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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 43
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In a poem about the Milford Track from around the same time (1966-68), the awesome landscape is associated with the state of being 'free / Of all time's rubbish', beyond desire and self-concern, the 'black seed / Of Adam' becoming free from 'its need to be' as the individual comes to accept his death: 'Only the dead / Walk easily through doors of solid stone'. In an unpublished addition to 'High Country Weather' the 'troubled breast' and the 'contentless mind' of the 'stranger' are quieted not only by the 'snow mountain-crest' and the clouds but also by 'The torrent voice resounding / In gorges blind'. The rivers of Central Otago are rapid, even torrential, not like the sluggish Brighton River, and become, like the mountains, symbols of inhuman, sometimes terrifying, but ultimately divine natural power. There are 'rivers leaping with immense inertia past gorge and derrick', with an 'opaque blindness . . . Showing an eye-universe inanely innately blind', and the Kawarau is a 'grey- green dragon'. The Matukituki has 'boulders huge as house's, like 'dice' thrown by the mountains, and is shown as drowning a calf, an experience that Mr Grummet tells Horse about, pointing the moral that "It is difficult to avoid being swept away". After heavy rain the river near the old Aspiring homestead becomes a 'waste river turbulent in flood / Where bones of trees roll' and is contrasted to the cows' (and the people's) need for 'the heart's revelation / Of hearth and labour, stall and habitation'. This country of menacing mountains and wild rivers is inhabited by appropriate creatures who form part of its symbolic system. There are the birds of prey, hawk, eagle, and falcon. They may symbolise the amoral cruelty of the natural order or the natural killer and hunter in man. The eagle is beautiful in 'the simplicity / Beyond simplicity of the machine / Whereby he drops, kills with curved talons', while the hawk hunting the hare becomes 'man the hawk and man the hare', pursuing 'their unrelenting passage here', and the 'broad hawk. . . blood on the iron talon' is associated with the poet in his fallen adult state, after 'Time slew the first Adam'. Part of the hawk in man is his sexuality, especially male desire. In 'Let Time be Still', 'fallen from his cloud / The falcon find[s] / The thigh-encompassed wound', while in 'My love late walking' 'my hawk . . . flies / Down to your feathered sleep alone / Striding blood-coloured on a wind of sighs'. In the beast fable poem, 'The Mountaineer', 'the red- winged kea' speaks for the wild element in man and nature, as opposed to 'the fat brown weka', who speaks for timid safety and the evasion of the wild. The kea understands both the death wish and the joy in the fallen mountaineer, but he also eats of his flesh: 'I see the dried blood on your beak,' Chirped the fat brown weka. |
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