From PublicAddress.net
Written from memory, a long way from home, and in the midst of a war, Robin Hyde's 'The Singers of Loneliness' is a something of a letter in a bottle. This impassioned assessment of New Zealand literature - an account of "what has been saved, what thrown away, and what is still possible and urgent" - made its debut in August 1938 in an unlikely venue: a small internationalist magazine out of Shanghai called the T'ien Hsia Monthly.
Why T'ien Hsia? Why Shanghai? In January of 1938, Robin Hyde had set off on her long-awaited journey to England. The original plan was to sail from Auckland to Hong Kong, and then travel overland to the mother country via the Orient Express. But while waiting in Hong Kong for her Russian visa, Hyde decided to travel to Shanghai, and from there ventured into the interior of China. The country was being overrun by the Japanese, and Hyde felt compelled to stay and write about what she saw.
Stay she did, for the next six months. In Shanghai she met Rewi Alley; in Hong Kong she met the New Zealander James Bertram, who had traveled with the Eighth Route Army. With their help she made contact with local newspapers and magazines, and travelled to the front - the first white woman journalist to do so - on a pass signed by Chiang Kai Shek. She was volunteering in a hospital in Hsuchowfu when the city fell to the Japanese.
During much of this period, as far as New Zealand was concerned, she was missing and presumed dead. Hyde's letters written at the time suggest that she, too, feared she would not survive. She eventually walked her way to safety, stumbling along the Lunghai railway line for more than 50 miles. Her successful escape was all the more impressive given that she was lame in one knee to begin with, badly battered after a vicious encounter with Japanese soldiers, temporarily blinded in one eye, and severely undernourished and ill, not to mention unable to speak Chinese beyond a handful of words. All the way, she carried her suitcase full of writing.
After recuperating briefly in a hospital, Hyde continued her journey to England, where she published her book about China (Dragon Rampant) and worked to raise awareness of the plight of China. She had hoped to return to New Zealand; she had also hoped, once peace was restored to China, to take up a visiting lectureship at Wuhan University, the university on whose steps she begins 'The Singers of Loneliness'. Instead, in ill health and despair, she committed suicide in London on the eve of the war in Europe, in August 1939.
'The Singers of Loneliness' is equal parts celebration, indictment, and call to action. New Zealand of the 1930s is a place "where little local history and no knowledge of the Maori language is taught in schools, though in certain advanced university courses a knowledge of Icelandic is requisite." The writers of her generation, Hyde argues, suffered from this official ignorance. They grew up "loving every inch of the terrain, feeling it grow into mind and bones, but knowing little of its story or cultural past except what, unconsciously hungry for some background, we were able to invent." And yet hers was the generation that became, as she famously put it, no longer "for ever England": "We became, for as long as we have a country, New Zealand."
The article was rediscovered in the 1980s, and republished by Gillian Boddy and Jacqueline Matthews in their excellent 1991 anthology of Hyde's journalism, Disputed Ground. Here now, as one installment of the Great New Zealand Argument, Hyde's letter in a bottle makes its way from Shanghai to New Zealand and back out into the world.
Jolisa Gracewood
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The Singers of Loneliness
Tien Hsia Monthly, August 1938
Published under the auspices of the Sun Yat-sen Institute for the Advancement of Culture and Education
Coming down the steps of Wuhan University, whose blue-tiled roofs, ornamented with crouching stone hounds, glittered over the horse chestnut trees, I talked with a Chinese Professor of Literature whose friend, a notable young poet, had translated Katherine Mansfield's works into Chinese.
'For most of us, K.M. is New Zealand, and New Zealand is K.M.,' wrote Max Kenyon, well-known English critic. But though Katherine Mansfield was the most famous and best-beloved writer of the Antipodes, there have been others. There must, unless New Zealand is to remain a locked treasure-chest, be many more. So far, (momentarily leaving Katherine Mansfield out of the question) three generalizations about New Zealand letters can be made. Pioneer New Zealanders were in contact with an immense wealth of native myth and poetry, which had never been written down. Though most of this was grossly wasted, a little has been saved and used, or is still available for writers of the future. Secondly, after a long period when the literary life of the country seemed so benumbed that its expressions were purely childish, prose writers like Elsdon Best, Jane Mander and William Satchell, poets like Eileen Duggan, R.A.K. Mason and others of genuine merit arose and produced work recognized as good. Thirdly, the world depression had several disastrous effects on the underpopulated country of New Zealand, which lives mainly by export of its primary produce, and is still in a quarter-developed condition: but its stimulating effect on the thought and culture of rebellious young minds, in a silent country which at last learned to be articulate, was probably worth all the hardship involved. No New Zealand writer regrets the depression.
But to get some idea of what has been saved, what thrown away, and what is still possible and urgent, one must go back to times a little before organized pioneer expeditions, like Edward Gibbon Wakefield's, set out from London. Individuals 'came to a country' which while certainly not flowing with milk and honey, was still quick with the sap of a native Polynesian mythology and poesy, so vitally a part of pre-Europeanised Maori life that it is unjust to dismiss it as a crude primitive culture. The first intelligent and educated white men to frequent New Zealand, before the Treaty of Waitangi (signed in 1840) claimed it as a British possession, did not make this mistake. By far the most entertaining historical and semi-autobiographical book written by any New Zealander is still F.E. Maning's Old New Zealand; by a Pakeha Maori. The author knew enough to treat the Maoris as equals, and draw on their tremendous mine of cultural and human knowledge. A Pakeha Maori (Pakeha – literal translation 'pale driftwood', common meaning 'a white man') is one who has fraternized with the Maoris until accepted as one of them – and usually trying, of course, to be one-and-a-half of them. The Maoris don't mind; Maori names were invariably conferred upon early white settlers, inter-marriage was free and frequent, and less than a generation ago, a law had to be passed preventing Maoris from adopting little white children, and enriching them at the expense of their own. The real aristocracy of the far north are still the descendants of white saw-millers and traders who settled in kauri country along the northern rivers and Maori ladies, often of high blood and wealthy inheritance.
So when the Treaty came to be signed, after debate in a great beflagged marquee crowded with white dignitaries and tall chieftains in great cloaks of shining feathers, snowy dogskin or tasselled flax, nephrite ornaments or pierced mako-shark teeth dangling from their ears, the conclave was interrupted by a huge red-bearded Irishman, who in fluent Maori advised the chiefs to think better of it, and throw the white man out. This was F.E. Maning: he had nothing against the white man, as such, but believed that the Maoris were being optimistic. But no man's hand can press back the tide, and so a day began to die, and another day to dawn.
Maning, who lived in a golden-glowing house of heart-of-kauri, far to the north, was not the only one of his kind. Over a decade before, Edward Markham left a journal recording his ten months' stay among Maoris of the Hokianga and Bay of Islands districts ('the Hell of the Pacific'). If published, (it has never reached the press) this would be an entertaining and valuable record. But in New Zealand, where little local history and no knowledge of the Maori language is taught in schools, though in certain advanced university courses a knowledge of Icelandic is a requisite, there are walls of glass-locked library cupboards between the seeker, and a knowledge of those days one hundred years ago. If one discovers anything, it is by accident or through persistence. Wonderful old Maori fairytales – real fairytales, with their mingled grotesquerie and illogicality, their no-beginning and no-ending, flowing on in the mind of the race – are sandwiched between reports of early Agricultural Shows, and pamphlets on chicken-rearing. The tales have, of course, been transcribed, for the Maori had no written culture, though the all-important genealogical tree was sometimes marked on whalebone, and a big Maori building panelled with dyed flax and carved in the old way, with eyes of paua shell squinting down over its carved red-ochred spirals, tells an important tribal story in every detail of workmanship. But the Maoris were never stingy with their legends, and men of some vision took them down, as they fell from the lips of old men dreaming in the sun. Also the Maori system of chant-memorising, taught by the tohungas (priests) to selected students, was deeply ingrained, and is still a true key, though a rusty one. But I see mouldering away, unread, unknown, Willoughby Shortland's fairytale transcripts, side by side with Markham's journal, and the remarkable sketchbook of Gilfillan, a pioneer artist whose pencil sketches of Maori life are probably the best in existence, though the Maoris repaid him by putting the red flower of fire to his thatch, nearly killing him, murdering his wife and all but one of his children. In some of the best Antipodean libraries, it is forbidden even to quote from Mss.; which is commonly regarded as conservatism, but which to me seems a crime against our rudimentary culture.
It is important, none the less, to know that about the time when England was starving John Keats like a dying rat, Maoris were maintaining poets and poetesses (there is a considerable degree of sex equality), as rare tribal possessions, even loaning them out to friendly tribes. And very bloody-minded most of these poets, who spurred tribes on to battle or recounted the victories of famous chiefs, commonly were. Battles bore such names as 'The Fall of the Hawks', 'The Gathering of Many Canoes'; a chief's canoe was Te Waikiekie, or 'Waters Kiss-Kiss'; the two main islands, Te-Ika-a-Maui (the fish of Maui, an ancestor god) and Te Wahe Pounamu (the Place of Greenstone, or Maori jade). Rocks, mountains, forests, lakes, were alive with diversified chanted or whispered legend and song, known to every child. Te Taniwha, the water-dragon, could be good or evil; te maeroro, the inhuman ogre, hunted in the bush; usually gentle were the turehu or piti-pae-arehe, white Maori fairies, who did no worse than steal the shadows of ornaments or weapons, and who taught the Maoris net-making. The crimson seaweed washing out under the keel of your boat near Whangarei Heads is, of course, the hair of Manaia's daughter, and anyone will tell you how Manaia, his wife and his dog all sit turned to rocks, seen at high tide. The Maori sentinel on the high, slenderly spiked stockade chanted over sleepers and moonlit whares (huts) his time-old formula of assurance. And behind this carved and ochred façade of big and little Maori gods, which I can only describe as a mingling of ancestor-worship and animism, well coloured up by legendry, was the single religion of Io, the sacred Breath of Being – a far from despicable deity.
'My body is the temple of the Most High. Therefore I must be very careful what I do with it, how I eat, with whom I confide it, where I lay it down … ' Thus a translation of part of the Io creed, given to me by a Maori woman of rank. But also, in the great northern kauri forest, I have placed the green branch of salutation under the roots of mighty Tane Mahuta, the tree chosen because of its size and age to be the personification of the God of Forests. Unless you know these names, you cannot know what was, what might have been and what still may be in the world of Maori legendry, which, though mainly unwritten, is a culture in itself.
After Waitangi were men who knew this storehouse – Selwyn, the tall young English Bishop, whose long bush journeys astonished everyone, whose wooden churches are among our few beautiful architectural remnants, and who wrote in his old stone library at Keri-Keri, the Place of Rumbling Waters, a prayer for a few hours of daily solitude 'that there may be some abundance in me from which I can give to others'. The Roman Catholic Bishop, Pompallier, wrote many Maori textbooks, and a journal, which unfortunately contains more of his religion than his record. At a little missionary press in the Bay of Islands (one of many such presses), Bishop Colenso printed an original composition – the first poem, so far as I know, ever written and printed in New Zealand. The quixotic Baron de Thierry, who wanted a little independent state where brown man and white would live on terms of perfect equality, lived in isolation on Mount Isabel, called after his beautiful dark-eyed daughter, and there wrote by crude candlelight the beginnings of the enormous, unpublished, unpublishable records which provided the writer of this article with the substance of an historical novel. In England a minor poet wrote a chorus especially for New Zealand emigrants:
Steer, helmsman, till you steer our course
By stars beyond the Line.
We go to found a land, some day
Like Britain's self to shine.
Cheer up! Cheer up! Our course we'll keep
With dauntless heart and hand,
And when we've ploughed the restless deep
We'll plough the smiling land.
The admonition 'Cheer up!' was necessary; all early emigrant ships, after heartbreaking months at sea, arrived with a record or cargo of dead children once as many as forty. Frantic, ineffectual nursing under the light of the sweating slush-lamps, an airless hold, and then another corpse overside …
Perhaps the greatest literary and political figure to make use of the early treasure-house was that of young Captain Grey, who came from South Australia in 1845, ended Hone Heke's individualistic Robin Hood war in the north, became Governor Sir George Grey, and wrote Polynesian Mythology, the most reliable attempt at investigation of the subject.
Heke died, with the words in his mouth: 'It is better to sit at peace for ever.' Grey lived on into old age, stripped of his political dignities, his silk hat as much an object of amusement as of awe in Auckland, his smug enemies well satisfied: 'Grey cannot work with anyone!' He wrote of a famous landgrabbing family: 'The A's are a soft rata vine, strangling the growth of New Zealand'; but he could not avert, and did not always handle wisely, the clash between landgrabbers and the original owners. There were wars, never involving the whole or a major part of the Maori race, but even until now alienating some of the finest northern tribes, rendering them landless, and, in the pumice and scrub country north of Auckland, resulting in their terrible deterioration of body and hope. I spoke to a Maori of this area, where once the great honey-peaches had stocked hundreds of canoes gliding down to Auckland, of the tragedy of lost legend, lost poetry. He said: 'It's all here still … only covered up. But the people who could uncover it – they, mostly, seem to be too busy.' An exception to this 'too busy' rule was the late Elsdon Best, author of Tuhoe and other celebrated books, who became a white tohunga, risking his life to make the Maori Yesterday a coherent prelude to Maori life today. Elsdon Best died a few years ago, having received little reward from his countrymen; James Cowan, Eric Ramsden, Lindsay Buick and Dr. Ivan Sutherland – the first three are historical experts, while Dr. Sutherland is a young author who prefers to write of the Maoris as living people with baffling health and sociological problems – are Best's most logical successors, but none equals him in merit.
While Governor of Cape Colony, Sir George Grey was in constant correspondence with the famous explorer, David Livingstone, whose long, vividly-interesting letters lie with many from Florence Nightingale and the noted Australian explorer, Eyre, in the Sir George Grey collection, probably one of the best, and least-known collections of literary and historical research materials in either New Zealand or Australia. Like Maning and Selwyn, Grey loved the lofty heart-of-kauri houses which are New Zealand's best attempt at individual architecture, and which, in their setting of blazing pohutukawa trees, shady English elms and oaks, tropical creepers, must be among the most beautiful wooden houses in the world. On Kawau Island in Auckland Harbour he built such a house, and planted the island with tropical trees and plants, loosing among them exotic animals and birds. Here he played patron to poor Thomas Bracken, reckoned as New Zealand's first poet; who did, indeed, write one fine poem on the fighting chieftain, Te Rauparaha, but whose general level may be judged by a stanza from his once world-famous poem 'Not Understood'.
Not understood! How trifles often change us –
The fancied insult or the unmeant slight
Destroy long years of friendship, and estrange us,
And on our souls there falls a freezing blight.
Not understood!
This is printed on Thomas Braken's tombstone in his South Island, Scottish city, Dunedin. They gave him a large tombstone when dead; but Grey, while he was alive, wrote the introduction for his poems, and entertained him on Kawau, where many a time they heard the dip of paddles and saw the sunset fluttering of plumes on the chief's taiaha (spear) as canoes came in. Sir George had a fully-tattooed chieftain for his bodyguard – Moki, who was ready to die for 'Hori Korei'. Yet among both whites and Maoris his old age was partly discredited. He was hot-tempered, and both sides wanted everything. Once Waitangi was signed, it was so obviously impossible that either should get their full desire. So Hori Korei saved from the wreck his beautiful island, his excursions into patronage, and the love of a few.
In his late years he shall go much alone, and silently behold the branch of peachblossom in the courtyard, and think long on his youth, when he had not yet ventured.
Yet when he is dead, a sigh shall go up: they shall remember his day, or ever the sandal was dipped in blood.
For it is good that he does, but evil in the doing of it: and in the end, only the mountains can be his friends.
This was the beginning of the end of the first good period in New Zealand letters – the period of unselfconsciousness, when writers knew, without question, moralizing or hesitation, what they were. They were Englishmen – not exiles or minds divided, but whole people, supremely at ease, fascinated by a new, wild and appealing terrain. Therefore they wrote what was natural and human, and their work remains well worth reading, often for style as well as for record. But the undivided New Zealand writer shook hands with this past on the edge of the landgrabbing wars, and it was an abnormally long time before he evolved any new literary present or future.
I should mention Robert Browning's friend, Alfred Dommett (the hero in Browning's 'I wonder what's become of Waring?'), who was once Prime Minister of New Zealand. His epic poem 'Ranolf and Amohia', is living work, and so are his brilliant, human letters, many preserved privately in New Zealand. The Mr. Brown so often mentioned as a literary intimate and walking-tour companion in Keats' Journals lived in New Zealand, as Superintendent of the prosperous Taranaki Province. Two sailoring sons of the poet, Leigh Hunt, used to visit him, rough and bearded, after voyages round the coast. In a little cottage in one of the loneliest far south sheepfarming districts, Samuel Butler, author of that famous novel The Way of All Flesh, got the inspiration for Erewhon, which during the nineteenth century held a place beside Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Jerningham Wakefield (a brother of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, whose settlement in the Hutt district, first called Britannia, at last saw the beginnings of the present capital city, Wellington), wrote a serial journal of his adventures on foot-journeys through the New Zealand bush. In the South Island, Lady Barker wrote and published her two-volume Diary – one of the most human and touching of all early New Zealand books. Heaphy, a minor explorer, but a fine descriptive writer whose literary work is all too rare, found the Greenstone People of the West Coast, and heard tales of Captain Cook himself from the lips of the ancient Coromandel chieftain, Te Taniwha.
It was the end, for four reasons: the closing, in war, pride and injury, of understanding between Maori and 'pakeha'; the dead hand of mid-Victorian morality, driving the poets and writers into a region of vain abstractions, sentimentalities, hypocrisy. Ella Wheeler Wilcox was virtuoso here, and New Zealand produced novelists and versifiers even weaker than the bangled and jangled American. Thirdly, the new, lonely, under-occupied country, successfully prevented Edward Gibbon Wakefield's policy of dear land from growing as it should have done, was taken up with the effort to become a land of men instead of wilderness. Writing was done with pick and mattock, not with a pen. The fourth reason was that the New Zealander was no longer an Englishman: he did not know quite what he was, in what ideograph, or of which situations he wanted to write. He was terribly lonely, terribly self-conscious …
I know that three mountains in the gold-bearing South Island regions are named Mount Hunger, Starvation Peak, Mount Misery. But except in imagination, I will never know the broken stories of the men who named them, because the people who should have written these stories preferred to write of how soon a child who sang a 'worldly' song on a Sunday should be forgiven by her father. In this false unreal atmosphere, the writers of my land and generation grew up: loving every inch of the terrain, feeling it grow into mind and bones, but knowing little of its story or cultural past except what, unconsciously hungry for some background, we were able to invent. We were too young to be much affected by the war, but the depression meant release.
Among the older writers, William Satchell, Jane Mander, Jessie Mackay and Ursula Bethell are the most outstanding – the last, a poet (author of 'Garden in the Antipodes' and 'Time and Space'), though by many to have caught the tempo and feeling of New Zealand earth better than any other.
These brown hills have the texture of paduasoy.
Or of old marching, pebble-worn sandals …
William Satchell's most successful book was a novel called The Greenstone Door; the door of friendship, opening again between Maori and pakeha. But he had to wait twenty years after its publication to see its success. Jane Mander's theme, in Story of a New Zealand River, is loneliness – that of a woman who sees all things flow away, and few things ever return. She has had other successes in London, but the quality of her first book was immediately recognised by such authorities as the one really great Australian novelist, Henry Handel Richardson, and it probably has the most meaning to New Zealanders. Another veteran writer of considerable ability is the lyric poet, Jessie Mackay, who has admirers at home and abroad, and who at seventy is still an active writer. But one of her strengths is also a weakness, an impairment of the integrity of her work. She is a passionate and idealistic admirer of all embodied in the old 'Celtic twilight' school. Much of her vitality goes into writing romances of the dead ages.
Two there loved in Rimini,
the dark tower of Rimini.
Two there died in Rimini,
With the dawn for company.Ah, the death-bell, booming, booming,
When the Malatesta's dooming
Rolled the night on Rimini …
From this one turns to Katherine Mansfield's poem 'The Sea Child'; or to this, most vividly New Zealand:
Last night, for the first time since you were dead,
I walked with you, my brother, in a dream.
We were alone again, beside the stream …
Then some lines I forget; the dead boy puts berries to his mouth, and she cries out, warning him:
You raised your head a little, and a beam
Of strange, bright laughter flitted round your head.
'Don't you remember? We call them Dead Men's Bread …
This is my body … sister, take and eat.'
That loneliness; she was eaten up with it, but never knew why she was so inhumanly lonely, or what she was lonely for, because the heavy, conventional well-to-do household around her, a fortress of conservatism which so falsifies us, filled her with such exasperation against doors that she wouldn't look out of windows. Unconsciously, of course, she did look: therefore exist 'The Picton Boat', 'At the Bay', 'The Garden Party', and, written when she was a young girl, the best poem about broom I have ever read. Taken with her other achievements, these were enough for a girl only thirty-three when she died at Fontainebleu. 'I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, Danger, we pluck this flower, Safety!' That was her epitaph. People say K.M. ran away from New Zealand, but if you see and understand her exact environs, you might sympathize with the belief that she ran away from a sham England, unsuccessfully transplanted to New Zealand soil, and utterly unable to adapt itself to the real New Zealand. They have cut down all the pine-trees in the street where she lived, in order to give her a memorial consisting of flat grass garden beds and a red brick waiting-shed. Running away from that sort of thing is the most understandable policy in the world.
J.A. Lee, Member of Parliament and now Under-Secretary for Housing, wrote Children of the Poor, a novel commended by Bernard Shaw. But poetry and the short story, especially K.M.'s short stories, have left a higher tidemark than the New Zealand novel. Here enters the factor of Eileen Duggan, a girl still in her early thirties, whose first book was prefaced by 'A.E.' She wrote:
Shall we let pride lay waste the soul?
What hope or need have we of pride?
We are but wanderers in the hinterlands,
Too few for linking hands …
Though that has a peculiar pertinence for the New Zealander, some more direct idea of the simplicity which is her main virtue may be gained from this little poem, included in her book of 'New Zealand Bird Songs'.
Wanaka*, mother of Clutha,
Says to the Shag in her shallows:
'Back, you thief of the twilight,
Highwayman of the headland,
After your line flew down
A nest in Hell was empty.'Wanaka, little old woman,
Wrinkles and rocks and mutters:
'Out of the land forever,
Out of the sky forever,
Back to the blight of God
In the land of hungry waters!Dreamily answers the bandit,
'My head is sold for silver,
But God, where all is gentle,
May weary of much meekness,
May turn unto the outlaw,
May bless the Shag, the seeker.'*Wanaka, from which flows the River Clutha.
The depression stirred Eileen Duggan, who, a devout Roman Catholic, is today writing for the political United Front paper, WomanTo-day. So is C.R. Allen, blinded poet and author, son of a wealthy Dunedin family:
Eyes of the heart, that vacillate and fumble,
Seeking perfection by some hidden gauge,
Intent on certitude, that fleeting lingers
Like winter sunlight on the printed page,
Searchers are we, somnambulists who stumble
On fragments of the truth. O, traitor fingers! […]
Thus the blinded poet writes of the 'traitor fingers' which are his only guide. But even more deeply affected and stimulated by the depression were young student groups, and individual writers unprotected from the storm. The leader of the student writers I would regard as R.A.K. Mason, author of 'The Beggar' and 'No New Thing', whose bitter verse, sometimes recalling that of A.E. Housman, has been included in leading English anthologies.
This short straight sword
I got in Rome
When Gaul's new lord
Came tramping home.It did that grim
Old rake to a T
If it did him
Why, it does me.
A.R.D. Fairburn, Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, Ian Milner, Frank Sargeson (whose short stories are of striking merit, though suffering from an overdose of the Hemingway technique), belong to this group, which has definitely furthered good printing and fought the 'pretty-pretty' in New Zealand. Its faults are endless, verbose political argument, and, like the erstwhile Spender-Auden-Lewis combination in England, on which its members have patterned themselves, not a little literary gang warfare. But the existence of such a student movement is a sign of growth. Probably the political stimulus which created it was the same that sent young James Bertram, New Zealand Rhodes scholar, to Siam, where he wrote Crisis in China, and later to five months' experience with the Eighth Route Army, resulting in the forthcoming publication of a second book on China. Geoffrey Cox was similarly beckoned into fighting Spain, where he wrote a clear-cut and excellent book, Defence of Madrid. In other words, the quick, quarrelsome, often imitative but as often talented young student group of today has helped to develop in New Zealand a keen political consciousness, which in the best minds becomes world consciousness, sympathy for the world.
Parallel, less aggressive, but containing members more gifted in a purely literary way, is the group whose works are usually represented in the quarterly Art in New Zealand, and the annual collection, Best Poems of New Zealand. Douglas Stewart, a nature-poet whose book Green Lions was a brilliant tour de force, has followed Katherine Mansfield's example, and sought London. D'Arcy Cresswell, a young soldier of the last great war, is too individualistic and, in a half-humorous way, too eccentric to work with any group; but his autobiography, Poet's Progress, caused a sensation in London some eight years ago, and he has also a deep and thoughtful poetic gift. Arnold Cork, Dora Hagemeyer, E.V.D. Morgan stand high among the others. But there is black-opal fire and nobility in the poems of Eve Langley, a girl from a peasant community in Gippsland, whose imaginative verse has all been written in New Zealand:
The sun salutes and sinks; the roads flow on,
And I am carried with them where they flow
Towards the sea, that holds and heals the swan …He stands and says that when he leaves our yurts
He crosses a desert like a cloth of gold,
The idle freedom of his wandering hurts
As if my love were dead, or I were old.
Nor do I think this discreditable, from Gloria Rawlinson, at nineteen the most popular of the very young writers. Her first London publication, The Perfume Vendor (a book of poems), has been followed by a novel, Music in the Listening Place.
Eat of my bread, Wind,
Hungry wind, eat:
Snow, pile upon me,
Warm your white feet.
I have a sun in my heart,
I have a fire in my breast.Rest on me, weary sea,
Tired sea, rest.
Warm your small fingers, Rain –
You are so cold:
Lean on me, lean on me,
Time, you are old.