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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 22
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| The poet turns to the buried rocks in the wet sand flats,
which he sees as 'the half-buried limbs of . . . the Titan Prometheus,
principle of the rebellious energy in man that enlarges our order by breaking
it and allowing it to re-form in another pattern - an energy that our way
of life dismembers and disregards'. In the poem that he writes to
honour Prometheus, the Titan's pain and gift, both repressed, are brought
back to us by 'calamity, time, deeply thwarted desire', and as the poet
contemplates Prometheus' limbs he feels the presence of the ancestors:
Only a pressure at The fences of the mind. From clay mounds they gather To share the Titan's blood with us. But only the occasional ghostly presence is left to him, 'the tribesman left over from the dissolution of the tribes'. Where his father's uncle could nearly kill a man who taunted him with having no tartan, the poet fears that 'the cloth has worn too thin', that there is nothing like that left to him to fight for. |
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