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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 42
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This power and indifference might be read naturalistically as an indication of a world without God, but Baxter reads it theologically, the mountains being 'His flawed mirror who gave the mountain strength / And dwells in holy calm, undying freshness'. As such they can have a therapeutic value as well as a frightening effect, for they provide a perspective beyond our egos and troubles. Thus the almost Wordsworthian tone of the early Wanaka poem, 'High Country Weather', where the vision of the 'red-gold cirrus' shining 'over snow-mountain' can cause the 'stranger' to 'surrender to the sky' his 'heart of anger'. In 'Thinking About Mountains ( I)', the poet asks himself why he, a middle-aged family man in the city, should dream of taking off up the Matukituki Valley into the mountains 'like a wild goat', and speculates . . . It could be certain places Stand for an insight or tranquility that should Be part of us - or rather, perhaps Cannot ever belong to us while the world is falling. In the second poem in that sequence, the insight offered by the mountains is dark: The wind that hurries its way over the icefields Has no voice and no face, but its manner of moving Implies the hardship of the human soul - Exposure, darkness, bleak abandonment On the crags of light. . . . However, the darkness is also of God, however obscurely: What made the mountain also made the soul But left us there to plough these narrow fields . . . That are not fields where heroes and ghosts go moving, Each soul a darkened flame, to their abandonment In God, but fields of death beside a wakeful river. |
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