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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 35
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Time, said the Town Hall clock, the four-faced master of the windy year. Sin, said the First Church spire, needling up to the Otago heaven of tombstone clouds. But the Leith Stream, the last and only woman in the world, lulling the dead sky in her arms, sighing under bridge and over weir down to the flat crab-wet harbour, had nothing at all to say. In the symbolic world of Baxter's City, there are on the one hand the forces of the living death of bourgeois respectability. The three clocks - 'the railway clock, the Town Hall clock, / And the Varsity clock'- are a recurring symbol of them, as they 'clang early summer time / Across the town cold as a Shacklock range', or as they mark off the night hours, 'genteel, exact / As a Presbyterian conscience'. They 'fill the conduits of air' with somewhat different messages. The Town Hall clock cries 'honour me', while the railway clock reminds us that 'Each traveller . . . / Has the horizon for a hangmans's noose, / Will end in a small stone cell'. 'The imperative clang' of the clock tower of the University is more various. To the young poet it says merely 'learning and secrecy;' while 'frowning at the wicked weirs', while the young man in 'Cressida (a lyric sequence)' associates the clock ironically with the lecturer in the classroom clearing his throat and speaking 'Of McDougall's instinctive drives'. It implicitly reminds Horse on behalf of the repectable Dead that he has been wasting his time at the Bowling Green Hotel, while in 'Walking up Castle Street', it speaks to the narrator more directly Its voice reverberated and grew in the Presbyterian silence. - You're late! You're late! You'll be late when the trumpet's blown. I've seen you, I know you. Where were you on Monday? Drunk in the Bowling Green. Where were you on Wednesday? Smooging in the town belt. Where were you on Friday? Nobody knows. What would your parents say? What will the examiners say? No application. No team spirit. No sense of decency at all. . . . Grey as a hangover conscience, the old clock looked down on me; but as the chimes died irreverent sparrows flew back in a cloud to squabble and skitter and nest in his elder's hat. |
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