Mythology of Place

THE MYTHOLOGY OF PLACE:

JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS

Lawrence Jones
II

The Brighton World

Page 10

        . Returning to the site in a later poem, the poet finds only fire-blackened stones, thistle growing amidst them, finding in the fallen house not a Yeatsian 'Atridean doom that daunted / The heart with lidless gorgon stare', but rather a Hardyan 'wraith of dead joy haunted':
     There once the murk was cloven
     By hearthlight fondly flaring within:
     Adamant seemed their hope and haven.
     O Time, Time takes in a gin
     The quick of being! Pale now and gossamer thin
     The web their lives had woven.
The old McColl site was on 'the clay track leading / From Black Bridge to Duffy's Farm'.
At the farm at the end of that track, on the hill above the ruined orchard, with its 'twisted apple trees / that bear no fruit', was the still-standing ruin of Duffy's house, with its memories of Duffy and his common-law wife Sarah still present.
To the poet it presents an accurate image
of what life holds for us:
    . . . I cannot

     promise more than this, the clods
     divided by purgation
     of frost, rustling autumn head

of thistle - space, air, light in
a room whose door is broken.

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