WITHOUT A MYTHOLOGY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 465, 21 May 1948, Page 10

WITHOUT A MYTHOLOGY

THE WOUNDED PRINCE. By Douglas le Pan. Chatto and Windus, ‘THESE poems by a Canadian are not strongly matked with a local pattern. Douglas le Pan is conscious of living in a country, as he calls it in the title of a poem, "without a mythology," but he is not self-conscious, He is not striving, with angry zeal, to reclothe the old Adam in a maple-leaf kilt, in the same way that a few years ago some New Zealand poets devoted a good deal of will-power to the creation of a local mythology. Mythologies are, I feel, a spontaneous growth. Le Pan is content to meditate on his country and its vastness "where time is worth nothing" and . the wilderness Will be ‘s ; innocent and lustrous To wear upon a birthday .... 4 he is content to conjure up without special incantation the old travellers, the coureurs de bois, Who put their brown wrists through the arras of the woods, And were lost-sometimes for months, Canada, where "the tartan of river and rock spreads undisturbed," is all the time at the back of his thoughts, but his speech is English. He is a literary poet, and the wounded prince, Wild Hamlet with the features of Horatio, was born English, whatever may be the accidents of geography. "In the eye is the wound," but has le Pan himself suffered any serious hurt? I do not ask that disparagingly, but in mere curiosity. Douglas le Pan has immense assurance; he feels little need to jab the reader with the shock of surprise. When the word is unusual, it still appears diffidently natural. He is, in his least ambitious moments, as subdued as Andrew Young. That does not mean that his choice of words is commonplace, but rather that he feels strong enough to (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) dispense with striving after effect. Occasionally he can go to the opposite extreme and use the artificial, the ‘farfetched word-‘"opiate clouds," "anthemed citadel." But it is the light, the -usual word which has the last word and is freighted with the heaviest significance: + «+». as the genius left you, Blood pouring in a haemorrhage, the feet unsteady, down you slipped, your virtue lost like bubbles. Douglas le Pan uses symbolism lib‘erally, but although his verse is full of wounded princes, Excalibur "the blue aurora weapon of the future," and "you seek new Easts," he can also write, without jarring the reader, of the wireless which "puts out crackling fingers and finds no friendship" or There are holes here and there for a goldmine or a hydro-plant. The fable blends with the modern- . The infant Hercules compels the snake, The surgeon cuts the flesh to an exquisite thinness : naturally and without discontent. Some features of le Pan’s poetry remind me of Ursula Bethell, though he has a firmer accomplishment. He is like Henry Reed in the flexibility and graceful, inevitable ebb and flow of his varied and enthralling rhythms. Here is a poet whose utterance is mature, noble, and fresh,