THE MYTHOLOGY OF PLACE:

JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS

Lawrence Jones
IV
The Brighton World
Page 41 
 However, in both poems the purity is a secondary attribute related to glacier and snow surfaces, and the mountains are primarily images of a frightening power that is too 
much for most humans.  And this symbolism runs right through the poetry.  In 'The 
Mountains', 'The mountains crouch like tigers. / They are but stone yet the seeking eyes grow blind'.  The blindness is because the mountains have a 'flame that reaches / Among familiar things and makes them seem / Trivial, vain'.  The poet chooses to flee the mountains and 'go to the coastline and mingle with men', just as in 'Haast Pass' he turns away from the Wildernessto 'the tired faces in the pub', and in 'Poem in the Matukituki Valley' he turns away from the mountains: 
     Therefore we turn, hiding our souls' dullness 
     From that too blinding glass: turn to the gentle 
     Dark of the human daydream, child and wife,
     Patience of stone and soil, the lawful city 
     Where man may live, and no wild trespass 
     Of what's eternal shake his grave of time. 

Although Baxter himself related 'The Mountains' to Naseby, his mother related it to the 
Matukituki Valley and an early family camping trip, James' first experience of the mountains,when they had decided not to proceed up the valley because 'we had an overwhelming sense of the menace of mountains, which loom over the Matukituki'.    Certainly that menace appearsin poem after poem.  In the generalised landscape of 'Prelude N.Z.' there are 'man-unmastered mountains' from which Pakehas, unlike the Maori, are not shielded by their gods.   In 'O lands seen in the light of an inhuman dawn' the 'nearing mountains stone crested . . . leaning and silted Druid monolioths', seem to be 'murmuring madness' and gaze with 'stone eyes', while in 'Luggate Pub' the poet feels 'the 'snow blind peaks' annihilation'.   In 'Love-Lyric IV' the 'inhuman natural curves' of the 'skyline silhouette' 'will / never alter while / we watch them'.   In 'Naseby', the dark peaks will hold / Their peace beyond our knowing' when human beings have disappeared. 
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