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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 29
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| Islands, however, are not a major Baxter symbol, and
rock images relate more frequently to the symbol of the cave or protective
ledge. On a stormy night the older poet avoids the cliff-top overlooking
Lion Rock, where he had contemplated suicide when he was younger (and where
he did not see Venus), because 'the sea's throat / Is filled with the voices
of oldest friends / Who offer what the living cannot find'.
However, there is also a 'Rock ledge above the sinuous wave' where
the suicidal impulse was quieted by 'A rock carved like a woman, /
Pain's torso, guardian of the place', a 'Magdalen of the rock' who can 'ask for us the death hour's peace'. There is also a rock chair on Big Rock, sitting 'over the whelming / burst of recurrent breakers / down there in the channel outside / the bay' which offers the reward of 'difficult safety' and seems to relieve the sense of stress. Near there is the cave on Big Rock where he could 'listen to some greater I / Whose language was silence', and feel his despair and his sexual tension eased by 'a silence that accepted all'. The cave becomes at the end of the poem the womb of the Earth Mother: "Open, mother. Open. Let me in". The poet remembers his first poem as coming when he 'climbed up to a hole in a bank in a hill above the sea' and there 'first endured that intense effort of listening' from which the poem emerges. That experience in turn relates to the limestone cave below Saddle Hill, off Creamery Road, where 'The smell of the earth was like a secret language / That dead men speak and we have long forgotten', and he could feel protected from 'age's enmity and love's contagion'. |
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