it. I don’t think I will seem too importunate and enthusiastic if I claim that here is some of the best verse that the literature of this young country has produced. Probably because he has been published mostly in limited editions and in occasional anthologies, Mason is not as well known and appreciated here as he should be. He is, above all, mature and well-equipped and sure-sure of himself (or rather uf the bitter certainty of his conflicts) and of his medium. Another important approach to him, I think, is the fact that there is no need to refer half apologetically to his New Zealand derivation. His work is New Zealand, but it does not belong exclusively here as does the work of half a dozen other writers one could mention. There is little beyond an occasional phrase ("the lone hand digging gum ") and a word or two ("bushie," " outback," "deadbeat") to relate him to this cduntry, and yet obviously he knows and feels and experiences the lot of the hungry and tired and poor, whether in the depressed alleys of cities or in the starved back country. He is a satisfactory reply to the attitude of mind which demands at the same time a universality of approach and "atmosphere" sufficiently distinctive to brand a work as " national." Here, then, are 37 poems, some of which belong to the New Zealand scene, and all of which have been wrung out of a man’s passions and bitternesses and struggles. They are, finally, his acceptance of the elemental facts of birth, pain, and death (facts which seem, strangely enough, to have escaped the attention of many New Zealand writers too preoccupied with’ dreams and scenery). They are the fruit of a tree which has been beaten and buffeted by the weather: Here are the children of the best part of a lifetime. Not as they should have grown, but twisted, stunted, maimed by poverty, chastity and obedience.

Except in one poem, the wry, sardonic "Body of John," there is little humour in Mason, and certainly little glib optimism: For my bitter verses are sponges steeped in vinegar, useless to the happy-eyed but handy for the crucified. From a technical point of view Mason is notable for his handling of the difficult sonnet form-* Footnote to John xi., 4," is a fine example-and for the economy and sureness he shows in shorter measures such as in "Christ on the Swag," "Prelude" and " Judas Iscariot." "Footnote to John xi., 4," which is not only Christ and his mother, but any son and any mother, is worth giving in full: Don’t throw your arms around me in that way: I know that what you tell me is the truthyes, I suppose I loved you in my youth as boys do love their mothers, so they say, but all that’s gone from me this many a day: I am a merciless cactus, an uncouth wild goat, a jagged old spear, the grim tooth of a lone crag. . . . Woman, I cannot stay. Each one of us must do his work of doom and I shall do it even in despite of her who brought me in*pain from her womb, whose blood made me, who used to bring the light and sit on the bed up in my little . room vand tell me stories and tuck me up at night.

Lest Mason should be thought to be nothing but "bitter vinegar," one must remember his title, which points (I imagine) to a political dawn, the " Prelude," which points to the same dawn... For the day is almost herelook, see scarlet in the sky of the east, the splash of blood that means dawnwhen the idols will be thrown down and children will dance through our land. : -and the love poem "Flow at Full Moon," with its magnificent final verse: And as the flow settles down to the sea it nets me about with a noose of one soft arm stretched out from its course: oh, loved one, my dreams turn from from sleep: I shall rise and go out and float my body into the flow and press back till I find its source. Two irrelevent points interested me. One was the comparison which "After Death" invites with Thomas Hardy’s "Afterwards"-Mason’s "but not for me" is an unfortunate line, and, all things considered, I prefer the warmer sentiment of Hardy-and the other was an image in one of the "Sonnets out of the Oceans Base" which recalled T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land epitaph for Phlebas the Phoenician, whose bones were picked in whispers by a current under sea. Mason’s "Ocean Sonnets" were apparently written about 20 years ago, at almost the same time as The Waste Land was enraginge T. C. Sauire.

IBID