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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 20
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| The view of his ancestors is complex. They are
seen as heroic, coming to New Zealand to create 'a Utopia, a Happy Island,
a Just City in which the best of the Old World would survive, taking new
Antipodean forms'. However, they were defeated by history,
their 'country virtue' was 'betrayed' by gold when the new colony was swamped
by the gold rush. The young poet would not wish them to be alive
again to share his Robert Lowell-ish vision that 'their orchard wealth
decays' on 'gorse-choked farms' while 'our markets thrive / Dry tinder,
touchwood for the final blaze'. But their intention went unfulfilled
partly because of what they brought with them, a negative Calvinism that
knew 'their Christ or no Christ ' only in 'the raging crackle of
/ These fire-blackened thorns', so that they left us with 'the green blood
/ Of thorns that thickens in our veins'. Our society, then,
has 'a strong Calvinist bias unconsciously received by us from our forefathers,
the early settlers', a latent puritanism that it 'carries like strychnine
in its bones', or, to change the image, that 'underlies our determinedly
secular culture like the bones of a dinosaur buried in a suburban garden
plot'. These forefathers, the poet's great-uncles and great-aunts,
had 'strong chains in heart and head', could deal with 'Adam's dirt' only
by repression and projection, so that
the lack ate inwardly like fire in piled-up couchgrass too green for it, billowing smoke. . . . |
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