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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 16
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| Yet the young Baxter did imagine Antaeus' bones
'bedded deep' in the tumulus, perhaps an image of the knowledge of Time,
Death, and the Fall buried within the child, for he dreamed of seeing the
corpse of his 'loved grandmother' with 'her face in anguish smiling' burning
on a funeral pyre on the mound. Even in the child's paradise,
the dark knowledge creeps in.The nearby Brighton River, running
sluggishly to sea at the Bay, is repeatedly a symbol of the cycle of Time
and Death, seen innocently by the child but now seen more darkly by the
adult. The adult poet looks back in memory at the 'daft boy' watching
paradise ducks on the 'brackish river shallows and is brought to
'Thoughts of Eden lost, and the sheen man had broken'. Now, in
proper Dylan Thomas fashion, he sees the meaning of the dead duck that
he had found then,
Knowing the natural world, like man's, founded On death, by the same canker grieved and wounded. |
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