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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 40
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The mountains, like the sea, are symbols, as are the plants, animals, and rivers, 'Expressing in the nouns of a buried language . . . A female eloquence, the coin of death / Turned over'. They are always available, even if we do not see them, 'Explaining to those who dare not love or die'. The dominant symbol of this group is that of the mountains: as protective maternal symbols as symbols of ideal purity; as menacing and hostile powers. Of mountains as maternal symbols there is not much in the poetry; Saddle Hill obviously served much better. In his own copy of the early poem, 'The Mountains', where the tiger-like mountains do not appear very maternal (although they do 'wait / As women wait'), Baxter had noted 'Mountains are mothers', and twenty years later,when he returned to the Naseby that had inspired that poem, he wrote that he 'must have been mad! There are no / mountains here'. That later poem, however, is about neither mountains nor mothers but rather about the differences between the middle-aged poet and that 'grim boy' who was his younger self. If the mountains take on a female aspect in other poems, it is sexual, not maternal. Mt Iron on a hot day is an image brought to the sleepless younger self of the poet by thoughts of the body of Pyrrha, from whom he has been divided nine days. And in the poem that Mr Grummet recites to Horse in the Bowling Green, a poem that later appears as 'Mountain Poem' in A Selection of Poetry and as 'At Raspberry Hut' in the notebook and the Collected Poems, the 'mitred mountain' becomes 'the black mare of rock' neighing at 'the sky stallion'. Sometimes the mountains symbolise purity. In the Matukituki Valley, the mountaineers find 'light reflected / Stainless from crumbling glacier, dazzling snow', and observe 'Sky's purity; the altar cloth of snow / On deathly summits laid'. In the Haast Pass the poet sees 'the pure glacier blaze'. |
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