New Zealand Verse/Introduction

The invitation to a volume of minor poetry, all written by dwellers in a little island country that has only not been forgotten by the world because it has never come much into the world’s mind, is a task that would demand delicate walking. When its right to exist is called in question, a book after the fashion of Meleager must in the nature of things be itself its own justification; but some account of the circumstances in which its verses have been written may be permitted, for the sake of supplying a due background for their makers, and a right understanding of what may be expected from them.

In these islands, then, first colonized by Europeans less than seventy years ago, and with a total population numbering in 1905 only nine hundred thousand souls—no more than one of the smaller of the world’s cities counts—there has existed right from the very beginning a tradition that it was a good thing to write poetry. The tradition has ​grown with the years, until in a recent prize-poem competition which brought out 1084 “poems” from the English-speaking world, the quota from New Zealand was seventy-four. Every year, now, one or two fresh volumes come to the birth, and promptly die of neglect on the part of the public; for, in marked contrast with the Australians, the New Zealanders, though they write poetry, do not read their own poets. Some of these volumes deserve the sudden death they suffer; others show an amount of promise which cannot be expected to find more than occasional fulfilment; a few show more than promise. It is the conviction that some of them contain verse which at least comes well up to the level of modern minor poetry that has led to the making of the present collection. It may be admitted at the outset that there is nothing very great to be disclosed herein: the poetical element that a new land contains must always at first be small and of little power. In the generation of the pioneers that is passing away literary effort was inevitably a rare thing: men’s energies were set too sternly to battle with the material facts of life to leave them time for cultivating its graces. The second generation has still before it the task of establishing the nation whose foundations were set by our fathers, and we too have comparatively little time for things not practical—the columns must be ​set up before we turn to moulding the entablature. There is a time which some of us look for, when New Zealand will be assigned a place among the nations not only on account of its exports of wool and gold, or for richness and worth in horses and footballers, but also by reason of its contributions to art and science;—when there will be more than one New Zealand scientist in the Royal Society, and more than one New Zealand poet in the anthologies; and “when New Zealand books, New Zealand pictures, New Zealand statues and buildings will gain some repute and note in the civilized world.” That time has not yet arrived. Nevertheless, there are first fruits ripe already, and if the sheaf we have bound is a very little one, it surely holds ears with no poor promise of good grain to come. And even the hardest-headed race of farmers and shepherds and workers in wood and metal has its dreams and its seers of visions (and even sends some of them into Parliament), and may be helped by the labour of such towards the deep-breasted fulness of mature nationality.

Of the writers in this book, with one or two exceptions, none are by profession literary people purely, for there is no literary life in the State. It is only a small percentage of any population that supports artistic effort, and in New Zealand the gross population is not large enough for this ​percentage to have any apparent power: so the musician and the painter must wear out their souls in teaching the elements of their arts, and the poets write leading articles and newspaper paragraphs. Possibly they are more in touch with their fellows for that; but, on the other hand, they must in some sense be always among aliens, to whose eyes they may be in most regards perfectly respectable citizens, yet always marred by the regrettable, foolish habit of writing verse. A poet hath no sort of honour at all in his own country.

As their professions go, perhaps the greater part are journalists, editors, reporters, free-lances: one of them rose to be a war-correspondent. These have got as near as our conditions allow to following the literary profession, but for some of them it means sore restriction from better literary work. There are also lawyers, not a few, and some of the best of the writers have been politicians—walking after Domett, who was Premier and poet and pressman, all three. It was Sir William J. Steward who, as Speaker, gave that model of Parliamentary rulings: “Parliament is an assemblage of gentlemen. The first characteristic of a gentleman is courtesy. Whatsoever, then, is discourteous is ungentlemanly, and therefore unparliamentary.” There are, inevitably, three or four Civil Servants in the list, two or three are clergymen, and the ​rest are for the most part settlers, settlers’ wives and sons and daughters, miners, shepherds and rabbiters, landholders large and small. It is related of one of them that in a mate’s opinion “he might have been all right at his poetry and stuff, but he was a rotten new chum of a musterer.” Perhaps, if we may compare small things with great, they made the same complaint about Theocritus. A fair proportion of these makers are women, as is only fitting in a land where one of the duties true chivalry owes is thought to be a lessening as far as may be of the disadvantages of sex.

All the verse in this book is written by New Zealanders, but not necessarily all in New Zealand. We have not, however, felt ourselves entitled to use the later verses of Broome or Domett, who themselves acknowledged for this country what we have chosen from them, but who in leaving New Zealand practically shook off their nationality. Again, our order of reference could not be limited to natives without grievous wrong to many “pilgrims” and New Zealanders by adoption. At the same time, “verses by New Zealanders” does not include all verse written in and on New Zealand—“In the Days when the World was Wide,” by Henry Lawson, for instance, is a ballad that belongs entirely to Australia—and this excuses ​us also from taking heed of the patronage of the globe-trotter, the Hun by whom, for its sins, every young country is scourged.

No attempt has been made at chronological arrangement; not because there is not as much difference between some verse of 1850 and some of 1900 in New Zealand as in France, say, but because in connection with a place which is a whirlpool of active life, and yet at the same time a backwater of literary influences, dates would only mislead. Younger writers, for example, have imagined the emigrant spirit as truly as the men of the early days: the gap is not obvious, but it is forty years broad, between “The Old Year and the New” and “The Night-watch Song of the Charlotte Jane” on the one hand, and “Emigravit” and “For Love of Appin”—both the work of native-born women—on the other. Again, Broome, an amateur squatter, afterwards a colonial governor, was caught—only too surely—by the pre-Raphaelite mannerisms of the ’sixties; O’Regan, a lonely lad teaching school in a mining district and dying at twenty-one, a branch that might have grown full straight, felt the same wind blowing in the ’nineties.

As to the subjects treated of, the collection tries to be typical of the country only in so far as limitations of style will allow. It makes no pretence to be a guide-book in verse; a volume of ​topographical or local poetry would have been compiled by entirely different canons. However much a characteristic subject may have been written of—as, for instance, the wrecks that have strewn our coasts since earlier days than the whalers’, and sown the headlands thick with sad associations—if a piece of verse on it that comes up to standard has not yet appeared, the subject has perforce been ignored. The first rule of the editors has been to choose the best verse available, irrespective of subject. At the same time, where this rule would allow, those verses have been selected that would give the widest and fairest representation of the writer and lend as much as might be some character of homogeneity to the volume as a whole. In a pioneer land, insistence on technical excellence presses with exceptional heaviness, and some verses have been admitted in spite of their formal imperfections, for the sake of a little gold in the sand.

Such considerations have joined with the element of sheer personal taste, which it has been attempted to minimize, but which cannot altogether be eliminated, in determining the character and scope of the present volume. It must be remembered that the selection cannot show the range of the different kinds of verse as written: to give an example again, there are no patriotic songs inserted, though ​the patriotic song has been attempted time and again, because none has yet been produced sufficiently worthy of its subject to claim admittance. Nevertheless, it happens that the selection epitomizes with fair precision the general range of New Zealand verse.

It is hard to say whether there are as yet any signs of a distinctive school of New Zealand poetry. Circumstances in the State are against the development of any consciously united effort. As has been said, there is very little local reading for the local writing, and each writer is a law unto himself in the choice of models, and responds to influences flowing anywhere out of the whole corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature. Again, there are no literary coteries in New Zealand, and the geographical configuration of the country will always prevent much centralization in any division of national effort. The great weekly newspapers, which are the striking feature of New Zealand journalism, either ignore verse almost entirely, or else duly fill up half a column a week out of their eighty pages with whatever in a more or less metrical form shall come to hand, and apparently with a catholic absence of discrimination: both plans are alike detrimental to the interests of poetry. Lastly, there is no accepted leader for such a school to follow. Domett has taken rank in ​the literature text-books as one of the secondary poets of the nineteenth century; but his work is too diffuse and not distinctive enough to become the ensample of a modern school of writers. No other has at once the reputation and the preeminence (several have one or the other only) to be an authoritative guide to the footsteps of his fellows.

There is one possible exception to the foregoing. Produced in nowise by literary or social agencies, the result of natural influences only, New Zealand landscape-writing is surely a class of poetry by itself, and if there is a “school” of poetry here it is certainly a school of landscape. Such a thing might be expected. New Zealand is perhaps unequalled among the countries of the earth for the combination in its natural scenery of variety with grandeur and beauty. There be the Sounds that rival Norway’s, the Alps that are comparable with Switzerland’s, a lone volcano as shapely as Fuzi Yama, geysers the greatest in the world, great rivers and mighty gorges, hot lakes in the north, chains of cold lakes in the south—and over and through them all the changing glory of the Bush. There is a range of climate up from Southland, which after Tierra del Fuego is the most southerly settled country in the world, through districts of mountain and plain, sun and rain and wind, to the ​subtropical forests and summer seas of Auckland, with the South Sea Islands only four days’ steam away.

Nearly all the Maorilanders have put some of their efforts to painting, each in his own way and with his own limitations, a portion of the splendour that lies around them. Half this volume could have been filled with verses in praise of Maoriland, and the standard the editors set themselves not been lowered. It would, in fact, have been possible to fill the book entirely with such pieces—and in that case, it is true, some of it would have been very bad verse indeed: but it would have formed the sincerest book of verse in the “Canterbury Poets” series.

With a view to securing some balance of subjects, however, verses of scenery have often been passed over where it was possible to represent a writer otherwise without doing an injustice. But scenic poetry has not been written out in New Zealand. More compelling than the return of Spring, more instant to be praised than the beauty of women, the Bush and the hills of Maoriland are still calling their lovers to paint their colours and sing their songs. As our painters’ studios brim with colours of fern and kauri, so do our poets’ pages with songs of tui and makomako: and every age will welcome its own interpreters of nature, as long as the sun ​makes rainbows in the Otira Gorge and the moon rises red over the Plains.

This kind of writing, if never capable of being made into the very loftiest poetry, can yet rise to no mean heights. As far as mere word-painting goes, nothing has ever been done in Maoriland that surpasses Domett: some of his pictures of the Bush come as near to being great poetry as pure landscape can, and he is incomparably the greatest of the poets represented in the volume. He lived a strenuous life of almost thirty years in New Zealand, during which he occupied in succession most of the high administrative offices, including, in 1862-63, that of Premier. Domett had written two books of poetry before he came to New Zealand, and a third, Flotsam and Jetsam: Rhymes Old and New, was published several years after his leaving. But he is most a poet in the book he wrote in Maoriland—his South-Sea Day-Dream: Ranolf and Amohia. Through its five hundred pages, alternating with metaphysical soliloquies, Homeric conflicts, an idyll as beautiful as the second stanza of Don Juan, but truer, teem the most vivid descriptions of the New Zealand bush, and all the wildly beautiful scenery that lies around the hot lakes of the North Island. And every now and then one comes across such a line as “Windswept, a waft of sea-birds white went scattering up ​the sky.” The whole poem resembles a luxuriant forest, crowded with exuberant growths, vocal with the sound of bird and waterfall, and the main story meanders through it as carelessly and almost aimlessly as the two lovers thereof wander on their enchanted honeymoon. The richness and beauty of the poem were not slow to win recognition. Browning, who was the poet’s lifelong friend, and who alludes to him in his own “Waring” and “The Guardian Angel,” wrote of it as follows:—“I am sure it is a great and astonishing performance, of very varied beauty and power. I rank it under nothing—taken altogether—nothing that has appeared in my day and generation for subtle yet clear writing, about subjects of all others the most urgent for expression, and the least easy in treatment.” Nor was the praise of Tennyson less hearty:—“Intellectual subtlety, great power of delineating delicious scenery, imaginative fire—all these are there,” he wrote. Longfellow also sent his tribute.

No other New Zealand poet approximates in greatness to Domett; but in the work of natives who have come after him there are to be found, if less fertility of imagination and power of vivid painting, a stronger passion for New Zealand, and a feeling of closer kinship with her soil. Domett writes wholly from the point of view of a naturalized, ​not born New Zealander. He wrote for an oversea public, if he wrote for any, and his native flowers and birds take English names, wherever he can find an analogy. In the ardent patriotism of such verse as that of Arthur H. Adams, and in several other poems in this volume, one recognizes a more filial sound which may be expected to permeate the poetry of Maoriland in the future.

Later writers have brought new possibilities into landscape poetry, also, by introducing a personal tone. Of these none captures the very spirit and perfume of the Bush better than Mrs. James Glenny Wilson; and Hubert Church, although he deals more often with other subjects, holds a worthy place by reason of the delicacy of his treatment and the originality of his language. (More New Zealand verse is rendered impossible by its hackneyed verbiage than from any other cause.) Another development is the little dainty vignette of bush and bird which Johannes Andersen has made his own. The group of town verses—in praise of our little cities that are not large enough to be a blight nor old enough to mingle awe with the love of them—is one that might have been considerably enlarged, had space and proportion permitted. And besides these, the land itself comes by glimpses into verse which cannot strictly be called scenic verse-up-country rhymes, songs of ​the seasons, tales of the Maori,—her mana is woven into the complaints of the exiles, and in the best of it all, the national verse, the land and her people are hardly to be separated the one from the other.

From landscape to seascape is a short step: and in sea-poetry New Zealand may one day find renown. It is peopled by an island race, many of whom are never out of sight or sound of the waves; the salt winds blow all over it; “our cities face the sea”; already seafaring life is become hereditary in many families in the coastal towns; and our coasts are stern schools for fishermen. Therefore it is not a wild prediction that the sea-poems in this book are earnest of good things to come, in deep-sea chanties and poems of old sea-knowledge and of the lives of men who serve the ocean.

When other subjects of verse than landscape are considered, the opportunities are not less, but the performance is scarcely so creditable. The national game is football, and Maoriland breeds some of the best footballers in the world—but most football verse is journalese, and the only lines the editors have found which seem to catch “the game’s glory” are those which serve as envoy. New Zealanders are second to no nation in their love of horses; yet our best horse-poetry seems to drag when compared even with that of ​Whyte-Melville, and is heavier than a Clydesdale after the galloping ballads of the Australian school. Perhaps the fact that such writing has been done so excellently well “over the other side” (of the Tasman Sea) has made it the more difficult for our men.

And though a larger proportion of the people lives outside the towns than in most countries, the group of up-country pieces which has been got together, very sweet and welcome as it seems to be, is unduly meagre. To David McKee Wright, poet, parson, journalist, anthologist, and more, be tribute paid, however, for the heart-calling lines he has written of the stations and the back-blocks.

The life and history of the Maori, again, give a wide field for poetry, which has not been tilled with success as yet. His romance has more than the pathos and soul of the Red Indian, and his long tale of legends of peace and war, lovers and heroes, not less than his quaint and beautiful mythology, is treasure-trove that belongs to the New Zealand poet by the right of the soil. But though many writers have attempted to versify the legends, all have manifestly found them extremely difficult to deal with: the writer who can lead us into Maoridom in verse as Judge Maning leads us in prose is yet to come. Even a suitable medium has hardly been found: with blank verse the barbaric tone of ​a story seems to vanish; and all the writers who have adopted the common, narrative metres have been unable to dissipate a certain incongruous English atmosphere that clings to the very movement of the lines. Domett lost his legend entirely in the intricacies of his poem; Bracken’s rough and frequently changing metres are convincing now and then, but the sustained effort fails. Perhaps the rugged rhythm of “The Noosing of the Sun-God” weds best of all to its subject; and next to it the styles modelled respectively on the old English or Scottish folk-ballads and on the longer metres that William Morris used for his saga-poems. Yet no writer has produced hitherto a rendering of a Maori legend that is satisfactory in every respect; and though a dozen renderings have been given of the tale of Hinemoa alone—the maiden who swam across Lake Rotorua to her lover, Tutanekai, being guided by the sound of his flute, and was discovered by him in a warm pool on the beach—none of them approaches in beauty the simple Maori original, translated by Sir George Grey in his Polynesian Mythology: “And Hinemoa knew the voice, that the sound of it was that of the beloved of her heart; and she hid herself under the overhanging rocks of the hot spring; but her hiding was hardly a real hiding, but rather a bashful concealing of herself from Tutanekai, that he might not find her at once, ​but only after trouble and careful searching for her; so he went feeling about along the banks of the hot spring, searching everywhere, while she lay coyly hid under the ledges of the rock, peeping out, wondering when she would be found. At last he caught hold of a hand, and cried out, ‘Hollo, who’s this?’ And Hinemoa answered, ‘It’s I, Tutanekai.’ And he said, ‘But who are you?— who’s I?’ Then she spoke louder, and said, ‘It’s I, ’tis Hinemoa.’ And he said, ‘Ho! ho! ho! Can such in very truth be the case? Let us two go then to my house.’ And she answered, ‘Yes’; and she rose up in the water as beautiful as the wild white hawk, and stepped upon the edge of the bath as graceful as the shy white crane; and he threw garments over her and took her, and they proceeded to his house, and reposed there; and thenceforth, according to the ancient laws of the Maori, they were man and wife.”

After the verse that sounds evident that local tone has been considered, there still remains that large division which cannot be bound down to the islands of New Zealand; and here our writers, coming out of the strongholds set apart for them to occupy, must measure themselves against the poets of all time. “Little songs for little birds,” and it would be unreasonable to expect from them anything very new, anything surpassingly noble, in dealing ​with the eternal themes of life and love and death. But place them alongside men of their measure in other lands or ages, and they show not badly in the comparison. One or two lilts well sung, some verses in lighter vein daintily hit off, a lullaby or two with a tenderness of motherhood in the rocking of them—these are not altogether unworthy of a little additional publicity.

It would be unsafe to generalize much from these pieces; how far New Zealand influences have worked on them is hard to say. Quite possibly, for the reason that transmigration of body is not sufficient in itself to alter a literary style, the editors may have inserted, among the verses of adopted Maorilanders, matter that was written before New Zealand came into their lives at all. At the most, one may venture to remark—provided a poet can be considered as in any wise a normal specimen—that the New Zealanders make love with much the same fervour as lovers elsewhere, are as much saddened by a luckless wooing, and rejoiced at a smile from their ladies; that when they write religious verse, it is of varying degrees of orthodoxy, sometimes forgets its aim of instilling right doctrine and gains thereby a fine line or two; that they can occasionally turn a blank verse line, and do not quite escape the charm of old Greek legends; that some among ​them have a mind of fancy that will be bound down to no particular time or place, or perversely imagines all that is unknown to be magnificent: in a word, that they can write with more or less felicity what we agree to call, mingling praise with blame, “minor poetry.”

A volume like the present lays its compilers under all sorts of obligations. Foremost, to the contributors and their representatives who have allowed their work to be included; to the weekly newspapers, for being good enough to give the scheme the publicity of their columns and thereby save the editors from overlooking many writers; to the authorities of the same and other periodicals and to publishing firms in various places, who have freely given their permission to republish many pieces, as is elsewhere acknowledged: and among sundry others, to Miss A. E. Alfrey, Miss Colborne-Veel, Dr. T. M. Hocken, Mr. J. L. Kelly, Miss Jessie Mackay, Mr. Seaforth Mackenzie, and Mr. A. G. Stephens, who have taken a great deal of trouble in hunting out poets for inspection, or have given generous assistance in various other ways. Some help has been derived from the Australasian anthologies of Mr. D. B. W. Sladen.

The editors regret that they have not been able to make the collection completely typical of the country: they would not have been averse to in​cluding verses portraying the life of the rabbiting camp and the freezing works, or exemplifying directly the results of Universal Franchise and Industrial Arbitration, had such been forthcoming. Unfortunately, Pegasus is a shy beast, and runneth apparently whithersoever he listeth. With what material was to hand, they have made the best showing they were able to make. If the work should help in any way the progress of New Zealand literature, the pleasurable toil of compilation will have had sufficient reward.

Christchurch, N. Z.,
November 1906.