The Voyage and the Story

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 472, 9 July 1948, Page 8

The Voyage and the Story

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. By William Hart-Smith. Caxtom Press. HE voyage this book of verse enjoins upon us is one that holds considerable excitement for the reader, even though it yields less strange discoveries than its author may perhaps have hoped. In some 40 poems William Hart-Smith writes a life of Ca@umbus and a description of his four transatlantic voyages. The verse is episodic rather than narrative and sticks closely to the historical facts. It might be argued that Hart-Smith, diligently following the emotional crises in the career of Columbus, could have handled the same material as a continuous epic. At timés one wishes he had, because it is evident that Hart-Smith’s salient merits are staying power and intellectual energy, these rather than a lyric gift or the divine marshalling of words into patterns in which the whole suddenly becomes something marvellous out of all proportion to the value of its component parts. Mr. Hart-Smith is a straightforward poet, self-confident enough not to fear the banal and the pedestrian ("The world is flat, And that’s that!"). This unassuming simplicity arms his art against the false and the pretentious. But, though his diction is, so to spéak, low-geared, he is never dull. He has the same power to command the _ attention as the shaggy verses of John Donne without any of Donne’s obscurity. If there is any arriére-pensée, any symbolism, in these poems, it has. been buried too deep for this reader. Columbus himself may perhaps be considered an allegory, an allegory of hope fulfilled which is yet in the end turned to dust and to ashes. His simplicity does not prevent HartSmith being epigrammatic in the same wry vein as Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese. And by the adroit use of the idiom of the 15th Century the poems nostalgically suggest the aspirations of the discoverers. They are rich in irony. We have grown weary of islands, and would like a continent. Sometimes they hold the observations of an acute psychologistthose who do deliberate evil cannot abide the paltry, stupid evil a man does who meaneth only good! Hart-Smith is primarily an intellectual poet. It is ideas which fire him. One of the most successful poems, "The World Complete," is a close summary of geographic fact. Few poets have so sutcessfully lost themselves in their subject and obliterated the subjective and the personal. His use of metaphor is not uniformly happy, but, when his metaphors succeed, they gleam with their own beauty. In "Westward Seven Hundred and Fifty Leagues" (one of the best poems in the book) which begins Standing still in the sea, which is glass, we are as it were timeless between yesterday and that which comes to pass.

we find this imagery drawn from the Old TestamentI tap the rock of our despair, but each freshet of reason angers only the fire of mutiny and treasonThis is Hart-Smith’s fourth volume of verse, the first he has published in New Zealand. He is an original and a mature poet, to whom poetry is an art rather than a rubbish bin for his emotions. We may expect to hear more of him. The Caxton Press, more silent of late than one would wish, has produced another satisfyingly graceful volume.

David

Hall